Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Routine. Unremarkable. He'd barely given it a thought.
What happened next was harder to explain.
He'd ended the call and walked out of his office to find them standing near the window at the far end of the floor, his wife with her back to him, some document spread open in her hands, her dark braid over one shoulder, and Johnny beside her, closer than the document required. Johnny, who was explaining something that had apparently just struck Chelsea as genuinely fascinating, because she had turned to look up at him with that open, unguarded expression she had, the one that operated outside the normal bandwidth of human facial expression, that did things to people without Chelsea knowing she was doing any of it.
Olivio watched his assistant's face go soft.
He'd seen that before. Not from Johnny. But he'd watched it happen in the lobby on Day One, when she'd smiled at an assistant who'd been sent down to turn her away. He'd watched it happen at the charity gala on Day Four, when the man beside her at the bar had spent forty-five minutes talking to her about his difficult divorce and had somehow left looking lighter, as though she'd absorbed some of the weight of it simply by listening.
He'd noted each instance with the detachment of a man cataloguing a known phenomenon. Interesting effect. Not his concern.
But this was Johnny.
And this was his floor. His office. His—-
He had crossed the room before the thought finished. He wasn't aware of the decision to move. He was simply moving, and then he was at her shoulder, and his hand had settled at the back of her neck with a possessiveness so absolute that it surprised him, and Chelsea startled and turned, and the brightness in her expression when she recognized him, replacing nothing, adding to nothing, simply arriving like a light switched on, made his hand tighten against her neck a fraction before he caught himself.
Tesoro. His voice had come out lower than he'd intended. Come. I'll do the briefing myself.
Johnny had made himself scarce with the trained efficiency of someone who had correctly read the room and had no desire to remain in it. Chelsea had followed Olivio into his office without question. He'd closed the door.
And then he'd looked at her standing in the middle of his office, in the burgundy dress his team had sourced for the gala, her braid slightly undone the way it was always slightly undone, her eyes finding his with the quality she had of giving him her whole attention as if there were nothing else in the room worth looking at, and the briefing had never happened.
He'd had her on his desk.
That was the honest summary of it, and the honesty was its own problem. He was not a man who lost his head. He was not a man who, afterward, sat in his chair with his wife in his lap and her head against his collarbone while he tried to remember what he'd planned to be doing, and failed, because the weight and warmth of her had made it impossible to care.
He'd told himself it was the situation. Johnny's face. The professional affront of finding his assistant that close to his wife in his own building. Territorial response. Entirely rational.
His thumb had traced the curve of her shoulder in slow circles while she dozed, and he'd thought: Rational.
He thought about it now, Day Eight, standing at his office window with his phone in his hand and Chelsea somewhere in the apartment downstairs, because he had given her the afternoon off from PR obligations and she had been pleased in that way of hers that made him want to give her things he had not previously considered giveable. His phone showed fourteen unread messages and two missed calls from the Vancouver property team, and he had read none of them.
He was listening for her footsteps.
He'd learned them. He had not meant to. It had simply happened, somewhere around Day Three, a fact absorbed by proximity and repetition until it sat there, available, whether he wanted it or not. The slight unevenness. The way her left foot fell a fraction softer than her right, not from hesitation but because her body had learned to negotiate the difference, had turned what used to be a concession into something she simply did without thinking about it.
He knew exactly when she was walking toward him and when she was walking away, and the distinction registered in him with a difference he had no interest in examining.
His phone buzzed.
He looked at it.
Edgar's name on the screen.
He set the phone face-down on the desk.
The city below was all cold geometry, the kind that had always looked to him like competence, like a world that answered to systems. He had built parts of that geometry. He understood its logic. It had never once, in twelve years, failed to give him the sensation of control.