Real.
Fun in a way that made him forget how heavy everything else in his life had gotten.
His joking suggestion to take it upstairs wasn’t meant to be serious. But when she looked him straight in the eye and said,“Why not?”like she’d be fine either way… he’d lost the ability to be casual about it.
Maybe that was what drove him to prove something that night. To prove that he could make it worth her time.
What they shared was fast, hot, and intoxicating.
But underneath the rush, there’d been this quiet connection that hit harder than he wanted to admit. For those brief hours it filled a hole in his life he hadn’t been willing to admit existed.
The last remaining boy of his family. The single one out having fun while his brothers were married with two kids each.
He wanted what they had but couldn’t seem to get a whiff of something close.
He’d planned to tell Nora in the morning that he wanted to see her again. That he’d like to discover what they’d had and it was more than a night of pleasure to him.
Instead, she was gone.
Sure, he could have asked his brother Eli or Griffin, the head of security, to pull the camera footage and track her down. But that would mean confessing he’d been ghosted, and he’d never live it down.
So, he let it go. Or tried to.
“If you eat all those at once, you’re going to get fat,” Blair teased.
He didn’t answer.
Because the truth was, every time he bit into one of those damn truffles, all he could think about was that Nora didn’t think that.
Not with the way her fingers had traced his chest, her lips tasting his skin, the soft, breathless sounds that still haunted him when the lights were out.
The first time had been all fire and urgency.
The second was slow, steady, and deep enough to follow him into his dreams.
He finished chewing and pushed it out of his mind. She was gone; he had to move on too.
“Hard to do that when I miss lunch half the time. Who’s going to make sure I eat if you’re not here?”
“Wow, Ethan,” his father said. “You might not get on your knees, but that’s begging if I ever saw it.”
His nose twitched a few times, then he tossed the box on his desk. “Help me eat these then. It will keep your lips from busting my ass.”
His father walked in laughing and helped himself to one. He nudged it closer to Blair who came in and grabbed one too.
“I am going to miss stealing the chocolate I buy for you. But you really need to find someone. I know it’s hard. I’m sorting through resumes as they come.”
“And? It’s not my imagination. No one is qualified. You’ve sent me two to look at and they were thin. Reaching. I was disappointed you gave them to me.”
She laughed at the last of his words knowing he was just laying it on thick. “Sadly, no one that I’d waste my time with, not even a couple in the building who inquired. There are a few in the organization that you could approach. You poached me from Norris.”
He laughed. “And he’s never forgiven me for it. I wouldn’t even think of doing it again.”
“I don’t know how you got away with it,” his father said.
Blair moved to the door and shut it. “Because Norris isn’t an easy person to work for and if you hadn’t asked me to come on with you, I would have left.”
His shoulders dropped. It wasn’t a secret that Norris Jones was harsh with his staff, but he wasn’t abusive. He wasn’t a dick. He always kept it professional, but the line sometimes grew thin.
