Dripping Sin

Forty-Second Floor

I was twelve minutes early.

I stood outside the Carver Group building on a Thursday morning with a coffee I had made at home because I needed something to do with my hands and looked up at the glass and steel tower that climbed forty-two floors into the pale morning sky.

I had dressed carefully. Navy dress, modest hem, professional. Then I had looked at my reflection and thought about those five words on my phone screen and changed into something else entirely. A fitted black dress, sleeveless, with a collar that was respectable enough to walk into an office but cut close enough that it knew what it was doing.

I was not proud of myself.

I went in anyway.

The lobby was all marble and height, the kind of space designed to make a person feel appropriately small. The receptionist was a young woman with perfect posture who looked at me with the polite blankness of someone trained not to react to anything.

"Mia Harlow," I said. "I'm the new personal assistant."

Something shifted in her expression so briefly I almost missed it. "Mr. Carver is expecting you. Forty-second floor. The elevator on the left."

The elevator opened directly into his office.

I did not know that until the doors parted and I was standing there and he was behind a desk the size of a small country, his head down, pen moving across a document, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms exactly as they had been in that coffee shop, and I had approximately two seconds to compose myself before he looked up.

He looked up.

And every thought I had organized on the elevator ride dissolved completely.

He was unreasonably attractive in the morning. That was the only honest way to say it. There was something about the early light coming through those floor-to-ceiling windows that had no business landing on a man the way it was landing on him, catching the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, the way his eyes found mine with that same unhurried certainty that had been dismantling me since the first night.

I thought about those hands holding that pen.

I thought about what those hands had done to me four nights ago and my body responded to the memory so immediately and so completely that I had to take a slow careful breath just to stay upright.

I was in trouble.

"You're early," he said.

"I'm professional," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. He set the pen down and leaned back in his chair and looked at me the way he had looked at me across the bar, like he was reading something he found genuinely interesting.

"Come in," he said.

I crossed the office and stood in front of his desk and held my spine straight and tried not to think about the fact that I could feel my own heartbeat in places that had no business having a heartbeat right now.

He studied me slowly. Not rudely, not leering. The way you look at something you have been thinking about and are now confirming your thoughts were accurate.

"You changed your mind about what to wear," he said.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yes you do." He rose from the chair and my brain logged the full height of him, the way the room seemed to adjust slightly around his presence, and something low in my stomach pulled in a direction I refused to acknowledge. He came around the desk and stopped close, that same distance he always chose, just inside the boundary of professional, just outside the boundary of anything I could comfortably complain about.

"Your desk is through there." He nodded toward a glass partition. "Emails, scheduling, correspondence. My last assistant left detailed notes. You'll catch on quickly."

"You don't know that."

"I know you," he said quietly.

The words moved through me in a way I felt physically, like pressure against the chest.

I thought about the marriage certificate in the drawer of my bedside table. I thought about Daniel eating breakfast this morning without looking up when I said goodbye. I thought about how I had stood at the door waiting for something, a word, a glance, anything, and then left without it.

I turned toward the glass partition before Luca could read any of that on my face.

"I'll review the notes," I said.

"Mia."

I stopped.

"How did your son sleep last night?"

I turned back slowly. He was watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on him yet. Still controlled, still measured, but with something underneath it that felt almost like genuine concern.

"The nurse sent me a message at midnight," I said. "He was settled. Comfortable."

Luca nodded once. "Good."

He went back to his desk and I went to mine and I sat down in front of a computer screen that showed me an inbox with forty-seven unread emails and I tried very hard to focus on the words in front of me.

It was difficult.

Because through the glass partition I could see him. Working, reading, occasionally speaking into his phone in a low voice I couldn't fully make out. Every so often he moved and the shift of his shoulder or the turn of his jaw would catch my attention and I would lose another thirty seconds to thoughts I had no business entertaining.

I crossed my legs under the desk.

I thought about his mouth on my throat. His voice asking what I wanted. The way every part of that night had felt like being handled by someone who understood the value of what they were holding.

Daniel had not touched me in four months.

I uncrossed my legs. Recrossed them. Stared at the email in front of me and read the same sentence four times without absorbing a single word.

At eleven o'clock his office door opened.

"Lunch," he said from the doorway.

"I brought something," I said, which was a lie.

"I know you didn't." He picked up his jacket from the back of his chair. "There's a place on the next block. We're going."

It was not an invitation.

I stood up and picked up my bag and followed him to the elevator and when the doors closed and we were alone in that small space I became very aware of how close we were and how familiar his scent was and how my body remembered things my mind was trying to forget.

He looked straight ahead at the elevator doors.

"You've been distracted all morning," he said.

"I'm new," I said. "It's a lot to take in."

He turned his head slowly and looked at me sideways and the look said he knew exactly what I had been taking in and it had nothing to do with the inbox.

The elevator opened.

We stepped into the lobby and I was two steps ahead of him when his hand touched the small of my back, barely contact, just the lightest pressure of his palm guiding me toward the exit, and I felt it go straight through the fabric of my dress like the dress wasn't there.

I kept walking.

I kept my face forward.

And I thought, with absolute certainty, that I was not going to survive this job.