Page 10 of The Boss
Her lips twitched, arazor flicker that wasn’t amusement and wasn’t surrender. “Maybe that’s exactly why I came. To see if the fire eats me—or if it consumes you first.”
Leif stalked back to her, the desk edge biting into her hip as he closed the distance. His knuckles brushed her cheek, deceptively gentle. “I don’t go down in flames alone,” he murmured. “Anyone near me gets scorched. You most of all.”
She tilted her head into his touch for the barest second before pulling back, reclaiming her distance. “Then I’ll make sure that never happens.”
The words carved through him, sharp as glass. He smiled, deliberate and lethal. “We’ll test that, little liar.”
For a long beat they stared, predator to predator, neither blinking. Then he seized her chin, tilting her face up until she had no choice but to meet the full weight of him. Her pupils widened, dragging the gold in her irises into a thin corona around thedark.
“Choose, Mariah,” he said, his thumb angling her mouth the way he wanted it—open, defiant, his. “Do you walk out and make this a war, or do you stay and make it a test?”
She didn’t blink. “I already chose when I walked in.”
He lowered his head an inch. Heat poured off her skin, and he could see the ghost of the Brand’s pulse under the edge of her sleeve. “Tests have rules,” he murmured. “Here are mine.”
“Name them.”
He released her chin and counted them off, one finger against the other, like a judge reading sentence. “One: you don’t disappear. Ever. Iwill know where you sleep, what you eat, who looks at you. Two: you don’t lie to me. Not outright. If you must dodge, you do it with skill, and you accept what I do with the gaps. Three: you don’t touch any part of my office or home that I haven’t unlocked for you. If you try, Iwill lock you down so hard you’ll forget your own name.”
Her voice was quiet. “And if I pass your test?”
He smiled without softness. “Then you survive me.”
The line hung between them like a wire. She reached for her sleeve as if to rub the edge of her palm, to hide the Brand by impulse. He caught her wrist again—hard, possessive—then gentled intentionally, turning her hand over and unfurling herfingers one by one. The lion’s head glowed faintly, answering the heat in his own. He didn’t kiss the mark. He didn’t need to. His gaze on it did enough.
“You walk around wearing this,” he said with false calm, “and expect me to be civilized?”
Something moved in her expression then, aflicker not of fear or bravado but of cost. “I expect you to be honest,” she said. “You and I both know men like you don’t build civilization—you package control and call it safety, selling the illusion to anyone desperate enough to believe it.”
He wanted to laugh at the audacity. He also wanted to put her on the floor and make her forget every word of theory she’d ever learned. He did neither. Instead he reached to his desk, sliding a leather folio across the polished surface and flipping it open to reveal contracts and nondisclosure forms she hadn’t noticed before. Pages prepared in advance, because he always planned for contingencies—eventhis.
“Sign and initial these pages,” he ordered, releasing her wrist and tapping the forms with a controlled finger. “Every one. Then go downstairs to Security. Jake will walk you to Housing and show you the badge routes. You will use the west elevators only. You will not set foot on Level Twelve without me.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Level Twelve?”
“My private operations floor,” he said, enjoying the way the word private made heat curl low in her body. “You can wonder what’s there. You can’t see it. Not yet.”
She clicked the pen out of his folio, signed, initialed, dated. The neatness of her handwriting irritated him. Controlled, measured, trained. When she finished, she set the pen down like a knife returned to a table and lifted her gaze. “Anything else?”
“A great deal,” he said. “For tonight—one more rule.” He rounded the desk and stopped an inch from her, so close he could count the beats at her throat. “When you think about running, remember this room—remember the lock sealing behind you, the Brand burning between us, and the way I had you pinned with nowhere to go. Remember that this is the place where you learned you can’t outrun me.”
“And if I don’t run?”
“Then you remember it anyway.” His voice dropped to a blade-edge. “Because every step you take in my office, every breath you dare to pull in my space, will lead you back to this desk, this door, this lock, and me.”
Her breath trembled. She masked it with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You really believe control is a place you can point to.”
He leaned in, letting the scrape of his stubble whisper against her cheek, his mouth almost touching her ear. “Control,” he said, “is a person. And you’re standing inside his radius.”
She shivered—tiny, involuntary. He felt it like victory and like a line drawn in indelible ink. He pulled back before he broke the line himself. “Jake,” he called, not raising his voice. The intercom caught him anyway. “Inside.”
He released the lock with the remote and the door opened. Jake entered, eyes lowered. He took in Mariah’s flushed mouth and Leif’s posture in one darting glance that didn’t dare linger.
“Walk Ms. Jones to Security,” Leif said before addressing Mariah. “Housing has your placement when we stay here—west tower, floor twenty-nine, one below my penthouse suite. You’re to be badged for west elevators and conference levels only. You’llalso be assigned a shadow—Henry on nights, Rolf on days. No one else.”
Mariah’s brows arched at his decree, but she didn’t immediately move. “Wait. You expect me to live here?” she asked, her voice cool but edged. “That wasn’t in the interview notes.”
Leif’s smile was razor thin. “Then Jake failed to prepare you properly. Living under this roof isn’t optional. It’s the price of being my assistant. You’re available to me at all hours. Day, night, crisis, war. Surely he warned you it was a prerequisite?”
