Page 47 of Sexting His Assistant

“That thing you do. Making control sound like responsibility.”

I move closer before I’ve decided to.

She doesn’t retreat. Her back meets the side of my car, and still she lifts her chin, stubborn and flushed and much too close to me in a silent garage beneath my building.

“You want responsibility?” I ask quietly. “Then understand this. I should not have touched you.”

Her breath catches. “But you did.”

“Yes.”

“And then you walked away.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The word is quiet now. I could give her a dozen answers.

Misha. The company. The Bratva. Her age. My enemies.

The fact that she’s my employee and my best friend’s little sister and the one person in this building whose innocence I once believed I had the decency not to damage.

All true. None complete.

I put one hand on the car beside her head.

She looks at it, then back at me.

“Because,” I say, “if I had stayed, I would’ve taken more than I had any right to take.”

Her lips part. A mistake. My mistake, noticing.

The distance between us is small now. Too small for sanity, too large for what my body wants. Her perfume reaches me, softer than this morning, mixed with the faint trace of office air and something that is simply her.

“Maybe,” she says, voice unsteady but brave, “you should stop deciding what I have the right to give.”

That sentence does something to me.

Something final.

I lower my head slightly. It’s not an invitation to kiss.

But her eyes drop to my mouth anyway.

My hand comes to her waist. She trembles once, almost imperceptibly, and I feel it through my palm. Her breathing turns shallow. Mine does not, because I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to hide signs of weakness.

But she’s learning me too quickly. “You’re shaking,” she whispers.

I’m not. Or perhaps I am.

“Because I’m angry,” I say.

“At me?”

“At myself.”

Her gaze softens for half a second, and that softness is more dangerous than her defiance. “Luka,” she whispers.