He noticed the dress the moment she walked into the lobby.
He was already in the conference room doing what he was supposed to be doing — talking to the right people, saying the right things, the practiced performance of a man who had been attending these events long enough to do them on autopilot. He was mid-conversation with a CFO he'd been trying to get in front of for two quarters when the lobby doors opened and Mara walked in.
The conversation stopped making sense to him.
She was in a black dress — fitted, sleeveless, a slit that started somewhere below the knee and suggested rather than announced. Nothing dramatic. Nothing designed to stop a room. Just a woman who knew how she looked and had made exactly the right decision about what to wear and the result was quietly devastating.
