ONE NIGHT TOO LATE

BEINGTHE CEO

Justin's POV

The silence in the wake of the slammed car door was more deafening than any boardroom argument, any screaming match, any accusation. It was a vacuum, sucking the air from my lungs and the warmth from the leather seats.

Anne Idia.

The name echoed in the confined space, a mantra of shock and a curse of fate. The woman from the club. The woman from my bed. The woman who had haunted my every waking thought for two weeks was Anne Idia. The new Financial Analyst. My new Financial Analyst.

My fingers, still resting on the steering wheel, tightened until the knuckles turned white. I stared, unseeing, at the polished concrete pillar in front of me. The world had just tilted on its axis, and I was the only one who knew it.

No wonder I had the nudge to go to the office Friday evening. Gosh, she looked so breathtaking.

Her face. God, her face. The blood draining from it, leaving her red. The wide, terrified eyes, the same eyes that had looked up at me with a mix of fear and awe in the moonlight. The way her body had gone rigid, a deer trapped in the brutal glare of my headlights.

She was terrified. Of me. Of this.

And I… I had been frozen. The great Justin Clark, rendered utterly speechless by a pair of horrified brown eyes. The only thing I’d managed was her name, a low, guttural sound that seemed to seal our mutual doom.

A sharp rap on my window shattered the silence. A security guard, his face a mask of impersonal efficiency, gestured for me to move along. The spell was broken. I gave a curt nod, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking space with a low growl from the powerful engine, the movement automatic, my mind a thousand miles away.

I drove to the office on autopilot, the familiar route a blur. My body was in the car, but my mind was back in that bedroom. The feel of her. The scent of her. The shocking, sacred trust in her eyes when she gave herself to me. And then, the cold, empty space she left behind.

I had spent two weeks obsessing over a ghost, and now that ghost had a name, a face, and a desk on the eighteenth floor of my goddamn building.

By the time I strode into the executive lobby, the mask was back in place. Not giving a damn and so Cold. The CEO. Serena at the reception desk offered her usual bright smile, but I walked past her without a glance, my focus a laser beam. My assistant, Eleanor, a woman in her sixties who had feared my father but only pitied me, stood as I approached.

“Mr. Clark. Your 9:15pm with the Singapore team is waiting in Conference Room B. The quarterly report summaries are on your desk.”

“Reschedule Singapore,” I said, my voice clipped, not breaking stride as I pushed through the double doors into my office. “I need the HR file for the new hire in Financial Analysis. Anne Idia. Now.”

Eleanor didn’t flinch. “Of course, sir.”

I stood behind my desk, my back to the panoramic view of the city, my hands braced on the cool glass surface. The urge to sweep everything onto the floor, to shatter the regulated order of my life, was a physical ache in my muscles. Control. I had to regain control.

Eleanor returned moments later, a slim tablet in her hand. “The file, sir.”

I took it, dismissing her with a nod. The door clicked shut, and I was alone again. I swiped the screen to life. There she was. Her employee ID photo. She was smiling, a polite, professional smile that didn’t reach her eyes. But they were her eyes. The same ones that had stared at me in the club, across the bar, in the dim light of my hallway.

I scanned the data. It was all there, the same information Marcus had dug up. But seeing it here, in the sterile, official format of a company HR file, felt like a violation. Of her. Of what had happened between us. Our night was now a line in an employment record.

Her qualifications were impressive. Top of her class. Fluent in two languages. A thesis on emerging market risks that was, frankly, brilliant. She was overqualified for the junior analyst role. She had been desperate. Desperate to escape her old life, the life with David Miller.

And she had walked right into the lion’s den.

The next forty-eight hours were a special kind of torture. I became a ghost in my own company, haunting the lobby of the eighteenth floor. I found excuses to walk past the open-plan area where the analysts worked. I’d linger near the coffee station, pretending to check my phone, my senses hyper-aware of her presence.

I saw her.

She was a study in forced normalcy. She kept her head down, her focus seemingly entirely on her computer screen. She laughed politely at something Victor said, but the sound was tight, strained. She moved through the space with a careful, measured grace, as if one wrong step would trigger a landmine.

And I was the landmine.

Our paths crossed only once, in the hallway leading to the print room. She was coming out, a stack of papers in her arms, and I was walking in. There was no avoiding it.

She froze, her eyes flying to mine for a split second before darting away, fixing on a point somewhere over my shoulder. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the papers.

“Mr. Clark,” she murmured, her voice barely a whisper.

“Ms. Idia,” I replied, my tone neutral, professional. The same tone I used with every other employee.

I held the door open for her. She flinched, as if my gesture was a threat, and scurried past me, the vanilla-jasmine scent of her hair a fleeting, painful reminder. She didn’t look back.

The rejection, even now, in this twisted context, stung. It fueled the dark, possessive thing that had awoken in me the morning she left. She was mine. She had been mine first. And now she was pretending I was just her boss.

It was unacceptable.

The frustration built inside me, a pressure cooker with no release valve. I couldn’t confront her. I couldn’t demand answers. Not here. The power dynamic was too precarious, too rife with potential for disaster. For her. A scandal here would cost her everything, and as furious as I was, the thought of being the reason that light in her eyes was extinguished forever was… unthinkable.

So, I watched. And I waited.

The breaking point came on the third day. I was in my office, reviewing the draft presentation she had prepared for the acquisitions team. It was, as expected, exceptional. Sharp, insightful, with a nuanced understanding of risk that went far beyond her years and pay grade. She had a gift.

A soft knock interrupted my thoughts. “Come in.”

The door opened, and Clara from HR stepped in, her expression slightly concerned. “Mr. Clark, I’m sorry to bother you. It’s about the new hire, Anne Idia.”

My entire body went still. “What about her?”

“She’s just come to me, quite upset. She’s requesting a transfer.”

The air left my lungs. “A transfer?”

“Yes, sir. To the satellite office across town. She cited… a long commute.”

A long commute. It was the flimsiest of excuses, and we both knew it. She was running. Again.

The carefully constructed wall of my control developed a hairline c***k. She thought she could just run away from this? From me?

“Denied,” I said, the word cutting through the air like a whip.

Clara blinked, taken aback. “Sir? The satellite office has an opening, and with her performance so far—”

“I said denied, Clara.” I met her gaze, letting her see the finality in my eyes. “Her work is too valuable to this specific team. She stays here.”

Clara swallowed, recognizing the tone. It was the voice my father had used. The voice that brooked no argument. “Of course, sir. I’ll inform her.”

She left, closing the door softly behind her.

I swiveled my chair to face the window, the cityscapeintriguing and indifederet. She had tried to flee. The knowledge was a bitter pill. My presence was so an abomination and a reminder of what we had to her that she would rather derail her dream career than share the same airspace.

Fine. If she wanted to play this game, we would play by my rules.

She wanted professionalism? She would get it. She would get the most demanding, exacting, impersonal boss she had ever known. I would bury her in work. I would critique every comma. I would force her to sit across from me in meetings and present her findings, and I would watch her squirm under the weight of my impassive gaze.

I would be her CEO. Nothing more, nothing less.

I picked up the tablet with her HR file again, my thumb hovering over her photo. The polite, smiling stranger.

The game had changed. The chase was no longer across the city. It was here, in these glass-walled corridors. And she had just made her first move.

It was now my turn.

I opened a new email.

To: Anne Idia

From:Justin Clark

Subject:Presentation Revisions

Ms. Idia,

Your draft presentation on the Atherton acquisition requires significant refinement. The risk assessment is superficial, and your growth projections lack substantiating data.

I expect a revised version on my desk by 8 a.m. tomorrow. Be prepared to walk me through your calculations in detail.

J. Clark

It was brutal. Unnecessarily so. The presentation was, as I had acknowledged moments before, exceptional.

I hit send.

The message was clear: You are not going anywhere. You are here, with me. And you will perform.

Now, we would see how long Anne Idia could maintain her carefully constructed walls before the pressure from the outside finally made them crumble.