Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Because somehow, the two inches of space between his hand and mine when I take the folder is worse than contact would have been. It’s a gap that my body is acutely, almost painfully aware of, like a near-miss that leaves your nerves ringing.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” I say, and my voice is normal. Totally normal. The voice of a woman receiving a document on a business aircraft.
I open the folder and start reading.
And I don’t notice the way his gaze lifts from his tablet for exactly one second and rests on me before returning to whatever he was reading.
I don’t notice it because I’m not looking at him.
Except I am.
I’m watching his hands. Because his hands are right there, holding the tablet, and they’re hands that make you understand why sculptors used to spend years on a single marble figure. Long fingers. Elegant but not delicate. There’s a strength to them that suggests they could be extraordinarily gentle or extraordinarily dangerous depending on what the situation required.
Stop looking at his hands, Zia.
I look at the delegate list.
I memorize every single name on it out of sheer survival instinct, because I need something, anything, to focus on that isn’t the physical attributes of my boss.
TURBULENCE.
Not bad turbulence. Not the sort that makes the oxygen masks drop or sends flight attendants stumbling. Just a brief, sharp jolt that catches me mid-sip of the water Ruby had set out, and my hand jerks, and the water sloshes, and I grab the edge of the table.
His hand is there before I even register that I’m off-balance.
Not on my hand. On my wrist. A quick, firm hold that stabilizes me instantly, the way you might catch a glass before it tips. Reflexive. Efficient.
And warm.
So warm.
His fingers are wrapped around my wrist, and I can feel my pulse beating against his palm, and I know, with the absolute, mortifying certainty of someone whose cardiovascular system has just betrayed her completely, that he can feel it too.
My heart, hammering against his skin.
For a preter with heightened senses, it might as well be a siren.
The turbulence passes.
He lets go.
“Careful,” he says. That’s all. One word. And then he’s back to his tablet, and I’m left looking down at the place on my wrist where his fingers were, where the skin is still tingling, where I can still feel the ghost of his grip like a brand.
I pick up my water.
I take a sip.
My hand is not shaking.
My hand is categorically, definitively not shaking.
I set the water down and pick up my tablet and pull up the V-Series specs because if I don’t find something concrete to do in the next five seconds, it’s going to replay the sensation of his fingers on my wrist on a continuous loop until I lose what’s left of my sanity.
Polymer composition. Tensile strength. UV resistance ratings.
His skin was warm. Not just normal-person warm. Warm like a furnace banked low, slow and constant.
Polymer composition. Tensile strength. UV resistance ratings.
I wonder if all preters run hot or if it’s just him. I wonder if it’s a stallion shifter thing. I wonder if his whole body is that warm, and then I immediately stop wondering because that line of inquiry leads nowhere appropriate.
I read about polymers. I read about polymers very, very intently.
But underneath the reading, underneath the specs and the technical language and the safe, solid world of product design, there is a question forming. A question I don’t want to ask because asking it means admitting that I’m feeling something I swore I would never feel again.
Is it just me?
Or is this...real?
He is my employer. He is royalty. He has probably forgotten more women than I will ever meet, and I’m sitting here with a racing pulse and polymer specs and the memory of his fingers on my wrist, wondering if I’ve finally lost it, like a character in one of the romance novels stacked on my windowsill.
There is nothing between us.
There is a table between us.
That’s it.
HE’S STARING AT ME.
I don’t catch it at first. I’m deep in the delegate list, cross-referencing names with the product specs Ruby loaded onto my tablet, making sure I can speak intelligently about every potential question the blue-marked names might ask. It’s the sort of focused, methodical work that usually absorbs me.
Usually.
But there’s a prickling at the back of my neck. The sensation of being watched by something you can’t see but your body knows is there. The hardwired part of my brain that remembers what it was like to be prey.
I glance up.
His eyes are on me.
Not his screen. Not the window. Me.
And for one unguarded second before he looks away, smoothly, like he wasn’t doing anything at all, I see what’s in those pale eyes, and it doesn’t fit the Prince of Atlantis reviewing a junior employee’s work readiness.