Something moves across her face. Her green eyes flash. Color flushes her cheeks. Beautiful. Her chest rises and falls. Not even her chef coat can hide the curve of her impressive tits. My fingers tingle. My mouthwaters. How I want to squeeze them. And taste them and— Fuck no. I need to get out of my head.
I turn back to my device.
"Now. Does anyone have anything useful to add? Or shall we continue?"
Not a peep out of anyone. No one, other than Harper, has anything to add to the briefing. How bloody disappointing.
"So, what is special about tonight?"
Harper. Again.
Jesus. The woman has a spine forged of surgical steel and the feral courage of a high-altitude climber.
She stands there, small but immovable, a glitch in my carefully calibrated universe. I hold her gaze, putting the full, crushing weight of my authority behind my stare, trying to cow her into submission.
She flushes. A delicious heat blooms across her skin, but she doesn’t look away. Her breathing hitches, growing rough and shallow, the sound of it scraping against my nerves like a knife across a sharpening stone. Her lips part. And the logic of the kitchen begins to disintegrate.
I want to bridge the distance. I want to feel those lush, forbidden curves crushed against the hard, unyielding line of my body. I want to squeeze and bite and taste until she’s humming that low, recognition-note for me, and only me. I want to consume her, but I also want to be the only thing she breathes.
Get your head back in the game, Hamilton.
"Nothing," I drawl, my voice a cold, precision-guided lash.
She blinks, the confidence in her eyes flickering like a candle in a draft. "Excuse me?"
"I said there is nothing special about tonight."
A gasp ripples through the brigade, a collective intake of breath that sounds like the pressurized hiss of a cooling system failing. They’re shocked. But no one’s going to say a word about how I toyed with them. And on a whim.
I meet individual gazes, and they look away.
Not Harper. She firms her lips, trying hard to get her emotions under control, and not succeeding.
That magnificent color on her cheeks spreads downward, stainingher décolletage in a map of fury and frustration. Her eyes blaze with an inner fire, a raw, incandescent light that I want to harness.
I want to drag her into the shadows of my soul and let her illumination burn away the rot, like a torch in a blackened mine.
I want her.
My hunger for her is evolving into something lethal, a variable I can no longer solve with math or military discipline. I have to hold the line.
I have to maintain the Ice Commander mask because, beneath the starch of this white jacket, I am a man on the verge of a total tactical collapse.
She is my employee. She is the most promising talent to ever grace my stations. If I show her the jagged, blackened extent of my desire; if I let her see that I don't just want to mentor her, I want to own her, I won't just scare her away. I’ll incinerate her.
"Unless," I drop my voice to a dangerous, silken whisper that only she can truly feel. "You think your presence makes it special, Richie?”
She swallows. I’m sure she’s going to stutter out a negative answer. Instead she bats her eyelashes and gives me a sweet smile.
“Obviously. Chef.”
The sass of this woman. The chuckle catches me off guard. I kill it.
I can’t stop staring at her sparking eyes. Her flushed cheeks. The pulse beating at the base of her throat.
My chest tightens.
She disarms me without trying. Steps straight through every wall I've built and doesn't even notice she's done it.
