Page 30 of Charmingly Obsessed
Three years ago, I walked into his office as a naive artist, andthat dayhappened. The public humiliation. The devastating kiss in the kitchen.
Six months later, he vanished from the office. Stopped showing up. Ran his empire remotely.
He started looking… different. More exhausted. More erratic. Haunted. Not himself.
It escalated. The rumors. Public outbursts. Blacklisted from five-star hotels. A revolving door of personal assistants on this side of the Atlantic, all quitting in droves despite the obscene salaries. Only Amanda in New York, his indestructible right hand, remained.
All of it. All the changes in him. They all trace back to that day.
But why?
His cold lips, tasting of blood and adrenaline, graze mine.
They linger at the corner of my mouth, a breath of unexpected heat. I stand frozen, staring blankly over his shoulder, my mind reeling, feeling like I’ve turned to stone.
“Why are you worrying?” he murmurs. I finally lift my eyes to his. The wildness is still there, but beneath it, something else. Something… vulnerable. “Let’s go. Give me your hand.”
In the car, the adrenaline begins to recede, leaving me shaky and nauseous.
The sight of the blood still streaming from Frez’s clearly broken nose is almost more than I can bear.
The antiseptic wipes and tissues in my trembling hands seem to irritate him more than his injuries.
He laughs, a raw, painful sound, dodging my attempts to clean him up, starting the engine.
“We need to get this cleaned up,” I insist, my voice firmer than I feel, already mentally cataloging the first aid supplies in Serafima’s bathroom. “Right now.”
“Let’s go to my place,” he says, his gaze fixed on the road, but then he shoots me a lightning-fast glance, his eyes intense, possessive. His voice drops, becoming huskier, laced with a meaning that has nothing to do with first aid. “We can… clean everything up there.”
I stare out the window, watching the blighted landscape of the park blur past. My mind is a battlefield of conflicting emotions.
Fear, relief, anger, confusion, and a deep, aching tenderness that scares me more than anything.
After three long, agonizing minutes of silence, I finally answer, my gaze still fixed on the passing scenery.
“Let’s go to mine first,” I say, my voice carefully neutral. “I mean… to Serafima Pylypivna’s. I need to… settle in.” I tighten my grip on the tissues, the antiseptic wipes, the ridiculous crushed tulip. “Then… then we can go to yours. If you still want to.”
“Of course,” he responds immediately, his voice laced with a relief that’s almost palpable. “Whatever you say, Diana. Anything.”
I want to conjure a different version of myself out of thin air. A Diana who isn’t a tangled mess of insecurities and past traumas. A Diana who doesn’t overcomplicate everything. A Diana who can just… accept this. Accept him. Because at the end of the day, stripped bare of all the drama and danger and billion-dollar complications, he wants to have sex with me. And God help me, I want it too. More than I’ve ever wanted anything.
What’s the big deal? It’s just… taking my clothes off. Once. Just once. He won’t run away screaming. He’s too… Too determined. Too possessive. Too well-mannered, ironically. I won’t even have to look him in the eye during the actual… unveiling. And then I’ll never have to know what he really thinks. My desire has to outweigh fear. My It has to. I’m not some alien creature. I’m just… bad at this. And my first and only boyfriend was a monumental piece of shit, so his opinion doesn’t count.
Just undress. Once. Just do it.
“…Diana,” Frez says gently, his voice pulling me from my spiraling thoughts. I nearly flinch, my gaze snapping back to his blood-streaked face. He looks… almost relaxed now. The wildness in his eyes has softened to a simmer. “Do you have any idea what the estimated mineral value of a single large asteroid is?”
I blink. We’ve already arrived. The Spectre is parked silently in the courtyard of Serafima Pylypivna’s grand, decaying building. The question is so random, so utterly Frez, that it momentarily short-circuits my anxiety.
“A lot?” I frown, trying to follow his bizarre conversational leap. “Like… a whole, whole lot?”
“Exactly.” He turns in his seat, facing me fully, his expression uncharacteristically serious. “Trillions, potentially. And I would gladly give away the entire goddamn asteroid belt, every precious metal, every rare earth element, just to know what the hell is going on inside that beautiful, complicated head of yours right now.”
If he knew… If he really knew the chaotic mess of self-doubt and overthinking that constitutes my internal landscape, he’d probably wither on the spot. Like an oak tree attempting to grow in the Sahara.
A hysterical laugh bubbles out of me, shaky and bordering on tears. It’s the sudden, absurd image of him, so decisive andpowerful, being dropped into the sheer, unrelenting noise of my head. The constant second-guessing, the what-ifs, the endless replays of every tiny mistake—it would short-circuit his brain.
He’d be the one needing a long, quiet recovery. But I’ve been living inside my own head my whole life. I’m used to the abuse.
