MY CEO IN DISGUISE

Chapter Seven

Nora's recovery gave her something she hadn't expected: time and Sebastian, in equal measure.

He didn't come to her apartment because the doctor's orders demanded quiet and a low-stress environment, or that's what he told her, though she suspected the real reason was that neither of them wanted to spend an evening apart if they didn't have to. He brought food she hadn't asked for. He brought a blanket from his own place because hers, in his opinion, was "an insult to the concept of warmth." He sat through three episodes of a show she was fairly sure he'd never admit to enjoying, and every single time the credits rolled, he found some reason to stay for one more.

"You don't have a company to run," she said, on the ninth evening, watching him fold himself onto the opposite end of her couch like it was the most natural place in the world for the CEO of a logistics empire to be sitting.

"I have a phone."

"That's not the same thing."

"It's close enough for now." He set the phone face down on the coffee table, deliberately, the same way he had that night at his desk when Vanessa's name had first lit up the screen, except this time there was nothing behind the gesture but a man choosing where he wanted to be. "The company can survive one evening without me in the building."

"Can it, though."

"Barely," he admitted, and something in the dry note of his voice pulled a real laugh out of her, the kind she hadn't managed since the accident, and he looked, for a second, almost startled by the sound of it, like he'd wanted to be the one to put it there and hadn't quite believed he'd manage it.

They didn't talk about Vanessa. He'd told her enough in broad strokes, a cousin, a betrayal, money that didn't matter as much as the trust that had gone with it, and Nora hadn't pushed for details, some instinct telling her he needed the version of himself that existed on her couch to stay separate from the version fighting a war two floors above an office he'd spent three months pretending not to own. She understood, in a way she hadn't fully articulated even to herself, that this apartment had become the one place he didn't have to be careful.

"Can I ask you something," she said, somewhere around the tenth night, her head resting against his shoulder, his hand doing that slow, absent thing against her knuckles that she'd started to crave more than she wanted to admit.

"Anything."

"What did you actually think that first week. Before any of this." She gestured vaguely between them, at the blanket, the takeout containers, the general shape of whatever they'd become. "Did you already know you were going to like me, or did it sneak up on you."

He was quiet long enough that she lifted her head to look at him and found him watching her with an expression she hadn't seen from him before, something unguarded and a little helpless.

"I noticed you the first day," he said. "You were reorganizing a filing cabinet that wasn't yours to organize because Mitchell had let it get bad enough that it was slowing everyone down, and nobody had asked you to fix it. You just did it. Nobody even said thank you." He shook his head slightly, like the memory still didn't sit easily with him. "I remember thinking, that's the kind of person this building doesn't deserve. And then I thought about it considerably more than I should have, for a man who was supposed to be evaluating supply chain inefficiencies."

"That's a very corporate way to say you had a crush on me."

"I'm aware."

"Say it the normal way."

"I had a crush on you," he said, plainly, like it cost him something to say it without the armor of a joke around it, and she felt the words land somewhere warm and unguarded in her chest, the kind of warmth that had nothing to do with the blanket he'd insisted on bringing.

"Good," she said. "Took you long enough."

"Three months."

"Three months too long," she echoed, and he laughed, low and real, and kissed her, slow and unhurried, one hand finding her jaw the way it always seemed to, like it was the only place his hand knew to go when he wanted to tell her something he didn't have words ready for.

She went back to the office two weeks later, cleared for a half day at a time, easing back in the way the doctor had insisted on, and found that nothing about walking through the front doors felt the same. Priya met her at the elevator with a hug that nearly knocked the folder out of her hands and a look that promised an interrogation the moment they were alone.

"You," Priya said once they were both settled at their desks, and Nora had barely gotten her computer to wake up, "have some serious explaining to do. I leave you alone for a month with a concussion, and you come back dating the actual owner of the building."

"It's not common knowledge yet."

"It is extremely common knowledge, Nora. He walked you to your desk this morning and looked at you like you invented sunlight. HR doesn't need a memo. Everyone with eyes already knows."

Nora felt her face go warm and didn't bother denying it, because there wasn't much point anymore, not when Sebastian himself had stopped pretending the moment she'd stepped off the elevator, falling into step beside her without a word about keeping distance for appearances.

It was different now, being watched. She'd spent three years being the kind of employee nobody looked twice at, and now she caught glances everywhere, some curious, some openly speculative, and she found, to her own surprise, that she didn't mind it nearly as much as she'd expected to. Whatever this was with Sebastian, it wasn't something she wanted to keep folded small and hidden anymore.

Sebastian found her at lunch, in the small kitchen off the main floor, and didn't bother with the careful, coworker distance he'd have kept a month ago. He simply crossed the room, boxed her gently against the counter with an arm on either side of her, and kissed her, unhurried, like he had every right in the world to do exactly that in the middle of a Tuesday.

"People can see us," she murmured against his mouth, not actually trying to stop him.

"Let them."

"That's very CEO of you."

"I own the building," he said, dry, and kissed her again before she could laugh properly at that, and she melted into it, one hand curling into the front of his shirt, entirely unbothered by the office noise carrying on twenty feet away.

He pulled back only far enough to rest his forehead against hers, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, just breathed the same air in a kitchen that smelled faintly of burnt coffee, and Nora thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that whatever came next, board votes, Vanessa, whatever storm was still circling somewhere above them, she wanted to face it from exactly this spot, pressed against him, unafraid of being seen.

His phone buzzed against her hip, where it sat in his pocket, and he ignored it once, twice, a third time, until the persistence of it made him finally pull back with a low, apologetic sound and check the screen.

Whatever he saw there drained the warmth out of his face in an instant.

"Sebastian." Her voice sharpened. "What is it."

He didn't answer right away, staring at the message like it might rearrange itself into something less dangerous if he looked long enough.

"The board moved the vote up," he said finally. "It's tomorrow morning. And Vanessa just texted me a countdown."