Longing For Him

CHAPTER 8: The Alert

Jace

The door closes behind her.

The moment she disappears from my sight, the icy armor I’ve built over four painstaking years shatters into jagged, agonizing shards. My hands, resting flat on the mahogany desk, begin to tremble.

I can’t breathe.

My chest heaves as I draw in a desperate, ragged breath, my lungs burning as as though I’ve been submerged for years and only just hauled to the surface. Everything inside me is screaming.

She was right here. Ten feet away from me.

For four years, I buried the phantom memory of her laugh, the way her soft brown curls felt tangled in my fingers, the taste of her lips under the pale moonlight, and the absolute, raw devastation of the day she vanished.

One morning she was my entire world, whispering promises of a future into my neck, and the next, she was gone. No note. No warning. Just radio silence and a void that nearly destroyed me.

I still remember the terror of that first day. I rang her phone endlessly, but it kept going straight to voicemail, panic clawing at my throat.

I drove straight to her family’s estate, practically suffocating with worry, only for the gate guards to turn me away without any explanation of what was going on.

I spent forty-eight hours frantically calling every single one of her friends, but none of them knew anything. On the third day, driven out of my mind, I went back to her house. As I approached the front gates, her mother’s car pulled out, kicking up gravel before stopping beside me.

Her mother had looked at me with genuine confusion, completely bewildered that I didn't know.

“I don’t understand why you’re making a scene, Jace,” she had said, her tone almost pitying. “Studying in London has always been the plan, long before she ever met you. She only had a week to pack once her admission was finalized.”

When I choked out that Jennie had told them she wasn’t going, her mother merely sighed. “She mentioned it once, yes. We didn’t argue with her because we knew she was just being foolish. We let her think what she wanted, but we were never going to let her throw away her entire future for some fleeting young love. In fact, we explicitly gave her that entire final week to say her goodbyes and tell her friends. Why she chose not to tell you is between the two of you, we certainly didn’t stop her.”

That was it. Jennie had known studying abroad in London was the plan all along, but after she met me, she’d tried to refuse, telling her parents she wanted to stay.

Yet, when her parents put their feet down with just one week’s notice, she had yielded. She had let them pack her up and fly her across the world without a word to me. No warning, no final goodbye. She had chosen them. She had abandoned me to pick up the broken pieces of my life alone.

And now, she walks into my office, looking breathtakingly beautiful, shedding tears, and talking about missing me?

A harsh, bitter sound tears from my throat. Half-laugh, half-growl. I grip the edge of my desk so hard my knuckles turn ghost-white. She thinks a few trembling words and a soft apology can undo four years of hell? She thinks she can just re-enter my world as my employee and expect the boy who worshipped her to still be sitting in this chair? That boy died the day she left. I built this empire on his ashes.

I grab the quarterly report in front of me, forcing my eyes onto the lines of financial metrics. I need to work. I have a firm to run, a portfolio to oversee, acquisitions to finalize.

The numbers blur on the page.

“Dammit!” I snap into the empty room, slamming the file shut.

My heart is thrashing against my ribs like a caged beast. I push back from the desk, standing up so fast my executive chair rolls backward into the glass wall. I stride over to the crystal decanter resting on the marble side table, uncorking it with force, and pour three fingers of amber Scotch into a heavy glass. I swallow the burn in one sharp gulp, desperate for the alcohol to cauterize the raw wound she had just opened inside me.

It does nothing.

Ping.

The sudden chime of my phone breaks the oppressive silence. I snatch it off the desk, half-expecting an HR email, but the notification on the lock screen is from Leslie:

‘Hey sexy... thinking about you. Free today?’

A dark, frantic urge surges through my blood. I need to drown this out. I need a physical release.

My fingers fly across the screen: Meet me at the suite. Now.

I don’t wait for her reply. I grab my suit jacket, shove my phone into my pocket, and stride out of my office.

My executive suite features floor-to-ceiling glass walls overlooking the private inner atrium. As I step into the corridor, my eyes involuntarily dart straight across the architectural expanse. Directly opposite my office sits the glass-walled corner office reserved for the Director of Real Estate Investment.

I picture her standing by her new desk, holding a stack of onboarding folders, looking lost and utterly fragile. Her head bowed, her soft brown hair catching the light.

A sharp, uninvited wave of guilt hits me right in the chest, hot and heavy. It feels dirty, like a quiet betrayal to the boy who once swore his heart belonged to only one woman.

But the moment the thought takes shape, my anger flares, and I brutally crush it underfoot. I don’t owe her my loyalty anymore. She gave up that right the second she walked out of my life four years ago without a word. I push the guilt deep down into the dark, replacing it with a cold, hardened resolve, using the bitter sting of her memory to numb the ache in my chest as I close the door behind me.

I tear my gaze away, my jaw locked tight as I march toward the private elevators.

“Mr. Sterling!” Natalie calls out, jumping up from her desk with an iPad clutched in her hands, her voice laced with surprise. “Wait, sir! You have the 1:00 p.m. strategy call with the Vance Tech team, and HR needs you to sign off on Ms. Anderson’s—”

“Cancel it,” I bark, not even slowing my pace.

Natalie blinks, taken aback by the vicious bite in my voice. “Sir? Cancel the Vance call? But they’ve been waiting all week, and the onboarding documents—”

I stop dead in my tracks and whip my head around to face her. The dark, lethal fury in my eyes causes her to stumble back a step, her face draining of color.

“Did I stutter, Natalie?” I snarl, my tone dripping with pure venom. “Cancel the damn call. Do your job, stop asking stupid questions, and clear my entire schedule for the rest of the day!”

Natalie stands frozen, her mouth slightly open in sheer astoundment.

I turn, step into the waiting elevator, and slam my hand against the button for the underground garage.

Minutes later, the engine of my sleek, black Maybach roars to life, echoing loudly against the concrete walls of the private garage. I slam my foot onto the accelerator, the tires screeching violently as I tear out into the city traffic.

I drive like a madman, weaving aggressively through the streets, my knuckles stark white against the leather steering wheel. My pulse is a war drum pounding in my ears. Every time I close my eyes, I see her tear-filled brown eyes. I see her pink lips trembling. I hear her begging me to say something.

Get out of my head, I scream internally, pressing the accelerator harder, the high-performance engine screaming as I cut off a taxi. Get the hell out of my head.

I pull into the valet lane of the Regis, throwing the keys at the stunned attendant without a word, and stride through the opulent lobby straight to the private elevators.

By the time I swipe the keycard and push open the heavy door to Suite 804, Leslie is already sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed. She’s wearing a sheer, silk robe that dips low at her chest, her blonde hair styled in effortless waves.

She looks up, a catlike smile spreading across her painted lips. “Well, that was fast. You must have really missed me, Jace.”

An immediate, visceral wave of irritation flashes through me.

How the hell is she already here? The thought strikes me with a burst of disgust. Doesn’t she have a job? A life? A career? She was just waiting around like a puppet, ready to leap the second I summoned her? The needy, transactional nature of it suddenly makes my stomach turn.

“Drop the talk,” I say coldly, kicking the door shut behind me and unbuttoning my suit jacket.

Leslie doesn’t seem to care about my mood; she’s used to my dominant, distant demeanor. She stands up, the silk robe slipping down her shoulders, and glides toward me with practiced, seductive ease.

“Bad day at the office?” she purrs, reaching up to wrap her arms around my neck. Her perfume—heavy, sweet, and suffocating—hits my senses.

It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.

Her scent isn’t vanilla and wild roses. Her touch doesn’t send an electric jolt straight to my heart.

Leslie’s hands move down my chest, her fingers sliding beneath my jacket to push it off my shoulders. She presses her body against mine, leaning up to kiss my neck, her hands reaching down to untuck my shirt.

“I’ve missed you so much, Jace…”

Jennie’s voice echoes inside my brain like a physical strike.

Leslie’s nails dig lightly through the fabric of my shirt, her fingers tugging at the buttons. She reaches for the buckle of my belt—

A violent surge of revulsion erupts in my gut.

I grab Leslie’s wrists in an iron grip and yank her off me, shoving her backward with enough force that she stumbles, her heels catching on the plush rug as she barely keeps her balance.

“Stop,” I growl, my chest heaving, my voice dangerous and lethal.

Leslie stares at me, her eyes wide with total shock and confusion. She clutches her open robe around herself, her seductive smile completely vanishing.

“Jace? What the hell?” she stammers, her voice rising in pitch. “What is wrong with you? You called me! You told me to meet you here!”

“Get your things and get out,” I say flatly, turning my back on her and running a hand aggressively through my hair.

“Are you insane?” Leslie screeches, her confusion rapidly turning into red-hot humiliation and anger. She marches toward me, her face contorted. “You text me out of nowhere, demand I drop everything to come to a hotel suite, and then put your hands on me like I’m some kind of trash? Who do you think you are? You can’t treat me like this!”

I turn around slowly, my eyes cold, dead, and utterly devoid of humanity.

“You wanted a transaction, Leslie,” I say, my voice dropping to an icy whisper that freezes the rage right out of her throat. “Now the transaction is over. Put your clothes on and leave before I have security escort you out of my suite.”

Leslie gasps, her face burning deep red with absolute humiliation. She snatches her bag off the bed, huffs out a venomous curse, and storms out of the suite, slamming the door behind her so hard the glass fixtures rattle.

Silence returns. Heavy, suffocating, and absolute.

I stand alone in the middle of the luxurious room, my hands shaking violently, my breathing heavy and ragged. I look down at my hands—the same hands that just pushed away a woman who actually wanted to be near me, all because my soul is still obsessively anchored to a ghost.

I turn and catch my reflection in the full-length mirror across the room. I look terrifying. My hair is disheveled, my tie loosened, my dark eyes wild with a cocktail of fury, pain, and absolute chaos.

I survived four years without her. I built a fortress around my heart. I made myself unshakeable.

And in less than twenty minutes, Jennie Anderson came back into my life and completely destroyed me.

My phone in my pocket suddenly vibrates. A single text notification lights up the screen. I pull it out, my chest tightening as I look down at the display.

It’s an internal automated alert from my executive floor security system:

‘ALERT: SMOKE DETECTED. AUTOMATIC FIRE RESPONSE INITIATED - Executive Office 402 (Director of Real Estate)’

The blood drains from my face as I stare at the flashing red notification.

She hasn’t even been in the building for two hours.

I reach for my jacket before I know what I’m doing.