His rule my sin

Two

I spent three hours and fifty-eight minutes rebuilding every wall I owned.

By 3:59 I was standing in the hallway outside his office on the forty-fourth floor, composed, professional, my heartbeat entirely under control. Completely under control. Mostly under control.

His assistant, Dana, had the expression of someone who had seen things and learned not to comment on them. She gestured me through at exactly 4:00.

I knocked anyway.

"Come in."

Two words. That was all. And still my body responded to the low register of his voice like it remembered things my brain was trying to delete.

His office was glass on two sides, St. Louis glittering below like a city-sized apology for being so beautiful. The desk was dark, deliberately clear, the kind of empty that communicated control rather than inactivity. He stood at the window with his back to me, jacket on, one hand in his pocket, watching the skyline like it owed him something.

He didn't turn immediately.

I crossed the room and stood and refused to fidget.

When he turned, the full force of his attention landed on me like something physical a hand pressed flat against my sternum, pushing. Those grey eyes moved over my face with an unhurried thoroughness that made my skin feel lit from the inside.

"Sit down, Miss Monroe."

"I'm fine standing."

A pause. Something crossed his expression there and gone. "Sit. Down."

I sat. Because my knees were considering betraying me anyway and I would rather it look like a choice.

"Archive project," he said, his voice back to boardroom-even. "Six weeks. Private assignment. Acquisitions division, twelve years of case files requiring cross-referencing and cataloguing." He held a folder across the desk. "Your academic record suggests you're suited to the precision it requires."

I reached for the folder. His fingers didn't release it immediately. For three full seconds we were both holding it, his hand an inch from mine, and the air between us was doing something it had absolutely no professional business doing.

He released it. I pulled it back.

"Why does this require a private meeting?" I asked.

"Because the files are confidential."

"That could have been an email."

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me the way he'd looked at me across the conference room fully, deliberately, like he was deciding something. The intensity of it settled low in my stomach and refused to move.

"I wanted to evaluate whether you'd be distracted," he said.

"By what?"

"By things that have no place in this building."

The temperature in the room went up by several degrees. I held his gaze and kept my voice completely steady through what I can only describe as an act of God.

"I'm not distracted, Mr. Russo."

"Good." His eyes dropped briefly just briefly to my mouth. Then back up. "Because I am extraordinarily intolerant of complications."

I stood. Smoothed my skirt. Moved toward the door with every ounce of composure I had left, which was not as much as I would have liked.

"Miss Monroe."

I stopped.

"You wore white that night."

The words landed quietly, precisely, like he'd been holding them since the conference room and had finally decided to set them down.

I didn't turn around. "I don't know what you're referring to."

"Yes." His voice was soft. Absolute. "You do."

Slowly, I turned.

He was watching me from across the office with an expression I couldn't fully name the specific tension of a man holding himself very still because moving would mean crossing a line he hadn't decided to cross yet. Hunger restrained. Deliberate. More devastating for the restraint.

"What do you want?" I asked quietly.

A long pause. His jaw tightened slightly.

"Right now," he said, "for you to be at your desk at eight tomorrow morning."

I left.

I made it to the elevator before my legs registered what the rest of me had known since the conference room that this man remembered every detail of one night in Arizona, that he had looked at me like I was both a problem and an answer, and that the professional distance he was performing with such precision was costing him something.

The elevator doors closed.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

I remember everything.

I pressed my back against the elevator wall and closed my eyes and thought about how thoroughly, spectacularly ruined I already was.