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“Check on me?”
“You seemed off today. You skipped lunch. You didn’t leave your desk.”
“You noticed that from one floor up?”
The question sits between us. He doesn’t answer it, because the honest answer would be: yes, I noticed, because I always notice, because I can track your every movement. He doesn’t say any of that. He just looks at me with those gray eyes and the silence says everything his mouth won’t.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Long day.”
“Sophia.”
The way he says my name. Not the professional Ms. Marchelli from the first meeting. My name, two syllables, spoken in that low register that bypasses my brain and lands in my body. I feel it between my ribs. I feel it lower.
“I’m fine,” I repeat, and my voice isn’t steady anymore.
He steps closer. A single step that closes the distance between us by half. He’s close enough now that his body heat reaches me, that warm radius that defies biology and makes my skin tighten and my breath shallow. I can see the texture of his jaw, the fine grain of stubble that’s come in since this morning. I can see the gray of his eyes up close, the way it isn’t flat but layered, silver and smoke and slate, like looking into weather.
“You’ve been crying,” he says.
I have. I didn’t realize it showed, but he can see it, or sense it through whatever lets him know things he shouldn’t. The traces of tears I wiped away an hour ago, sitting on the bed, reading my father’s words. Not human. God help me.
“I was thinking about my father,” I say. It’s the truth. Just not all of it.
His expression changes. The heat is still there, the possessive focus, but underneath it something cracks open. He knows grief. I can see it in the way his features soften, the way the hard line of his jaw gives way to something almost tender.
“What kind of man was he?” I ask. I’ve asked this before, in fragments, to Katya, to Lex, to the edges of conversations that never quite got there. I’ve never asked Dominic directly. “In your eyes. Not the company line. Not the polite version. What was my father to you?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. I watch him decide how much truth to share.
“Marco was the most observant man I’ve ever met,” he says. “He saw everything. He understood more than he let on. He was loyal, and he was smart, and he was in deeper than anyone should have let him get.”
“In deeper how?”
“He cared about this family. Not just the business. The people. He made it personal, and in our world, personal is where it gets dangerous.”
I hear what he’s saying and I hear what he isn’t saying. My father got too close. My father saw too much. My father crossed a line that existed for a reason, and what happened next is the thing nobody will tell me.
We’re standing close enough that I can feel his breath. I want to touch him. The wanting is so acute that it manifests as a physical pain, a pressure in my chest that builds with every breath I take of his scent. I know the pull isn’t normal. I know that nothing about this is normal. But knowing doesn’t stop the wanting. It doesn’t even slow it down.
He reaches for my hand.
I’m holding the back of the couch. My fingers are white-knuckled on the fabric. He reaches down and wraps his hand around my wrist, gently, his fingers finding my pulse point, and I feel his touch like a detonation. Heat floods up my arm and through my chest and pools between my legs. My grip on the couch loosens. My body softens toward him. I can feel myself tilting, gravitating toward him.
My pulse is hammering under his fingers. He can feel it. He has to be able to feel it, because his grip tightens like he’s reading my heartbeat through his fingertips and the story it’s telling him is the one he came here to hear.
“Dominic.” My voice is barely a whisper. I don’t know if I’m warning him or inviting him. I don’t think there’s a difference anymore.
He pulls me toward him. Slowly. Giving me time to resist, and I understand with a clarity that should be terrifying that I am not going to resist. Whatever he is, whatever he did this weekend, whatever happened to my father, I am not going to stop this. The pull won’t let me and the truth is I don’t want it to.
His other hand comes up and cups the back of my neck. His palm is hot against my skin, almost feverish, and his fingers thread into my hair and tilt my head back. I look up at him. His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them and his pupils are blown wide. His lips part. I watch his gaze drop to my mouth and stay there.
He kisses me.
It’s not gentle or careful. It’s not the way a man kisses a woman for the first time when he’s testing boundaries and reading signals. He kisses me like he’s been starving for three weeks and I’m the only thing that exists on his table. His mouth is hot and demanding and it opens mine without asking and his tongue finds mine and the sound I make, a helpless, broken sound that comes from somewhere below my diaphragm, disappears into his mouth.
He pulls me against him. His arm wraps around my waist and crushes me to his chest and I can feel every line of his body, the heat of him bleeding through layers of fabric, the hard planes of his chest and stomach, the evidence of exactly how much he wants this pressed against my hip. I grab fistfuls of his shirt. I pull him closer, though there’s nowhere closer to go. I kiss him back with everything I’ve been feeling for three weeks, every late-night fantasy, every shower where I pressed my forehead against the tile and imagined his hands. Every morning I walked into the office and pretended that the sight of him didn’t make my whole body clench.
His hand tightens in my hair. He angles my head and deepens the kiss and his other hand slides down my back and grips my hip and pulls me against him and I feel myself disappearing into the heat of him, into the want, into the gravitational collapse that’s been building since the first time he shook my hand and his skin burned against mine.
