He was holding his phone out and I could see the screen from where I stood, the headline big enough to read from across the room.
"It’s everywhere." His voice was tense in a way I’d never heard from Miles. "Trending on three major platforms."
The photo on his screen. Us. Against the hotel wall. My hands on his shoulder. His hands on my face. My face tilted up, eyes closed, mouth on his.
I stared at the photo. My face was visible. Clear. Unmistakable.
The shadow. The shape in the valet lights that I'd seen and blinked away and told myself was paranoia. It wasn't paranoia. It was a camera. Someone had been standing in the dark with a lens pointed at us the entire time.
My face was on the internet.
I ran out of Jace’s office. Past Miles. Past the empty desks. Down the corridor. My heels were clicking on the floor. The sound was too loud and the walls were too close. It was hard to breathe.
I made it to the bathroom and locked the door. I put my back against it and slid down until I was sitting on the cold tile with my knees pulled to my chest.
I was exposed.Again.
By getting too close to a man.Again.
My face out there for anyone to find, forhimto find, when all I’d wanted was to disappear.
CHAPTER 14
Jace
She looked at me like I’d set her on fire, then ran out while I fought every instinct to go after her.
"I don’t know. I think she might want to be alone right now," Miles had said.
That was ten minutes ago. I’d been sitting with the burn.
You’re my boss. Nothing more.Her words kept replaying in my head.
The phone was in my hand, the tabloid photo open on the screen.
Two people kissing against a hotel wall.
My hands on her face. Her hands on my shoulders. The blue dress, the angle of her chin tilted up toward mine. She looked so beautiful that my heart clenched even now. Not just with admiration, but cold simmering rage. Every private second of the best moment of my life had been stolen and turned into content.
That night had been in my head all weekend, and I had done the stupidest thing I’d done in years—I picked up my phone and texted Miles:
Jace
Seems like my assistant is becoming my next little obsession.
I typed it because I needed to name it to someone. Because the feeling was too big for my chest and I didn’t know what to do with it.
The wordobsessionwas a joke next to what I actually felt. Obsession was the Rubik’s cube, the cleaning rituals, and the color-coded calendar.
What I felt for Anna Wilson wasn't an obsession. It was gravity.
The slow, inescapable pull toward a person who’d walked into my sterile, controlled, perfectly ordered life and taken it apart piece by piece without even trying.
My mind kept replaying the gala. The lights going out. The stage disappearing into black. My body locking up, the basement flooding in like water through a broken wall. The panic swallowed me whole, my lungs forgot how to work.
And then.Light.
A single beam cutting through the dark. Her voice, steady and close, the words that reached me when nothing else could:I’m here.
