Page 17 of Danny

"Evie—"

"I'm not judging. Just observing." She leans against the wall, arms crossed, red lipstick perfect, the picture of a woman who's grown up in rooms like this and learned to read them the way other people read street signs. "How was it?"

"How was what?"

"Anna."

"He bumped my nose."

A beat. Then she laughs — a real one, startled, loud enough that Theo glances over from the kitchen doorway and then looks away when he decides we aren't a security threat.

"He bumped your nose," she repeats.

"He came in at the wrong angle. And I grabbed his tie. And my book fell."

"What book?"

"I was holding a book. It fell on the floor during the — while we were—"

"While Danny Sterling was kissing the shit out of you?

"Yes."

"That's the least smooth thing I've ever heard. That's the opposite of smooth. That is sandpaper." She's grinning now. "How was it?"

"It was—"

I stop. Because the honest answer isn't something I can say in a service corridor at work. The honest answer is that it was clumsy and desperate and he'd made a sound — low, rough, involuntary — that I’m still playing on loop in my head. Feeling such a powerful man lose control over me? Yeah, that may have been the best kiss of my life.

"That good?" Evie says, reading my face.

"I'm in so much trouble."

"Yeah," she agrees cheerfully. "You really are."

He sits in my section the next night.

He should probably be at the Founder’s Table or the fancy, shmancy VIP corner or something. But instead, he’s sitting in my section, giving me a look like he wants to eat me alive or devour me on the very table in front of him. Honestly, I’d let him.

He sits down like a regular customer, orders a Yamazaki neat, and opens something on his phone that he pretends to read for the next two hours.

I know he's pretending because the screen doesn't scroll. Not once. The man sits there with his finger on a phone that isn't moving, in a suit that costs more than my apartment, drinking whiskey slower than any human being has ever consumed a liquid, and watches me work.

He isn't obvious about it. He doesn't stare. But every time I cross the floor — delivering a drink, clearing a table, pausing to check an order with Matteo — his eyes track me. Briefly. A glance, a beat, back to the phone. Like he's rationing himself. Allowing himself one look per lap and then cutting himself off.

It's doing things to me.

Stupid things. I'm hyperaware of my own body in a way I've never been — the way the uniform sits on my hips, how my hair falls against my neck, the specific path I walk across the floor and whether it takes me closer to table four or farther away. I catch myself taking the long route past his table to deliver drinks to station two, which makes zero logistical sense and adds thirty seconds to every trip.

Matteo catches it on the third lap.

"Station two is the other way."

"I know."

"You just walked an extra forty feet to deliver a gin and tonic."

"I was stretching my legs."