Strictly Unprofessional

Chapter Three

kade

The thing about Nadia Voss was that she never asked for anything directly.

She suggested. She implied. She arranged her words in elegant formations that all pointed toward what she wanted while giving her complete deniability if you called it out. Kade had spent two years in a relationship with her learning this, and another eight months after it ended confirming that the skill had not faded.

Today she had suggested, over grilled halibut and a Chablis she'd ordered without consulting him, that they had unfinished business.

He had implied that they did not.

She had smiled the smile that meant the conversation wasn't over, kissed his cheek outside the restaurant, and gotten into a car that cost more than most people's apartments.

He'd stood on the pavement for approximately four seconds before pulling out his phone and pushing Chen's two-thirty back twenty minutes because he needed to walk and he couldn't walk and take a meeting simultaneously and he was not, under any circumstances, going back to the office looking like a man who had just been unsettled by an ex-girlfriend over halibut.

He was fine.

He was absolutely fine.

He pushed through the lobby doors at 1:43 p.m., nodded at the front desk, and took the elevator to thirty-four.

The floor was quiet the way it always was after lunch. He crossed through the main corridor, past the cluster of marketing desks, and he was not looking for Viv's red hair among them, he was simply moving through a space that she happened to occupy.

She was at her desk. Head down, one hand curled around a coffee cup that had probably gone cold an hour ago, doing something on her screen with the focused expression that meant she had found an error somewhere and was hunting it down.

She didn't look up.

He kept walking.

At 4:15 p.m. Marcus Leigh dropped himself into the chair across from Kade's desk with the energy of a man who had decided his afternoon was over and was making it Kade's problem.

"How was lunch," Marcus said. It wasn't a question.

"Fine."

"You pushed Chen."

"Something came up."

Marcus looked at him. Marcus had a particular look that he deployed specifically when he thought Kade was being an i***t, which was calibrated and precise and deeply annoying because it was almost always accurate.

"Nadia," Marcus said.

Kade didn't confirm or deny. He turned a page in the Henderson brief.

"She wants back in," Marcus said.

"She wants a lot of things."

"And?"

"And nothing." He set the brief down. "It was lunch, Marcus. People eat lunch."

"People eat lunch with their exes when their exes want something." Marcus picked up the stress ball from the edge of the desk and threw it once in the air. "What does she want?"

Kade leaned back in his chair. Through the glass wall he could see the outer office. Viv had her phone to her ear now, scribbling something on the notepad she kept to the left of her keyboard even though everything had a digital equivalent. She always said typing felt impersonal for certain calls. He had no idea why he remembered that.

"She wants to revisit," he said.

"Revisit the relationship."

"She used the word unfinished."

Marcus was quiet for a moment. Then: "What did you say?"

"I said we'd finished just fine."

That earned a short laugh. Marcus set the stress ball down. He had the look now of someone choosing his next words carefully, which with Marcus meant he had been thinking about this before he walked in.

"Can I say something," Marcus said.

"You're going to regardless."

"The woman outside your office." Marcus tilted his head toward the glass. "Calloway."

Kade said nothing.

"Something's different with her lately."

Still nothing.

"You've noticed," Marcus said. Not a question either.

"She's the same as she's always been."

Marcus gave him a look so flat it was almost architectural. "She used to laugh at the thing you do. The deadpan thing. During briefings. She'd get this expression, barely anything, but it was there." He paused. "She doesn't anymore. She just moves on. Like it didn't land."

Kade was quiet.

It had landed. He knew it had landed because Viv had better comedic timing than anyone in the building and she had always, always reacted to his. Not obviously. Never obviously. Just that small flicker behind her eyes that told him she found him funny and was annoyed about it.

It had been gone for months and he had only consciously named it this morning when she handed him the Henderson notes and looked at him like he was simply a problem to be managed.

Which he was. That was entirely appropriate. He was her employer.

He did not enjoy it.

"I don't know what you want me to do with that observation," Kade said.

"Nothing," Marcus said easily, standing up. "I'm just noting it. For the record." He picked up his coffee. "Also Nadia Voss is a beautiful woman who wants you back and you spent thirty seconds of our conversation thinking about your secretary instead of her, which is also just. For the record."

He left before Kade could respond to that.

Kade turned back to the Henderson brief.

He read the same paragraph three times.

Through the glass wall, Viv had finished her call. She was typing now, posture straight, the overhead light catching the deep red of her hair in a way that was completely irrelevant to anything. She reached up and tucked a strand behind her ear without breaking stride on the keyboard.

He looked back at his brief.

Different, he'd said to her at the end of the day. You're not the same.

She'd held his gaze and given him nothing. Clean, professional, unbothered.

And he had stood there in her outer office like an i***t trying to read a woman who had simply, at some point he couldn't identify, decided to stop being readable to him.

He didn't like it.

More specifically, he didn't like how much he didn't like it.

That was a problem for later.

He went back to Henderson.