Page 145 of His Good Girl

His eyes dropped to my mouth. “Yes.”

He kissed me then, not for long, not long enough to satisfy either of us. When he stepped back, I had to grip the edge of the desk to keep from following.

“Work. Now, young lady,” he ordered.

I slid off the desk, straightened my skirt, and narrowed my eyes at him. “You like sending me away frustrated.”

“I like knowing that tight little pussy of yours is wet for me.”

I blushed the entire way back to my desk.

* * *

By Friday morning, the office had begun to feel almost normal, which was absurd given that I was sleeping badly, working harder than I ever had, and conducting a secret relationship with the man whose name was on the building, but humans are adaptable creatures. We could get used to anything: war rooms, public scandal, Benjamin, the sound of a locked office door, the strange dual reality of being corrected in a meeting at three and kissed breathless at six.

Fifteen minutes after I arrived, Dana dropped a file on my desk.

“You’re coming to the Hartwell briefing,” she said.

I looked up. “I am?”

“Don’t look thrilled. It encourages men to overexplain.”

“Why?”

“Because you rewrote the public access summary and Marcus will ruin it if left unsupervised.” She looked me over. “Also, because you need to learn how these rooms work.”

Benjamin, passing behind her, said, “She means rooms with blood on the carpet.”

Dana did not turn. “Metaphorical blood.”

“Usually,” Ben said.

The briefing was in Conference Room A, the same room I had only glimpsed through glass before. Callum was already there when I walked in behind Dana, standing at the head ofthe table with his jacket buttoned and his expression carved into something dark and serious. He did not look at me first. He looked at Dana, then Benjamin, Marcus, Tom, Elise, the documents, the screen. Only after I took the seat Dana indicated along the side did his gaze touch mine.

It was brief. Professional.

But enough to make my pulse flutter.

The meeting was brutal and fascinating. Lang had fed another vague claim into the local development ecosystem, this one suggesting Rowe’s prior site review had been rushed under political pressure, which was false, of course. Callum listened, asked questions, cut through panic, and twice turned to me for the exact phrasing in the public access summary.

The first time, I startled.

The second time, I answered without apologizing.

Callum did not smile, but Dana did. Barely.

Afterward, as everyone filed out, Benjamin leaned near me and murmured, “Congratulations. You were useful in a room when Tom nearly melted down from the pressure.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Don’t tell anyone. I’ll deny it.”

I carried that with me back to my desk, along with a new stack of work and the increasingly familiar sense that the life I had entered was larger, stranger, and much more dangerous than the one I had left.

Late Friday afternoon, I found a folded paper tucked beneath my keyboard on my old desk that I sometimes still worked at. Therewas nothing on it. My skin prickled before I touched it. I looked around. The operations floor was busy but thinning, people gathering bags, ending calls, and preparing to escape for the day before the weekend could be revoked. Benjamin was at his desk. Dana was in her office. Callum’s door was closed.

I unfolded the paper to find a photograph. It was grainy, taken from across the street, me outside Rowe Tower the night Callum first kissed me.