Corner Office Confessions

Chapter 12: Behind Closed Doors

They kept it quiet — a secret folded carefully between board meetings and late-night calls, stolen minutes in his office after the floor emptied out. It wasn't enough, and it was everything.

"This is insane," Nerisa murmured one evening, her head resting against his chest as they sat on his office couch, the city lights the only witness. "You're my boss. I'm supposed to be building a career, not—"

"Not falling for the reclusive tyrant everyone warned you about?" A dry smile tugged at his mouth.

"Something like that."

His arms tightened around her, an instinct he still wasn't used to giving in to. "I could move you to a different department. Different reporting line. No conflict of interest."

"You'd do that?"

"I'd do a lot of things I never thought I would, apparently." He pressed a kiss to her hair, quiet and unguarded in a way only she ever saw. "You make it hard to remember why I built all these walls in the first place."

"Maybe you don't need them as much as you think."

He went still at that, old instinct warring with the steady warmth of her against him. Trust had never come easily — not after a childhood that taught him love was something people used against you, not something safe to hold onto.

"I want to believe that," he admitted quietly.

"Then believe it a little at a time." She tilted her face up to his. "You don't have to hand me everything at once, Nathan. I'm not going anywhere."

He studied her for a long moment, searching for the catch, the eventual betrayal he'd been braced for his entire life. He didn't find one. Just her, steady and certain, waiting for him to catch up to what she already knew.

Slowly, carefully, he let himself lean into it — into her, into the terrifying, unfamiliar shape of something real.