His rule my sin

Five

The building was quiet by nine.

I told myself I was going back for the files. I almost believed it until I stepped off the elevator on forty-four and found him waiting jacket gone, shirt sleeves rolled up, looking like a man who had stopped performing composure for the evening and was simply, entirely himself.

And himself was a lot.

"I was starting to think you weren't coming," he said.

"I almost didn't."

"But you're here."

"But I'm here." I set my bag down. "We need to talk about Monroe-Keller."

"We do." He didn't move toward me. Just watched me across the room with that steady grey gaze that I was learning to read the slight tension at his jaw, the way his eyes moved over me, the careful stillness of a man holding himself at a leash. "Come here first."

"That is a terrible idea."

"I know." He held out his hand. "Come here anyway."

I crossed the room because my body had clearly made a separate arrangement with my common sense and hadn't bothered to inform me. When I reached him he didn't pull me in immediately just looked at me, close enough now that I had to tilt my head back, close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, and brushed the backs of his knuckles slowly down my cheek like he was memorizing the texture.

"You have no idea," he said quietly, "how many times today I thought about the elevator."

"I have some idea," I admitted. "It's extremely inconvenient."

That pulled a real smile from him brief, genuine, transforming his whole face for a moment into something warmer and younger and entirely unfair. "Yes," he agreed. "It is."

He cupped my face in both hands and kissed me slowly, deliberately, with none of the elevator's urgency and all of its intent the kind of kiss that didn't rush because it had decided it had time, because it was going somewhere and was choosing to enjoy the distance. I sighed against his mouth and felt his hands move into my hair and thought that this was the specific, singular problem with Dominic Russo: he kissed like every kiss was a conversation he intended to finish.

When he finally lifted his head, my eyes took a moment to open.

"Monroe-Keller," I said. Voice slightly unsteady. Not my finest moment.

He pressed his forehead to mine. "Monroe-Keller," he agreed, and stepped back, and the warmth of him retreating was a physical thing.

He told me plainly. His company. 2014. A restructuring acquisition that was legal, strategic, and devastating to the companies it absorbed. My father had no protection, no counsel who understood what was coming. Within four months it was over.

I stood at the glass wall with St. Louis spread below me and held that information in my chest and breathed through it.

"You hired me knowing I was his daughter," I said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He came to stand beside me, not touching, both of us looking at the city. "Because what happened to your father's company was legal and it was wrong. Those two things coexisted and I spent years letting the first one excuse the second." He paused. "And because when your application came through, I thought if I could do one right thing. If I could give one person something back "

"That's not restitution. That's guilt management."

"Yes," he said quietly. "It started as that."

"And now?"

He turned to look at me. In the dark of the office with the city light behind him he looked like something out of a story I should have known better than to walk into, and he was looking at me with something so unguarded it almost hurt to see it on his face.

"Now it's considerably more complicated," he said.

I looked back at him and felt twenty-two and in over my head and completely, terrifyingly unwilling to leave.

"This is dangerous," I said.

"Catastrophically."

"You're my boss."

"Yes."

"Your ex-fiancée just threatened you because of me."

His jaw tightened. "Yes."

"And my father's ruin is sitting in a file three floors below us with your signature on it."

"Yes." He held my gaze. "And if you walk out of this office right now, I will not follow you. I will not make this harder than it already is. You owe me nothing, Isabella. Not a single thing."

The city glittered below us.

I turned from the window and walked back to him and pressed my hand flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat faster than his composure suggested, real and human and slightly desperate and looked up at him.

"I'm not leaving," I said. "But we are going to do this differently than you're used to. I am not a secret. I am not something you manage. Are we clear?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he brought my hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to my knuckles with a slow deliberateness that sent heat straight through me.

"Extraordinarily clear," he said against my skin.

His phone lit up on the desk.

Eleanor Beaumont: I warned you. By tomorrow morning, her university knows everything. Make a choice, Dominic.

He went still.

I watched his face close down into something cold and ready not fear, but the focused alertness of a man who has just realized the war has already begun.

"Go home," he said quietly, his thumb still tracing circles on the back of my hand.

"Dominic "

"She won't touch you. I'll make sure of it." His eyes came to mine, and underneath the cold readiness was something fierce and certain. "Go home, lock your door, and trust me."

I pulled my hand back gently. Picked up my bag.

"You have until tomorrow morning to earn that," I said.

I left him standing at the window with Eleanor's message glowing on his desk and the whole city watching, and I took the elevator down alone and stepped out into the night air and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who has just stepped off a ledge, that there was no version of this that didn't cost me something.

The question was whether what I was walking toward was worth what I was going to lose.

I thought about his heartbeat under my palm.

I walked faster.