Strictly Unprofessional

Chapter Eight

VIVIENNE

She told Damien everything at 8 p.m. on her couch, with wine, in the specific order that made it sound less significant than it was.

The eggs. Nadia. The evening light. I'm working on the answer to that.

Damien listened with the focused silence he reserved for situations he considered genuinely serious, which was a short list. When she finished he was quiet for four full seconds.

Then he said: "He looked at your mouth."

"That's what you took from all of that."

"Viv. Baby. He looked at your mouth and told you Nadia means nothing and said he was working on why your feelings matter to him." Damien set his wine down with the gravity of a man delivering a verdict. "That is not a man being considerate. That is a man in the early stages of losing his mind over you."

"You're being dramatic."

"I am a dramatic person. It doesn't mean I'm wrong." He pulled his knee up onto the cushion and turned to face her fully. "How did you feel when he said it?"

She drank her wine.

"Viv."

"Confused," she said. "I felt confused."

"And?"

She looked at the ceiling. It was a perfectly ordinary ceiling. It had no answers on it.

"Like something I'd packed away very neatly had just been picked up and shaken," she said quietly.

Damien was silent for a moment.

"That's the most honest thing you've said about him in months," he said.

"Don't make it a thing."

"It's already a thing. It became a thing when he ordered you eggs." He retrieved his wine. "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing. I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to go to work tomorrow and be excellent at my job and not think about grey eyes or things said in evening light like we were in some kind of film."

"You just described his eyes specifically."

"Damien."

"Grey eyes. You said grey eyes."

"I'm aware of what I said."

"You're so far gone," he said, with tremendous affection.

She threw a cushion at him. He caught it without spilling his wine, which was an unfair level of coordination for someone three glasses in.

"He has an ex who looks like a Renaissance painting," Viv said. "He runs through women the way normal people run through coffee. He is my employer. These are facts."

"Also facts: he noticed you stopped looking at him. He ordered you breakfast. He told you unprompted that his stunning ex means nothing. He stood close enough to you at six p.m. that you could probably identify his cologne in a lineup." Damien tilted his head. "Which you can, can't you."

She said nothing.

"Viv."

"It's cedar and something warm," she said. "I don't know what the second note is. I've been trying to identify it for eleven months and it's deeply inconvenient."

Damien stared at her.

"You are so cooked," he said softly.

"I hate you."

"No you don't. You love me and I love you and I'm telling you this because I love you." He leaned forward. "You protected yourself. You did the sensible thing. But sensible and right are not always the same thing, and I think you know that."

She did know that.

She just didn't know what to do with knowing it.

She wore the green blouse on Thursday.

She told herself it was because it was clean and pressed and the colour suited her complexion, which were all true things. She told herself it had nothing to do with the fact that it fit considerably better than her other Thursday options, which was a lie she was actively maintaining.

Damien saw her step off the elevator at 7:58 and sent her a single text.

DAMIEN [7:58 AM]: the green one. interesting choice.

She did not respond.

Kade was already in his office when she arrived, which was unusual. He was on a call, standing at the window, and he turned when she came through the outer office door the way he sometimes did, an automatic thing, checking who had arrived.

He saw her.

Something shifted in his expression. Small, controlled, but there. His gaze moved over her once, the way you looked at something that had caught your attention before your manners caught up, and then he was back on his call and turned toward the window again.

She set down her bag.

Her face was neutral.

Her entire nervous system was conducting a private celebration that she was refusing to acknowledge.

She sat down, pulled up his calendar, and got to work.

At 9:30 he came out for a document she had already placed on the edge of her desk in anticipation of him needing it. He picked it up. His hand was close to hers on the desk surface. Not touching. Not quite.

"Green," he said quietly, not looking at her.

"It's a colour," she said, not looking at him.

"It suits you."

She felt that sentence move through her in a way that was entirely inappropriate for 9:30 on a Thursday morning in a professional environment.

"The Nakamura brief is on page two," she said.

"I see it."

He didn't move immediately. He stood at the edge of her desk for a moment with the document in his hand and the particular stillness of a man who had more to say and was deciding against it.

Then he went back into his office.

Viv stared at her screen.

Cedar, she thought. And something warm underneath it.

She still couldn't identify the second note.

It was still deeply inconvenient.