Liana's POV**
The afternoon had been quiet in the way that made me nervous.
No Graham summoning me. No Brian hovering. No unexpected emails. Just the steady hum of the office doing what offices do, keyboards and murmured phone calls and the distant argument someone was having with the printer on the far side of the floor.
Quiet, in my experience, was never actually quiet.
It was just the interval between things.
I was finishing a legitimate version of the risk analysis — clean, accurate, nothing Brian could use — when Lucy appeared at the edge of my desk with two cups of tea and the expression of someone who had absolutely nothing on their mind.
That expression, I had learned, meant the opposite.
"Break?" she said, setting one cup beside my keyboard without waiting for an answer.
I
