I don’t know how to do this, I mean we kissed, and then she pulled back.
Jace
Do you think she feels the same way?
There was no way he was talking about me. I was a temp who could barely pay rent. I was nobody.
The door clicked behind me.
I looked up.
Jace stepped into the doorway, filling it. His eyes went from my face to the laptop screen. He could see what I was looking at. I could see that he could see. And the silence between us was the loudest thing in the building.
"I don’t recall giving you permission to be in here," he said.
"What do these messages mean?" I asked and held my breath.
He walked toward the desk. Toward me. I stepped back and my hip caught the edge of his chair. He didn’t stop. He kept coming and I pressed against the chair because there was nowhere else to go and then he was right there.
Too close.
I could smell the mint and coffee on his breath mixed with the cold morning air still clinging to his collar.
"What would you do," he said, his eyes dropping to mine, "if it is about you?"
My mouth went dry. I gripped the arm of the chair behind me because my hands needed something solid.
"What would you do if I told you that you’re in my head every hour of every day and it has started to feel like a curse I can’t break?" He wasn’t blinking. His gray eyes were locked on mine,darker than I’d ever seen them, and his voice was doing things to my heart that made it hard to stay steady.
"What would you say if I told you I can still feel your lips on mine? That I crave it every single moment and I don’t know how to make it stop?"
He leaned in. Another inch. His breath was on my mouth now.
"Would you run?" His voice was barely there. "Would you be afraid of me?"
My pulse was in my throat. In my wrists. In the backs of my knees. Every part of me was responding to how close he was and the way he was looking at me. Like I was something he wanted to consume and worship in the same breath.
My body leaned toward him. A fraction. My weight shifted forward without permission, closing the distance he was too controlled to close himself.
I caught myself. Pulled back. Gripped the chair harder.
"You’re my boss," I said. "Nothing more."
My voice held. I don’t know how because nothing else inside me was holding.
His eyes stayed on mine for a second. Then two.
Three seconds where I could see everything—the desire and the hurt, the question and the answer he didn’t want to hear—all of it right there on his face, in the darkness of his eyes.
Then it was gone.All of it. As though someone reached behind his eyes and turned off the lights.
"Of course," he said. "My apologies for the confusion."
He stepped back. Turned toward the window. Put his hands behind his back, one glove gripping the other, and looked out at the Miami skyline like I wasn’t in the room anymore.
My pulse was still racing. I was about to leave when the door slammed open.
Miles.
