He didn’t linger on my legs. Didn’t stare at my chest. Instead, his eyes lifted back to my face and stayed there, dark and intent and oddly gentle.
“May I come in?” he asked. The patient question held no elements of teasing or presumption. He was genuinely asking.
I recognized it when he called—known with absolute clarity—that if he’d shown up, this was how it would go. That all my rules and caveats and careful lines had already been eroding the moment I agreed to stay up.
“Yes,” I murmured.
Tonight…
I hesitated—just a second. A single, fragile pause where I tried to remember all the reasons this was a bad idea. All the careful walls I’d built. All the distance I’d crossed to find myself.
His voice softened. “Say yes, Rachel,” he whispered. “Just say yes.”
My reflection looked back at me—eyes bright, pulse visible at my throat, desire written too clearly to deny.
I wanted to say yes. I had wanted to say yes since the restaurant.
“Yes,” I murmured, aware of just how terrible an idea this was and just as surely, the very best one I could make.
Chapter
Eight
RACHEL
The elevator doors slid shut with a soft click that sounded far too final.
I stood beside Dominic, close enough to feel the heat coming off him. The gilded walls reflected us back at ourselves—him relaxed and lethal in that effortless way of his, me wound tight, eyes bright, pulse betraying me at my throat.
I couldn’t stop looking at him.
He caught me at it and smiled slowly, like he knew exactly what was happening inside my head and had no intention of rescuing me from it.
“You see only us, don’t you?”The whisper of his words caressed me without him doing a damn thing. The elevator hummed upward. Each floor ticked by, a countdown I didn’t ask for and couldn’t stop.
“This,” I said, my voice low and very steady considering I was unraveling, “is a bad idea.”
His mouth twitched. “Absolutely awful.”
When the doors opened, he stepped out first and reached back for me without looking, fingers brushing mine like aquestion he already knew the answer to. I laced my fingers through his before I could rethink it.
“Terrible,” I agreed, letting him lead me down the softly lit hall.
The carpet muted our footsteps. The air felt thick, charged, like the moment before a storm breaks. Every nerve ending in my body was awake. Every sensible thought I’d ever had was losing ground.
He let go of my hand at his door. Just long enough.
The card key brushed the lock and it clicked to green. He paused, then glanced over his shoulder at me, eyes dark, searching.
“I should go,” I said, because it was the right thing to say.
My feet didn’t move.
The door opened. He stepped aside, holding it wide, giving me an out he didn’t expect me to take.
“You can be pissed at me tomorrow,” he said quietly.
That was all it took.
