She was breathtaking. But even that was an understatement. The way Christie looked wrecked me, leaving me wanting nothing but her. The second she graced that ballroom with her presence, I forgot about my business. My priorities. The second she walked in, I was in ruins. But she never saw me on the second floor of the ballroom staring down at her. She never saw the way my eyes homed in on her and never let her go. In fact, she didn’t even glance around to try and find me. All she did was gawk with those lush lips of hers at the subtle exorbitance that decorated the ballroom. And that shawl. It made her look like a movie star from an old film. A glistening fabric that matched the shimmering decadence of the fabric of her gorgeous red dress.

But the moment she removed the shawl from her shoulders, the image of her body was forever seared in my memory.

Her tight red dress snuggled itself into every curve of her the way I wished my hands could. Her luxurious brown hair sparkled underneath the lighting of the grand entrance, piled on top of her head. A few strands fell against her cheeks and framed her face, like a piece of art framed in the mightiest of woods carved with the steadiest of hands. When she turned and glanced around the room, I got the best view of how that dress hugged her breasts. How that tight fabric snaked down her body to her thickened thighs with a slit up her leg that was bigger and bolder than my appetite for her on any given day.

I walked down the stairs as deftly as I could, feeling no shame with regard to my blatant want for her.

I spoke her name while reverence dripped from my lips. She was an angel. A vision. The perfect woman wrapped in the most seductive color that tugged at the core of my body. Watching her eyes on me while she took me in only forced the animal percolating in my gut to peek his head out. I smelled her perfume and wondered what it would smell like laced with the tantalizing smell of her womanhood. Her dark eyes filled with an emotion I couldn’t read. But her red lips made me want to find out what it was. They made me want to coax it out of her as I pressed her against the ballroom walls. I wanted to take her in front of that whole room of people. I wanted to pin her wrists above her head and show her how much I wanted her. How much I needed her.

What she had awakened within me.

But instead, I tried simple conversation. A compliment to make her smile and an inquiry into how her evening was going. And though it meant to bolster her confidence and make her feel comfortable, it only seemed to make her nervous. And the second she said she was concerned, my stomach dropped. Then, she mentioned it was work related.

And the hairs on the back of my neck bristled.

We stood there on the balcony I’d led us onto with nothing but with the wind whipping around us. The few fireflies the city boasted of lit our surroundings, basking her creamy skin in a warm glow. Such a place usually called for romance. A bit of kissing. Maybe a secretive confession of the lewd and lascivious variety. But instead, that beautiful balcony filled with questions I never thought I’d hear come from her lips.

Christie was always surprising me with her capabilities. But that didn’t mean the surprise was wanted.

“Is Abbott Financial really a financial business? Or is it a front for something else?” she asked.

What the hell was I supposed to say to that?

How could I tell her she had been secretly aiding me in covering up my real transactions? How could I tell this woman that had come to tug at a part of me I had locked away from so long that she single-handedly helped me import and export some of the highest-end designer drugs on the market today? I hired her because she was intelligent. I hired her because she possessed the kind of mind that could catch onto new skills quickly. Because she seemed eager to take anything on, and I knew I could train her to be what I needed. I craved someone like that sitting at her desk. I had been desperate for someone who could work this job with me like she had proven time and time again she could.

I hired the perfect woman for the job. And it was about to bite me in the ass.

My prior secretary had no idea what Abbott Financial had ever been doing, and she still had the brains to know that she needed to get out the moment she had a family. The moment she got pregnant. Some people had a skill at seeing danger before it struck like lightning. My prior secretary didn’t have the mental fortitude to put everything together, but then again, I hadn’t hired my prior secretary because of her mental fortitude. I had hired her because of her interpersonal skills. Back when I was taking on new clients that came in and saw me almost every damn day.

Christie had a different set of skills my company needed at this point in its tenure. She also had the intelligence to possibly put together what I was doing. I knew that the second I hired her. I knew she was a risk, and I had taken it willingly in order to acquire her skills. To acquire her presence. To acquire her gaze. I’d willingly shot myself in the foot with hiring her.

Fuck. It had always been about her.

“What conclusions have you drawn?” I asked.

The snicker that fell from her lips weakened a part of me inside. All I wanted was for her to look at me how she had in that interview. The way she looked at me when I picked her up for dinner with my brother. The way she looked at me almost every morning over the coffee I brought to her desk.

But instead, the look she gave me was polluted with anger and frustration. Betrayal etched itself into those beautiful crimson lips. A taste that should never grace such a plump pair of beauties. I never told her I was a good man. I never gave Christie the assumption that I was righteous, or even reliable. I never claimed to be anything I wasn’t. She seemed to have come to the wrong conclusion of me to start with, and it made seeing the real me a bitter experience for her. One I would be forced to watch play out on her face in the middle of one of the most romantic spots in the entire fucking city.

“I hired you because you’re smart, Christie,” I said.

Her eyebrows pinched together, like she was fighting back tears. I wanted to kiss away the wrinkles of her worries. Massage the tension from her cheeks with my tongue. I wanted to steal her away to some distant island where she didn’t have to think about my seedy business affairs or the lies that had been dangled in front of her at her desk or the enormous amount of mental acuity it took her to piece the truth together.

“Maximus?” she asked. “Are you running drugs?”

It ruined me to hear her say my name like that. To spit it like a dirty word. Like poison on her tongue. Her question was simple, but the answer wasn’t. And the endless consequences that could come from my answer foreshadowed a mess I’d be cleaning up for months. Whether I decided to lie, or whether I decided to tell her the truth.

I sighed, letting out the breath I’d been holding. I held her gaze and ran the chess game of best possible answers through my head. I ran every single scenario. I predicted every possible way she could take each answer. Which one was the closest to the truth that still gave me her? Which one could she accept that explained away what she had found and still placed her in my arms? In my bed? Against my body?

This kind of work was the only work I was good at. It was what I succeeded in and supported my mother with. I hated technology because of its ability to track and I couldn’t stand the idea of turning into the disgusting creep my father had become. He played house. He moved in the light. He refused to embrace his darkness before slapping my mother across the face with it. My father’s darkness dwelled within me, and the only way to be unlike him was to embrace it. To allow it to flourish. To lose myself in it and learn to control it rather than stuff it down until I exploded onto a makeshift family I’d created in my vain attempt to be something I wasn’t.

I embraced my darkness to be unlike my father. And in the process, I was staring at the one woman that made me feel more like him than anything else. My secretary. The woman who had single-handedly come in and reorganized my world. Who gazed up at me with the eyes of a blazing inferno and demanded answers from a man that could take her out without ever pulling the gun on my hip. Christie was filled with strength that cemented her to the ground in front of me, and a woman of her caliber deserved an answer.

The right answer.

My financial institution front worked only because every shareholder of my company and every board member I spoke with was also a client in my side-business. The only person in my daily life who knew what I did was Sebastian. He didn’t support it, but he understood it. Embracing how much I was like my father helped me keep my distance from him. And even as I thought it, I snickered at how I’d kept Christie at arm’s length.

Maybe embracing her as well would help me to become less like my father. Not because I was fucking around with my secretary, but because I was doing it for all the right reasons. At the right time in my life. Without destroying a family I had created out of some empty societal necessity to be something I wasn’t. Deep down, I knew that was what happened to my father. He played a part for as long as he could because he felt he had to. He felt that was expected of him. Marriage to a prim and proper woman. Children. Owning his own business. Coming home and kissing his wife. Buying her gifts and sending her flowers. Maybe somewhere in his pathetic excuse for a life, someone convinced him he had to be this way and it suppressed who he really was inside.

Or maybe I was simply the animal Christie now thought she looked at.

I saw it in her eyes, her change of opinion about me. Even before I had formulated my answer, she had already tabulated the truth. And she knew it, like my brother did. Most of it, anyway. My employees were all a part of the whole, but they weren’t fake. They were hired under their real names, but fake identities were made for them in one of my departments. It was to protect their families and cover my ass. If they got caught and couldn’t be tracked back to me via paperwork and technology, it made cleaning up loose ends easier. So long as they were paid well, they didn’t open their mouths. But I never hired anyone without giving them a false identity they used at the company.

Christie thought she had found fake employees, but they weren’t fake.

Each name was attached to a real person with a real life and real families and real emotions. And it was my job to keep them safe if they were going to stick their asses out on the line to help me run one of the dirtiest, shadiest businesses in the underground world. Sure, random names and genders. And the spreadsheets she found attached to those strings of numbers? They meant nothing more than what they were. Numbers used to identify clients in a system I had set up on my own to yield only to me and dissolve into nothingness the second someone else attempted to penetrate it. Only I had the keycode to decrypt that string of numbers into a name, and that was how I kept everyone in my company safe.

All of it, coded. All of it, secured. No one ever saw the information enough to bat an eye at it and no one had cared enough to attempt to sift through it. Usually.

Yet another thing that showed me how brilliant Christie was and how seriously she took her job.

I kept everyone as ignorant as I could on the entire process. None of them knew what the distribution facilities were. Or why they changed locations so often. I kept everything as compact as I could and only exposed something when I felt it necessary to secure a shipment or a client. Nothing else. It protected them and their loved ones, it protected my ass, and it kept me out of the media and off government radars. Because those who knew too much were at risk of retaliation from competitors and other seedy characters that dipped in and out of my world.

Only I knew how all the pieces fell onto the board. Which meant only my ass was ever truly on the line.

“Are you going to answer me? Or are you going to continue staring at me in an attempt to intimidate me?” Christie asked.

I watched her big brown eyes seek an answer from my expression. I knew, in the grand scheme of things, she should have known from the beginning. I should have told her at least part of it. The risk I put her in by handling the books meant she could be liable if the company went down. If someone came after me. If I somehow fucked up.

I couldn’t lie to Christie any longer. I cared too much about her well-being and the consequences that could befall her because of my selfish actions. She needed to know the truth, no matter what it cost me in the end.

I nodded my answer, and I heard her suck in a sharp breath. Actual tears filled her beautiful eyes for the first time that night and my heart slammed against my chest in fury. I steeled myself, ready for her to yell at me. To tell me how horrible she thought I was. To spit her resignation at me and storm out of the party and out of my life for good. However, none of that came.

Instead, she turned and began to go inside, which was a thousand times worse than any insult she could have thrown my way.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever see her again if she walked out.

I reached out without thinking and took her by the hand. I stopped her movements and pulled her to me, feeling her body pressed against me for the first time. I couldn’t apologize for my profession, because the darkness inside of me enjoyed what I did. I couldn’t feed her fairytale promises of wanting to change, because I never would. The company never would, so long as I could keep it afloat and prospering. But I hoped she could feel my want for her to stay.

I hoped she could feel my need for her beating from my chest.

I wrapped my arms around Christie’s beautiful form and felt her head rest against my shoulder. She softened for a moment, and I skimmed my palm over her back. My hand fell to her hip, feeling how soft and sweet her curves were against my skin. In any other situation I would have taken her right there on the balcony. I would’ve pinned her against the wrought iron railing, lifted her dress, and watched the pleasure from my fingers roll over her eyes.

But the second she pulled away from me, it burst every dream I could’ve enacted. And I understood why. I didn’t like it. In fact, I hated it. My hatred for it bubbled in my veins and rattled my vision. I couldn’t make her stay, though. Not now. Not when she knew the truth. Making her angrier drove her one stop closer to running off, opening her mouth, and ruining me for good.

I had possibly traded my entire fucking empire for the sake of one woman’s opinion.

“I have to go,” Christie said softly.

Her eyes darted away from mine as she turned her back to me. She made her way inside, and I didn’t follow her with anything other than my eyes. When she turned the corner, I stepped back into the ballroom, sliding my hands into my pockets and watching her from the second story of the room. She picked up her shawl from the coat check and made her way to the doorway, but then she stopped.

She turned her glorious face up towards the balcony and connected her eyes with mine before she left.

I forced myself not to move. Willed my legs with all the energy I had coursing through my system to stay put. I had to return to the party I’d thrown as an excuse to spend time with her outside of work. An entire fucking party, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wine and champagne and food and decorations. All to find an excuse to see her outside of work and reward my employees for a job they didn’t even know they were doing. All of it served as a reminder of why I kept my distance from people in the first place.

But part of me began wondering if I could fix it. If I could fix whatever it was Christie and I had. I knew she felt it. I saw it in her eyes every day in my office. I knew she wanted me. Her simple look back told me she was having seconds thoughts on walking out in the first place. Christie hadn’t simply organized my professional life, she had brought a light into my personal life I intentionally kept snuffed out. Dwelling in the dark was easier if I couldn’t remember what the sun on my face felt like. But every time Christie smiled, the sun shone in her eyes. And I wasn’t ready to let that go. I wasn’t ready to go back to sitting alone in my fucking office with Sebastian as a defunct secretary.

I couldn’t let her go now that I’d had her close to my body. The question was, what would it take to get her back?