Page 41 of Based on You

The sound reached us both at once. Violet stepped back. The warmth that had been hovering right there, close enough that I'd felt it coming through the thin fabric of her dress, vanished in a split second. She looked up at me for half a panicked beat. "Goodnight," she blurted, the word out before the thought was fully formed. Without waiting for a response, she spun on her heel and hurried up the stairs, never looking back.

I stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen.

A moment later, Olivia sauntered around the corner. She stopped squarely in the doorway. A slow, wide smile stretched across her face, one dark eyebrow arched higher than the other.

"What just happened in here?" she asked, her voice dripping with amusement.

"Nothing," I lied.

She looked around the empty kitchen, then back at me. Her triumphant smile stayed put. "Right. Nothing."

"Go to bed, Olivia." I rubbed my temple.

She turned away, but that knowing smile went with her up the stairs. I stayed planted on the kitchen floor another full minute before I could make my legs move.

I retreated to my bedroom.

I wasn't a man who lost control. That was one of the few things I'd always known about myself for certain. I assessed situations, I made calculated decisions, and I acted, or I chose not to. I didn't lean toward women who worked for me. I didn't let casual conversations in my kitchen escalate into something that needed a thirteen-year-old's footsteps on the stairs to break it. I'd always had a ruthless talent for drawing firm boundaries and staying on the right side of them. What I'd done tonight with Violet was none of those things.

I sank onto the edge of my mattress and went over the scene.

Her wrist had been wrapped in my hand. Her face had been close, her wide eyes watching and waiting, and I'd gravitated toward her like the decision was already made, like two years of careful professional distance simply hadn't existed. The impulse hadn't been calculated. It hadn't been weighed. Olivia's footsteps had been the only thing that stopped the moment before it tipped over into something I couldn't take back.

I never should have done it.

Not because I didn't want to. I'd been ready to cross that line long enough that tonight came as no surprise to any logical part of me, except maybe the part now sitting in the dark dealing with the fallout.

But she was a vulnerable guest living in my house. She was my executive assistant. Yes, something had sparked in that kitchen, but she still hadn't asked me to lean in. I'd moved without a word, without any acknowledgment of what crossing that line would mean. Too forward. Too fast. I'd assumed, the one thing I'd always trained myself never to do.

I wanted to rewind the clock by an hour and keep my hands to myself.

It took me a long time to fall asleep.

Morning came too fast and too bright. I heard her moving in the hallway long before Marta started prepping in the kitchen, the click of her bedroom door, her footsteps on the hardwood, the brief pause outside the shared bathroom. I dressed in a suit and headed downstairs.

She was already at the kitchen island, gripping a mug of coffee. She glanced up the second I walked in.

"Good morning, sir," she said, clipped.

"Morning," I answered, stiff.

She dropped her gaze back to her mug. I poured my own coffee. Marta set a plate of breakfast down between us, and neither of us said another word. This silence had none of the easy comfort we usually shared. It sat between us, pulled taut like a wire about to snap.

Manuel drove us to the tower in silence. In the backseat, she kept her phone out, and I kept my eyes on my tablet. Neither of us spoke the whole commute. I stared at the back of Manuel's headrest, debating whether to say something to clear the air. I debated it for twenty city blocks. In the end, I said nothing.

The moment we reached the executive floor, she went straight to her desk, and I escaped into my office.

I read through the morning briefs. I cleared the overnight queue from the London division. I tried to focus on the work, but my mind kept circling back to the kitchen instead, playing the moment on a loop until nine-thirty, when I finally heard her chair roll back.

She knocked twice on my heavy oak door and marched in, her leather notebook already open.

"I have your daily schedule," she said, crisp. Standing in front of my desk instead of taking her usual seat, she ran through the itinerary without needing a prompt. The Beatrice Holm fansign was locked in for two o'clock; my presence was technically optional, but the marketing team had flagged that it would mean a great deal to the author to have the CEO there.

Later, the app development team wanted a mandatory forty-five-minute session in the late afternoon for a progress update on the V.M. Ashby outreach and the software build timeline. A strategy call with London had been pushed from ten to eleven.

"Violet, are you okay?" I asked, cutting through the rundown.

She froze mid-sentence. Slow, she looked up from her notes. A bright smile plastered itself across her face, a fully formed, polite expression, but her dark eyes stayed flat and guarded behind it.