Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
The socks nearly break my composure. Pink with red hearts. Fucking hearts. She yanks them off without ceremony, balls them up and stuffs them into the toes of her boots with practiced efficiency. My chest tightens with something dangerously close to amusement.
Not because she’s ridiculous. Because she’s real. Painfully, beautifully real in a way nothing in my world ever is anymore.
She stands, walks back to the standing desk, her movements measured and deliberate. She picks up the shoes—those ridiculous, expensive things—and places them on the desk surface with unnatural precision. Then she just stares at them like they’re live grenades about to detonate, her fingers hovering near but not touching the leather.
I wait. The moment stretches between us, taut with possibility, charged with something electric and dangerous. The air feels weighted, like the pressure before a storm breaks. I could cut this tension with the knife strapped to my ankle.
Will she do it?
Will she break?
I’ve seen men twice her size crumble under less pressure than this. Yet she stands there, spine straight, face carefully arranged into neutrality despite the war I can see raging behind those pale green eyes.
She carefully places them on the floor, each movement controlled to the millimeter. Not thrown. Not slammed. Placed. A small act of defiance wrapped in compliance—the most dangerous kind.
I catalog this, too—her ability to yield while maintaining some internal fortress I can’t quite breach. It’s... unexpected. Most people I break are either all defiance or total submission. This calibrated resistance is fun.
She lifts one foot, hovering it over the red leather like she’s about to step on broken glass. I can almost hear her thoughts—calculating how to manage this, how to survive the next move without showing weakness. The moment stretches, and I wait.
She slips her foot in and immediately loses her balance, arms flailing slightly before she catches herself against the desk. Something tightens in my chest—not concern, but interest. The kind of interest a scientist has watching a particularly resilient specimen under pressure.
Her second foot follows with similar awkwardness. Now she stands there, looking down at Lucia’s thousand-dollar shoes like they’re alien objects attached to her body. The red soles peek out as she shifts her weight, trying to find stability.
“Walk around a little,” I say quietly.
Her eyes flash to mine—defiance, embarrassment, calculation—before she takes a tentative step. Then another. The shoes are clearly too big. Lucia’s narrow stilettos weren’t made for Emmaleen’s small feet—they gape at the heel, forcing her to flex her toes just to stay inside them. It makes her movements awkward, unsteady, vulnerable.
It makes her mine.
She takes a careful circuit around the room, one hand hovering near surfaces for balance. That skirt—that absurd, fluttery little thing—flips when she moves, revealing just enough thigh to punch a jolt of heat straight into my bloodstream.
I force my expression to remain neutral, bored even. But something inside me shifts—a tectonic plate moving beneath the frozen surface.
I didn’t expect… this.
Whatever “this” is.
“Go back to your desk,” I command.
She turns too quickly and wobbles, catching herself before disaster. The sight of her unsteady on those ridiculous heels sends a dark thrill through me—like watching a rare bird with clipped wings.
She’s muttering something under her breath, her lips moving in a private conversation with herself. “Fifty-two thousand dollars,” I think she says.
The salary I promised her. She thought it was a lot of money on Saturday, her eyes widening just enough to tell me she’d been surviving on far less.
What does she think now that she knows what I expect of her? Now that she’s seen the cold machinery of this “office,” felt the weight of my expectations pressing down on those delicate shoulders?
The number probably feels smaller by the minute, shrinking against the magnitude of what she’s walked into.
When she reaches the desk, she places both hands flat on its surface, steadying herself. Relief flashes across her features for just a moment before she schools her expression back to neutrality.
But I caught it.
I catch everything.
The power in the room has shifted. She knows it. I know it. These absurd red shoes have accomplished exactly what I wanted—they’ve made her uncertain in her own body. They’ve given me the upper hand.
And yet there’s something about the way she stands now—slightly uncomfortable but refusing to complain—that suggests this battle is far from over.
I circle the room slowly, studying her from every angle like a predator. Each deliberate step is another turn of the screw. Little Miss Take shifts her weight from foot to foot, already uncomfortable.
“Stop shuffling,” I murmur. “Posture matters, Miss Take. Chin up. Shoulders back.”
The look she gives me could freeze hell. Her eyes narrow, jaw tightening—a flash of pure hatred before she masks it. But she obeys, straightening her spine and lifting her chin with mechanical precision. The movement forces her to adjust her balance, her body tilting forward slightly, fingers splayed at her sides for stability.