I feel his gaze on my back until I round the corner. And then, because I cannot help myself, I stop.
I lean back one careful inch, just enough to peek around the edge of the wall.
Lucas has stopped walking. He is looking down at his chest. One hand smooths the front of his tie, the gesture small and almost unconscious, and I see the faintest, most satisfied set to his mouth.
I duck back out of sight before he can look up.
I press a hand over my mouth to keep the laugh in, then walk the rest of the way to my office with both my gait and my pulse quick.
Jason and Eric are already here when I arrive, coffees in hand, pleasant as ever. Both of them are dressed in dark suits. Head to toe. No color. Not a bright thread between them.
Eric lifts his cup in greeting. “Morning, Miss Carter.”
“Good morning,” I reply, sliding behind my desk.
I busy myself with my laptop. I don’t look at Jason. I don’t look at Eric. I absolutely do not look at either of their suddenly extremely coordinated, extremely boring wardrobes.
I bite the inside of my cheek hard to keep myself from smiling or laughing.
Because for a man who claims not to want me, Lucas Steele is going to an awful lot of trouble to make sure I don’t want anyone else.
Chapter Nine
Lucas
The sound of Sienna’s laugh cuts through my concentration like a blade.
I have been sitting at this desk since 7:30 a.m., working through quarterly reports, and I almost convinced myself that I could hear nothing. That the open window down the curve of the west wing was purely architectural, and the voices drifting in from two doors away had nothing to do with me.
She laughs, and my pen stops moving.
It is a lively, warm, thoroughly unguarded sound, the laugh of a woman having a good time. One of her assistants—both of whom are men, maddeningly— says something in a voice pitched for her alone. She laughs again, and my grip on the pen tightens until the metal creaks.
It’s been a week.
One week since she walked out of that library with her mouth still bruised from mine. Since the lake the next morning. Seven days of watching her move through my house like she belongs in it, warm with everyone except me. Cool and professional and utterly unaffected when we run into each other.
“I don’t like my men weak, Lucas” has been rattling around in my skull every time I try to sleep.
Another laugh. Male this time. A low murmur I can’t quite catch. She says something back in that same warm, interested tone, and my wolf stands up inside me with its hackles raised.
I set the pen down before I snap it.
I try to concentrate on the file in front of me. Her merger plan. I have been over it three times this week, and I will be damned before I admit to anyone, including myself, that I keep opening it hoping to find something wrong. Some incompetence. Some reason to send her back to Moonvale where she belongs, where she cannot spend her mornings laughing at things other men say to her.
There is nothing wrong.
Her framework is, if anything, better than what I’d put together with my own people last month. She has restructured the assessment phase to cut three weeks off the timeline without losing a single security checkpoint. Her cross-employment proposal, with pack members rotating temporarily between territories during phase one and with paired mentors on each side, appears simple on paper but is actually so well-designed that it makes my chest ache. It would solve half a dozen integration problems that haven’t even surfaced yet.
I had assumed that she’d spend her days here focusing her energies on me and that I would find a reason to send her packing. Instead, she has redesigned three of my systems in a week and walks past me in corridors like I’m not even there.
I push the file away.
Through the open window, I hear her voice, clear and precise now as she says something about timelines. She is not laughing anymore; she is working. Vance’s deeper voice answers her. Cole’s drier one follows. The three of them settle back into theirdiscussion with the easy rhythm of people who have found a good groove.
My jaw is so tight, it hurts.
Let her have her groove, I tell myself as I close my eyes. This is what you wanted. Stay on your side of the estate. Do the merger. Let the strategic advisor from Moonvale be a strategic advisor. Stop eavesdropping.
