Chapter 2
“I didn’t call for you.” Nina’s voice came out half an octave too high. “It was a mistake. The message was for Sariah — my friend. She’s the one who gave me these pajamas, and I was going to send the photo to her, and your name was right above hers in my list, and I hit the wrong one, and —”
She was stammering. Her, Nina Surell, who spent forty hours a week putting order to the numbers of an organization she knew wasn’t what it advertised itself to be, could not finish a single sentence in front of this man. Her face burned like someone had pointed a space heater at it.
Alex didn’t interrupt. He simply watched her fumble. And for a fraction of a second, his gaze dropped — quick — over the satin that suddenly felt much shorter than it had ten minutes ago. When his eyes came back up, there was something in them that erased the second half of whatever she’d been trying to say.
He stepped inside. She stepped back.
He stepped again. She stepped again.
By the time she registered what was happening, he was in her apartment, and the door had clicked shut behind him with a sound that seemed far too loud for what it was.
“Alex.” She tried lifting a hand, palm out, as though pressure could hold him off.
He caught her wrist. Not hard. With precision. The way someone holds a thing when they know exactly how much force will make it stop moving without hurting it. He drew her toward him slowly, closing the distance until her back met the wall and his body was close enough that she could feel heat coming through the fabric of his suit.
His hand moved from her wrist up to her face. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, and a current rolled down her spine from the nape of her neck to somewhere much lower.
“I should send you away,” she whispered, and her voice had no conviction at all.
“You should.” His mouth was so close to hers that she felt the warmth of each word. “But you won’t.”
And then he kissed her.
It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t mannered. It wasn’t anything she would have expected from a man like him. It was direct, deep, and carrying an intent that emptied her lungs. One hand cradled the side of her neck, his thumb along her jaw. The other found her waist and pulled her against him with the kind of certainty that said, without a syllable, that he had been thinking about this for longer than she’d realized.
Her body answered before her mind caught up. Her fingers closed around the lapels of his suit, and she kissed him back with an urgency that unnerved her, because that isn’t who she was. She didn’t kiss her boss pressed against the wall of her own apartment on a Friday night. She didn’t lose the thread like this.
But with his taste on her mouth and his weight against her, she couldn’t locate a single reason to stop.
Until she did.
She pushed at his chest with both hands. He gave — not far, just enough to look at her, breathing hard, that smile still fully intact, as though she’d done exactly what he’d expected of her.
“Get out.” This time, her voice came out level. “Now.”
“Nina —”
“You’re my boss, Alex. My boss. This is abuse of power. This is crossing every line. This is everything I refuse to accept. I’m not one of those women who comes running when you snap your fingers. I sent the wrong message — a mistake. And you showed up here like it was an invitation.”
He took it. Every word. He leaned back against the door, hands returning to his pockets, the smile shifting — less provocation now, into something she couldn’t quite name.
“You called for me,” he said again, with a calm that made her want to throw something at his head. “I came.”
He opened the door. Stepped out. And closed it behind him without waiting for a reply.
Nina stayed where she was, leaning against the wall where a minute earlier he’d had her pinned. Her heart was beating so hard she could hear it in her ears. She slid down until she was sitting on the floor, back against the plaster, knees drawn up, hands shaking quietly in her lap.
Her phone lit up. Sariah: Did he show up?
She didn’t answer. She let her head fall back against the wall and closed her eyes, trying to untangle the wreckage inside her chest. Her lips were still tingling. His cologne still hung in the air — something woody, expensive, the kind of scent that didn’t belong in her apartment, and that she already knew was going to live in her memory far longer than she wanted to admit.
She should have been furious. And she was. But underneath the fury, underneath the outrage, underneath all the things she’d keep repeating to herself until they took hold, there was a truth she couldn’t talk her way out of:
When he kissed her, she hadn’t wanted him to stop.
And when he said the kiss hadn’t lied, the most inconvenient piece of her had known he was right.
Monday arrived with the subtlety of a freight train.
Nina put on the most severe thing she owned — black trousers, a blouse buttoned all the way to the collar, hair scraped back into a tight knot — and left the house with the bearing of someone headed to a deposition rather than a desk job.
L’Ort sat in Back Bay on a tree-lined street that smelled faintly of old money. From the outside, it looked like any expensive Italian restaurant — dark stone facade, gold lettering etched into the door. Inside, past the dining room, through the kitchen, and up a narrow staircase most customers never noticed, there were two administrative offices. One was hers. The other, larger, at the end of the corridor, was his.
She came in through the back door, nodded at Marco the chef, climbed the stairs, and shouldered her way into the office. The room was empty. His chair, visible through the half-open door down the hall, was empty too.
She sat down, powered up the computer, and exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding since the subway.
Ten minutes. She had ten minutes of peace.
Then he walked in.
Gray suit, impeccably cut. White shirt, no tie. A coffee in his right hand. And that controlled half smile that could mean anything from good morning to I can see exactly what you’re doing and it won’t work.
“Good morning, Nina.” As though they were starting any ordinary Monday. As though Friday had simply never happened.
“Good morning.” Eyes locked on the screen.
He propped himself against the doorframe, lifted his cup, and drank slowly. She could feel his gaze on the back of her neck like a weight — something warm that settled between her shoulder blades and slid down.
“I need the consolidated report for all three restaurants by Wednesday,” he said. “Nero’s margins dropped two points last quarter. I want to know whether it’s operating costs or lost revenue.”
Professional. Surgical. Not a trace of the man who three days earlier had pinned her to a wall and kissed her until her brain short-circuited.
“Wednesday,” she repeated, jotting it down.
He pushed off the doorframe and left without another word. No suggestive aside. No double meaning. No reference to pajamas or misdirected messages.
She should have been relieved. She should have thought, Good, he’s being an adult. We can move on.
What she actually felt was irritation. Hot, irrational, wholly indefensible irritation — because he was behaving with the exact maturity she’d wanted from him. And a small, stupid corner of her, the corner that could still taste him when she ran her tongue over her lip, had wanted him to say something. Anything. Something she could push against.
His silence left her with nothing to fight. And that turned out to be worse than any provocation he could have offered.
By mid-morning, she’d worked it out. Alex hadn’t forgotten anything. He hadn’t moved on. He’d simply switched tactics.
The first tell was small. He came by her office three times in two hours, always with a plausible reason — a question about Il Sangu, a document that needed signing, a remark about the accounting software. All legitimate. None of them requiring him to linger against the door frame longer than necessary. One shoulder pressed to the wood, watching her while she answered.
The second tell came after lunch. She usually ate at a cafe three blocks from L’Ort — corner table, same order, phone out. That day, she was midway through typing a reply to Sariah when the chair across from her pulled out.
Alex sat down as though the seat had been reserved for him. He set a coffee on the table — not for himself, for her — and leaned back with the ease of a man who occupies any space as if it had been built around him.
“Coincidence?”
“You don’t live in this neighborhood. You don’t eat at cafes. And I doubt you know what a nap is.”
“Not a coincidence.” His smile widened slightly, just enough to confirm her answer had been exactly what he’d expected.
“The coffee you order here is an insult. Tomorrow I’ll bring you something real.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I will anyway.”
He stayed under ten minutes. Didn’t bring up Friday. Didn’t flirt in any way you could name out loud. He asked about the report, made an observation about Nero’s revenue dip that proved he actually understood the numbers, and left with the same fluid ease with which he’d arrived.
But the coffee he’d set down was still hot, came from an Italian roastery she couldn’t have afforded on her salary, and matched her taste in a way that wasn’t accidental.
He knew how she took her coffee. She had never once told him.
Tuesday morning, when she got to the office at 8:15, there was a cup already waiting on her desk. Hot. Same roastery. A post-it stuck to the side, slanted, confident handwriting:
No sugar, with cinnamon. Am I getting warmer?
She slipped the post-it into a drawer before anyone could see. She didn’t reply. She drank every drop.
The texts started that afternoon. The first landed at 3:16 while she was going through Il Sangu’s balance sheets.
That cafe coffee is an insult to the beverage.
She ignored it.
Fifteen minutes later: If you tell me you prefer theirs to what I brought you, I’m taking it personally.
She bit her lip to keep from laughing.
Then at 4:05: The report is due Wednesday. The coffee is forever.
She answered before she could stop herself: Are you always this dramatic about coffee?
May you like
His reply was instant: Only when the person drinking it is stubborn enough to prefer bad coffee out of pride.
She locked her phone. Unlocked it. Locked it again. Pushed it to the far corner of her desk and went back to the numbers. But the numbers refused to behave, because she was smiling. And the worst of it was that the smile had arrived without her permission.
