Page 6 of Everything We Found

Thomas smiled easily. “That was my intention.” He stood beside the grand kitchen island. Leaning against the counter, hewatched her explore his space with a quiet possessiveness she realized with a start. Not of the kitchen, but of this moment. She was here, in his sanctuary.

“Kitchen turned out great,” Nadia remarked, refocusing her attention on the custom Euro-style maple cabinets. “Kudos to your designer.” She winked, gliding her hand over the island’s black marble surface.

His fingers drummed against the stone mere inches from hers before he pulled back and shoved his hand into his pocket with a hesitant laugh under his breath. “Happy to refer her, but I have the feeling you know her better than I do. I haven’t seen her in a while. I’d love to catch up with her if she’s willing.”

This was weird, talking about her in the third person. But she should have anticipated this. He always spoke boldly around her. He was also a big flirt, though he’d never admit to being one, and had never made a move on her. Except for that one kiss. The memory of it flashed between them like lightning. There and gone, leaving the air crackling in its wake.

She wagged a finger at him and walked over to the windows. She couldn’t get over the view.

“How’ve you been?” Thomas asked.

A part of her would love to catch up with him too. But a bigger part of her was beginning to feel traitorous to Aimee again.

She crossed her arms and whirled around to face him. “All right, why am I here?”

“Why did you come?”

“Uh-uh. We’re not doing that. Don’t waste my time. I’m not here to play games.”

He sighed. “Come with me.”

They walked through another wide hall lined in glass into the primary suite, which also had a wall of floor to ceiling windows.He crossed the room and slid open a barn-style maple-stained door to an empty windowless room.

Nadia immediately pictured a toy room where Thomas could exercise his kinks.

“Please don’t have me design something that makes us both uncomfortable.” A warmth crept up beneath her collarbone as she said this and she felt a traitorous skip of her heart. Was Thomas even into that kind of foreplay? What would it feel like to be at his mercy? Or for him to be at hers?

He frowned, momentarily confused. “I want you to design and oversee the build-out of a panic room.”

“A… what?” Her attention snapped back to him and the empty room behind him.

“Panic room. Have you done one before?”

“Yes, several.” Silicon Valley tech moguls tended toward paranoia. They were practicing doomsdayers who preferred to be overly prepared. If they weren’t buying property in New Zealand, they were building bunkers that could sustain a family of four for over a year. Her gaze darted between his eyes in an attempt to read him. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, why?” he answered, his tone flat.

“Nothing, it’s just when someone wants a panic room they either have more money than they know what to do with or there’s a reason they need one.” Like a viable threat to their life.

When they were last in touch, Thomas’s company, Donato Enterprises, had been on the brink of bankruptcy and the Donato name had been in the news, and not for the right reasons. Phil had laundered cartel money through the company. Donato Enterprises’ reputation suffered and Thomas had been trying to hold on to their clients who were canceling their contracts faster than Apple pushed out iPhone updates when the board of directors, which included his mother as majority shareholder, voted him out. The company changed its name andNadia stopped following what was happening after that. She stopped wondering about the Donato family, and for the most part, stopped thinking about Thomas.

Or she tried to stop thinking about him. But memories and desires tend to surface the more they’re ignored, until they’re unavoidable.

She’d been under the impression all that was behind him.

“I want to be prepared. You never know when the next extinction level event will hit us.”

Nadia pursed her lips. She didn’t buy that excuse.

“Zombie apocalypse?”

“Tom.”

He sighed and his gaze subtly shifted to the stark wall behind her. “I just want to be prepared,” he droned, the flatness in his words reflecting his weariness.

Nadia took a closer look at him. This wasn’t the hard-edged man who once managed a billion-dollar corporation while falsifying his brother’s death and orchestrating a plan worthy of a bingeable thriller to keep him hidden. This also wasn’t the man who lived off cigars and whiskey, working endless days and sleepless nights trying to salvage a company his older half-brother-slash-cousin had nearly destroyed.

Standing before her was an emotionally drained individual trying to rebuild his life and himself.