And that voice!
She didn’t know what it was with that voice, that accent, or was it the way he spoke? Like hethoughtevery word he uttered was a blessing to their ears? Could someone’s arrogance be so contagious that you ended up believing what that person believed, and that was why every time her boss spoke, she had to remind herself she was loyal to Cyrus even though Cyrus wasn’t loyal to her, and* aaargh!*
Her thoughts were going nowhere, just likeshewould end up going nowhere, too, if she let herself spend another second caged in her boss’s arms.
So...be convincing, Kyara!
“I’m n-not lying.”
“I know you are.”
Kyara forced herself to look at him in the eye...and just the eye because honestly, being this close to Mr.Havington was making it so, so hard for her to ignore just how much his presence smoldered, and how devastatingly gorgeous—
Not helping, self!
She refocused on his gaze, and just his gaze. “I promise I’m not.”
Her body tensed as a moment of silence followed, but when she felt his arms loosen—
Gotcha!
She made a run for it—
Lyrius let her go because he wanted to see what she would do with the half-second of freedom he had given her. He was already moving when she pivoted toward the door.
“Like I said...”
But it was no use.
“I know you’re lying,” her boss said silkily, “but I wanted to see what you were planning to do, and so here we are.”
She had never stood a chance, and so there they indeed were, her being worse off than five seconds ago since he had used her own weight to shut the very door she had tried to leave...while Mr. Havington was right behind her, once just her boss, but now he was her warden, too.
“I expected better from you, Kyara.”
Her boss’s voice was softly taunting, but it was hard to feel mad when he was whispering every word into her ear.
“Lying is a sin. Or did Shayla—”
How in the world—
“—not teach you that?”
He had already stepped back by the time she whirled around to face him, but her boss didn’t even have the decency to look away.
“H-How do you know about Shayla?” Kyara really couldn’t wrap her mind around it. “How—h-have you—have you been spying on me? Because if you have, that’s—”
“—something I’ll have no qualms doing, if I deem it necessary. But in this case, however, there wasn’t any need.”
Kyara crossed her arms over her chest. “And you expect me to just believe that?”
“I was in a Zoom meeting with Adriano when I heard your voice in the background.”
Oh, how convenient.
“You were saying something about broccoli being better than ice cream—”
She took it back. This was absolutelyinconvenient, and so she hastily cut him off, saying, “You’ve, um, convinced me.”
