Page 199 of Ruin Me Gently

She nodded, smiling before turning her attention back to Silas. “You’ve got a finance meeting at eleven, a lunch call with NeuroSync at one,” she listed. “Legal wants you to review the new contracts for the Synthara acquisition, and Mr. Everly’s scheduled a check-in later this afternoon.”

He nodded. “Anything urgent?”

“Nothing thatcan’t wait.”

“Good,” he said, glancing down at me. “Come on.”

The second his office door clicked shut behind us, Silas turned, caught my wrist, and pulled me in.

His lips met mine in a slow kiss. His hands slid down my arms, then to the buttons of my coat, undoing them carefully before sliding it off my shoulders.

“Sit,” he murmured against my lips.

I moved to one of the chairs in front of his desk and he walked to the other side, settling into the ludicrously expensive chair.

I leaned back, letting my gaze drag over the room. It was ridiculous.

Warm wood, floor-to-ceiling windows across one wall, looking out over the city, the desk looking like it had been custom built for a mastermind orchestrating world domination. And that wasn’t even the most impressive part. There were screens. Everywhere.

Not just monitors, but big, curved displays mounted against the walls, glowing with complex data, live feeds, spreadsheets filled with numbers and projections that might as well have been another language. A holographic projector sat in one corner, currently powered down, but looking like it could display a full 3D model at the push of the button.

Across one of the walls, a massive digital whiteboard stretched across the surface, flickering with diagrams, notes scrawled in his sharp handwriting, and calculations that looked like they belonged in a high-level physics journal.

He was in his element. Watching me, sleeves rolled up just enough to flaunt those sexy as hell forearms. He was effortlessly commanding, insufferably good at everything, and somehow even hotter when he was like this.

I’d spent a good chunk of the morning just watching him work. Letting the quiet settle between us, pretending I wasn’t ridiculously enamoured by the whole thing. But forty minutes ago, he’d disappeared off to a meeting, leaving me alone, sprawled across the couch in front of the glass walls, sending Molly a string of texts, and basking in the fact that I was here, in this world, with him.

The office door swung open, and he strode in, undoing the button on his jacket, rolling his shoulders like he was shaking off the meeting.

“That bad?” I asked.

“Not bad. Just long,” he exhaled, dragging a hand through his curls. “I have to hop on a call.”

And then he was gone. Not physically, but mentally, his attention already on whatever multi-million-dollar conversation he was about to have as he sat at his desk.

“Mmm. Take your time.”

I stretched onthe couch again, shifting so that my dress rode up my thigh, knowing damn well his peripheral vision was too good for him to miss it.

At first? Nothing. No reaction. Not even a flicker. Just the steady rhythm of his fingers over the keyboard, the smooth, measured way he adjusted his headset.

“That’s not what I asked,” he said in a cool, brutal tone as he adjusted those ridiculously hot, professor-chic glasses.

I stilled.

“Fix it. Today. I don’t care what it takes.”

Oh.Oh.

That was sexy as hell.

I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, slower this time.

His gaze flickered toward me, brief, sharp as a knife, before dragging back to his screen. But I caught the way his throat bobbed with a slow, controlled swallow.

Interesting.

I let my fingers drift absently over my thigh, tracing lazy patterns like I wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing. Like I wasn’t watching him pretend not to watch me.

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