The Billionaire's Most Dangerous Weakness

"Get on your knees, Miss Laurent." Adrian Devereux didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Every executive in the boardroom went silent as he dropped a photograph onto the glass table. My photograph. Taken outside his private penthouse at 2:13 a.m. I stared at it for exactly one second before lifting my eyes to the most dangerous man in Manhattan. "Is that supposed to frighten me?" His mouth curved, but there was nothing warm about his smile. "No. This is." He slid a second photograph across the table. My dead mother's face stared back at me. I forgot how to breathe. My mother had been buried eleven years ago. I'd watched them lower her coffin into the ground. Yet there she was, standing beside Adrian's father at a private charity gala three months ago. Alive. Or someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to make me believe she was. Adrian leaned across the table. "Now, Vivienne, you're going to tell me why you've been investigating my family." I forced myself to meet his eyes. "Fire me." His gaze dropped briefly to my mouth before returning to my face. "That's the problem, sweetheart." He gathered the photographs. "I don't think I want to." "Out," he said to the room. Nobody argued. Eleven people filed past me, and not one of them looked at my face. They looked at the floor, the walls, their phones. Marcus Hale, the general counsel, paused in the doorway and gave me a long, measuring smile. Then the door closed, and it was only us. "On your knees was a figure of speech," Adrian said. "I wanted to see if you'd flinch." "And?" "You counted the exits instead." "Three," I said. "Four, if I count the window." "Thirty-eight floors." "I said if." Something almost like laughter crossed his face. He killed it fast. He crossed to the window instead, hands in his pockets, Manhattan spread out behind him like it was one more thing he owned. "Start talking." I could have lied. I'd built a whole résumé, a whole woman, around lying. But he had photographs. And he'd said I don't think I want to, which meant he was holding something back too. "Eleven days ago, a note was slipped under my door," I said. "One line. Your mother is alive. Come to Devereux Tower tonight. Penthouse level. 2 a.m. It was signed with a C." His shoulders went rigid. "I went. I didn't break in. The elevator opened when I touched the call button, like somebody had already approved me. I stood outside your door for four minutes and nobody answered." I swallowed. "Then I left." "The elevator doesn't open for strangers." "I know. That's what scared me." He turned around slowly. "What did the note look like?" "Black ink. Slanted handwriting. A little c with a tail, like a comma." For the first time since I'd walked into this building, Adrian Devereux looked uncertain. He crossed the room, opened a drawer in the credenza, and laid a folded paper in front of me. A slanted C. with a tail like a comma. "I've been receiving these for six weeks," he said quietly. "They said someone in my building was lying about my family. Then they sent me your name." "So you hired me to watch me." "I hired you because someone wanted us in the same room." His eyes pinned mine. "I need to know why." "You could have asked nicely." "I don't ask nicely." His voice dropped. "Not when I want the truth." The air changed. I'd noticed it before, in the three weeks I'd worked for him, in the elevator, over spreadsheets, in the second too long he held a door. This was different. We were alone, he'd just admitted he needed me, and neither of us was pretending anymore. I stood, because sitting felt like losing. "Here's what I want," I said. "I stay on payroll. I keep my access. You don't tell your father or Marcus Hale or anyone else what I am." "And what do I get?" "The one person in your building who isn't lying to you about being a liar." He stepped closer. Not much. Just enough that I could smell him, cedar and cold air and something warmer underneath. "That's a terrible deal." "Then make it better." "Careful, Miss Laurent." His voice was low enough to feel in my ribs. "I'm very good at negotiations." "So am I." I reached up and straightened his tie. It didn't need it. I just wanted my hands on something he controlled. His breath hitched. It was tiny, and I would have missed it if I hadn't been counting. "You're doing it again," he murmured. "Doing what?" "Looking at my mouth." "You looked at mine first." "Yes." No hesitation. No apology. "I did." I should have stepped back. Instead I said the most reckless thing I'd ever said to a man. "If we do this, we do it on my terms." His eyes darkened. "Tell me." "I say stop, you stop. Immediately. No questions." "Always." "And you don't get to use this to find out what I'm hiding." "And you don't use it to find out what I am." A long pause. The city hummed behind him, thirty-eight floors down. "Deal," I said. He didn't kiss me. He waited. His hand rose slowly, giving me every chance to leave, and his thumb brushed the edge of my jaw. Heat bloomed under my skin like I'd been struck. "Say it," he said. "Kiss me." He did. It wasn't polite. It wasn't careful. It was a slow, deep, devouring kiss that tasted like whiskey and years of wanting. My back met the edge of the boardroom table and I pulled him with me, fingers in his hair, and he made a rough sound against my mouth that went straight through me. "Vivienne." He broke away only to breathe my name. "Tell me you want this." "I want this." "Say it again." "I want you, Adrian. Don't make me say it a third time." His laugh was unsteady. It was the most honest sound I'd heard from him. He lifted me onto the glass. His hands slid up my thighs, slow, asking at every inch. When he reached the hem of my skirt he stopped and looked up at me. "May I?" I should have said no. "Yes." He sank to his knees, and for one dizzy moment I understood the joke he'd made earlier, because this man who ran a company of forty thousand people was kneeling in front of me with his eyes lifted like I was something to be worshipped. His mouth traced the inside of my knee. Then higher. Every nerve I owned arced toward him. His hands were steady and warm and unhurried, and when his lips finally found me I gripped the edge of the table and lost track of the room. He was patient. Devastatingly patient. He listened to every breath I took and answered each one, slower when I shuddered, deeper when I gasped his name. He didn't rush. He didn't take. He paid attention, with the same terrifying focus he used on balance sheets, until my thighs trembled around his shoulders and the sound I made wasn't anything I'd ever allowed in front of a man. He held me through the aftershocks, one palm steady at my hip. "Look at me," he said hoarsely. I looked. His mouth was flushed, his hair a wreck, and the expression on his face was so openly, shamelessly tender that my chest hurt. "You okay?" "Come here." He rose. I pulled him down by his tie and kissed him, tasting myself on him, and he groaned, pressing me back against the glass. I found his belt. His hand closed over mine. "You don't have to." "I know." I slid off the table and sank to my own knees, deliberately slow, eyes locked on his. "Aren't you the one who wanted to see me on them?" His head dropped back. "Christ." I took my time. I learned him by sound: the sharp inhale when my fingers moved, the broken curse when my mouth followed, the way his hand came to my hair and trembled instead of gripping, asking and never forcing. He said my name like it was a prayer he didn't expect answered. When he finally shook apart, I felt it all the way to my bones. Afterward he pulled me up and held me against his chest while his heart slammed under my cheek. "That," he said unsteadily, "was not in my plan." "You had a plan?" "I was going to fire you." He kissed my temple. "Very professionally." I laughed into his shirt. It was the first time I'd laughed in weeks. He tugged my skirt straight with careful hands, adjusted my blouse, and fixed his tie badly. Then he picked the second photograph off the floor and frowned at it. It was the one of my mother. "Vivienne." His voice had changed. "When did your mother's gala happen?" "Three months ago. You said so." "I know what I said." He turned the photo over. "The printing date on the back is three days ago." Cold ran down my spine. "So someone staged that gala," I whispered. "Or someone took this photograph this week." His phone buzzed on the table. Mine buzzed in my pocket at the exact same instant. One message, to both of us, from an unknown number. C: Stop kissing, you two. She's watching.