Page 157 of Sexting His Assistant

“It is how this one works.”

“You really want me there?”

“Yes.”

“As staff?”

His gaze stays on mine. “As you.”

That answer makes the room feel too small.

My phone buzzes.

Misha’s name appears on the screen.

I silence it quickly, but Luka notices.

“He will ask where you are,” he says.

“I’ll tell him I had work.”

“That is true.”

I look at the fireplace, where the diary is now ash.

“Yes,” I say. “For once.”

18

LUKA

The diary burns faster than I expect.

For something Nina worked on for months, it disappears in minutes.

She stands beside my desk with her arms folded, pretending she is not affected, but I can see it in the way she keeps glancing at the fire, in the way her mouth tightens whenever another page curls into black. She is angry at me for destroying it. She’s angry at herself for caring. She is probably angry that some part of her feels relieved.

I understand that better than she thinks.

There were things in that notebook I deserved to see and things I had no right to see. Her neat handwriting. Her irritated side comments. Her attention to details I never asked her to notice, or maybe I did, just not honestly. The names of women I used as cover for the one woman I could not stop watching.

I should’ve ended that system before she ever had to make a diary for it.

I should’ve stopped taking women to dinner the first time I sat across from one and thought about Nina standing outside my office with a pencil in her hair and annoyance in her eyes.

I should’ve had more discipline.

Last night proved I have none where she’s concerned.

I look at her now, at the careful distance she has put between us in my office, at the way she holds herself like she is one bad decision away from either slapping me again or kissing me again, and my mind goes back to the closet with a force that makes my hand tighten around the edge of the desk.

Her back against the shelf. Her skirt in my hand.

Her fingers in my hair while she tried to stay quiet.

The way her body tightened around me when I put my mouth on her breast, the way she bit down on a sound when footsteps passed outside the door, the way she looked at me afterward, furious and flushed and too beautiful for any good sense I had left.

I pull my thoughts back before my face gives me away.