He pushed me away.

Not hard. Just two hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm's length like I was something that might break.

"Delaney. Stop. You're not okay."

I knew that. I knew everything was wrong. The burning skin, the shaking legs, the way I'd just grabbed a stranger's tie. Except he wasn't a stranger, and that made it worse.

My face crumpled. I didn't even feel it coming.

The tears just fell.

Elliot's grip loosened. He stared at my wet cheeks for one long second. Then he pulled me inside, kicked the door shut, and wrapped his arms around me.

"Hey. Hey. I've got you."

His shirt smelled like cedar and whiskey. I pressed my face into it. My hands slid under the open buttons, over warm skin, down his stomach. I wasn't thinking. My fingers just moved on their own.

His body went rigid.

"Delaney." His voice dropped low and rough. "Don't touch me like that."

My palm kept wandering.

He caught my wrist. "I mean it. If you want me to stop, say so now."

I tilted my head and blinked up at him through the tears. "What if I don't?"

Something in his gray eyes cracked open.

He pinched my chin between his fingers, tipped my face up, and kissed me.

After that, the night came apart in pieces. His hands. My name in his mouth. The sheets cold, then hot. I remember gripping his shoulders. I remember him asking if I was sure, and me pulling him closer instead of answering.

Then nothing.

---

Sunlight stabbed my eyelids.

My head pounded. My whole body ached in places I didn't know could ache. I rolled over.

Elliot Carver was asleep next to me. Bare chest. One arm flung above his head.

I looked down at myself. Red marks on my collarbone. On my breasts. On the inside of my thigh.

Panic shot straight through me.

His eyes opened just as my hand swung.

*Crack.*

The slap echoed off the walls. His head turned with it.

He didn't yell. He didn't grab me. He just turned back slowly, caught my stinging hand, and pressed his mouth to the center of my palm.

Then he licked it. One slow stroke of his tongue.

I yanked my hand back like it had been burned. "What is *wrong* with you?"

"You hit me first." He sat up, rubbing his jaw. "Fair trade."

"Fair? You—we—"

His attention had shifted past me, down to the sheets.

His face changed completely.

I followed his gaze. A small, dark red stain on the white cotton.

He looked at the stain. Then at me. "Delaney. You were with Derek for four years."

"So?"

"So why was this your first time?"

Heat flooded my face. I wasn't about to tell him I'd been waiting for my wedding night. That I'd believed in it. That I'd been an idiot.

I lifted my chin. "Because he couldn't get it up."

Elliot stared at me.

Then he laughed. One short, surprised sound before he caught it and pressed his lips flat again.

"It's not funny."

"No," he agreed, still fighting a smile. "It really isn't."

He reached for his phone on the nightstand. "Dr. Patel. Presidential suite at the Meridian. Now, please."

---

The doctor was a calm, silver-haired woman who checked my pulse and pupils, then asked what I'd had to drink.

"Just water. From behind the bar."

She drew two vials of blood for a toxicology panel. Then she and Elliot exchanged a look.

"Someone very likely put something in your cup." She wrote a prescription and handed it to me. "Drink plenty of fluids. If your heart races again, call me."

When the door closed behind her, the room went quiet.

Elliot sat on the edge of the armchair, elbows on his knees.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'd had too much at the party. I should have stopped. I should have called someone. I didn't."

I didn't know what to do with an apology from him. I grabbed my uniform off the floor instead.

"I have to go."

"You should rest."

"If I miss my shift, Wade fires me. I need that job."

"Wade." He said the name like he was filing it away.

He stood, walked over to the pile by the door, and lifted a dark suit jacket. One sleeve hung half-torn at the shoulder seam. Buttons were missing.

"You did this," he said. "Last night."

My cheeks burned again. "I'll pay for it."

"It's a thousand dollars."

I almost choked. "A *thousand*?"

"Custom tailored." He held it up to the light, examining the damage. "Pretty much ruined."

"I don't have a thousand dollars, Elliot. I have four hundred eighty thousand in debt and a fiancé who threw me out of my own apartment."

He set the jacket down. "Then work it off."

"Excuse me?"

He crossed to the desk, opened a leather folder, and pulled out a few printed pages. "My executive assistant quit last week. I need a temporary replacement. Six months. Your first six months of bonuses cover the suit."

I didn't take the papers. "You just happened to have a contract ready?"

"Because I do need an assistant." He held it out. "Read it. Job duties are all there. Scheduling, meetings, correspondence. Nothing else."

"Nothing else," I repeated.

His eyes met mine, steady. "I'm not going to force you into anything, Delaney. Not ever."

I took the contract.

My eyes went straight to the salary line.

I read it twice. Then a third time. It was five times what the hotel paid me.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Because I need an assistant."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting today." He handed me a pen.

I hesitated. Every warning bell in my head was ringing. Rich men didn't hand out favors. Derek had taught me that.

But four hundred eighty thousand dollars didn't care about warning bells.

I signed.

---

What I didn't know was that while I showered, Elliot made another call.

"Security footage from the bar," he told the hotel's head of security. "Last night. Everyone who touched her cup."

It took less than an hour. The footage showed Sabine Moreau tipping a small packet into my water.

"There's something else, Mr. Carver," the security chief added carefully. "Some of the staff say the floor manager, Wade Rourke, has been bothering her. Grabbing. Touching. Since her first week."

Elliot didn't answer for a long moment.

When he finally spoke, his voice was very quiet. "Where are they now?"

Twenty minutes later, Wade and Sabine were dragged into the underground parking garage by two men in dark jackets. Wade came out with a broken nose. Sabine came out crying, her mascara streaked down to her chin.

"You don't go near her," one of the men said. "You don't speak to her. You don't even say her name. Understood?"

Wade nodded so fast blood dripped onto his collar.

---

I walked out the hotel's front doors with the contract folded in my bag and my legs still a little unsteady.

At the curb sat a black car with tinted windows. The back window was halfway down.

Elliot was inside. He was watching me.

His face was still, almost lost, like he was looking at something he'd waited a very long time to see.

Our eyes met through the glass.

He didn't look away.

And for the first time, I wondered how long Elliot Carver had been looking at me before last night.

My desk was six feet from Elliot's.

Not outside his office. Not down the hall with the other assistants. *Inside* his office, close enough that I could hear him tapping his pen.

"This is a joke," I said.

"It's efficient." He didn't glance up from his monitor. "You'll be in every meeting I'm in. Saves walking."

"Your old assistant sat here too?"

"No. She sat outside."

"Then why—"

"Because she quit." He finally lifted his eyes. "And I learned my lesson."

---

By noon, I had sat through three meetings and understood maybe a third of them. Hedging. Liquidity ratios. Words that sounded like a foreign language spoken very fast.

But numbers were numbers.

At two o'clock, I was reformatting a vendor report when a line item snagged my attention. Then another one, eight pages later. Same amount. Same consulting firm. Same date range.

I walked it over and dropped the pages on his desk.

"They billed you twice."

Elliot scanned the highlighted rows. His brows pulled together. He flipped back. Flipped forward.

"Sixty-two thousand dollars," he said slowly. "Finance signed off on this."

"Finance didn't read page fourteen."

He picked up his phone, spoke two clipped sentences to someone, and hung up. Then he leaned back in his chair and studied me.

"Not bad, Bellamy."

"I'm aware."

"Still doesn't cover the suit."

I had been waiting for that. I pulled a cheap plastic calculator from my blazer pocket and punched in numbers right in front of him.

"I'll pay you three dollars a day," I announced. "Starting today. Until you retire."

He blinked. "Three dollars."

"You're twenty-seven. Say you retire at sixty-five. That's roughly forty-one thousand dollars total. You'll actually make a profit." I clicked the calculator off. "You're welcome."

For a second, he just stared.

Then the corner of his mouth twitched. "You brought a calculator to work."

"I brought a calculator to *you*."

---

It became a habit, the bickering. He criticized my email formatting. I told him his handwriting looked like a seismograph. He drank his coffee black and complained mine smelled like a candle shop.

The problem was the closeness.

He kept leaning over my shoulder to check documents. One hand braced on my desk. His sleeve brushing my arm. Cedar and something warmer underneath it.

Every time, my brain served up the hotel room. His mouth on my collarbone. My fingers in his hair.

"Column F is wrong," he murmured near my ear.

"Column F is fine." My voice came out an octave too high.

"Your face is red."

"The heat's on too high."

"It's sixty-eight degrees in here, Delaney."

I scooted my chair two inches sideways. He followed it with one inch, like he was testing how far I'd run.

---

Near six, the floor emptied out. I was stapling packets for the evening meeting when the question slipped out.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You will anyway."

"In college, you couldn't pay for housing. I remember you sleeping in the library over winter break." I set the stapler down. "Now you own this building. How?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer.

"Four months after graduation, my dad got drunk and walked across Route 9." He said it flat, like reading a weather report. "Driver never saw him."

My throat closed up.

"My mom got sick the next year. Complications from her diabetes. She was gone by spring."

"Elliot." I reached over and touched the back of his hand. I didn't plan it. "I'm so sorry."

He gazed at my fingers for a moment. Then he turned his hand over, gave mine a single brief squeeze, and released it.

"It's fine. It was a long time ago."

It didn't sound fine. It sounded like a door he'd shut and locked years ago.

"After that, there wasn't anything else," he went on. "So I worked. Built two financial products nobody thought would sell. Traded the patents for equity. A few years later, I was the majority shareholder."

"Just like that."

"Nothing about it was 'just like that.'" He tilted his head. "Your turn."

"My turn for what?"

"The Bellamy heiress. Carrying drinks at the Meridian." His tone stayed easy, but his eyes didn't. "What happened?"

I picked the stapler back up. *Click.* "Career change."

"Delaney."

*Click.* "I wanted to try the service industry."

"Someone drugged your water."

*Click. Click.*

He let the silence stretch. Then, softly: "Is your mistake named Derek?"

My hand froze on the stapler.

I turned and gave him my sweetest smile. "Is your mistake named minding other people's business?"

He laughed. A real one, low and surprised. "Fair."

"Fair enough."

"Get your coat," he said, standing. "We're late."

---

The merger meeting was at a private conference floor across town. Some fund wanted to sell off a tech subsidiary, and Asteron wanted to buy it cheap.

I walked half a step behind Elliot, holding the folders against my chest.

The doors opened.

Derek Lorne sat at the far end of the table.

Navy suit. Gold cufflinks I recognized because I'd bought them for his birthday. He was laughing at something the man beside him said.

Then he spotted me.

The laugh died. His face went blank, then sharp. His gaze slid from me to Elliot and back again, adding things up.

He recovered fast. He always did.

"Well." He leaned back in his chair. "Didn't realize the Meridian let waitresses tag along to business meetings now. Is that a new hospitality package?"

Two men on his side snickered.

My fingers dug into the folders. Heat crawled up my throat.

Elliot didn't react. He pulled out the chair on his right, took his tablet from his own bag, and placed it directly into my hands.

"Sit here," he said.

Then he turned to the table.

"This is Delaney Bellamy, my executive assistant. She'll be taking notes and reviewing your financials." A pause. "Carefully. She found a sixty-two-thousand-dollar error in ours this morning."

Nobody snickered after that.

I sat. My hands only shook a little.

Derek's jaw worked. He smiled anyway. "Of course. Welcome, Ms. Bellamy."

---

Forty minutes in, Elliot's phone buzzed. He checked the screen and rose.

"Excuse me. I need to take this."

The door clicked shut behind him.

Derek waited until the others drifted toward the coffee station. Then he moved into Elliot's empty chair, so close his knee bumped mine under the table.

"Cute," he said quietly. "Secretary."

"Executive assistant."

"Does he know what you are? A girl with half a million in debt clinging to the first rich man who'll have her?"

I kept my eyes on the tablet. "Are you done?"

"Not even close." He leaned in. His cologne was the same. It made my stomach turn. "You know who holds your family's debt now, Delaney? A fund under Langford. My firm's parent company."

My stylus stopped moving.

"One phone call," he whispered, "and those loans get called in. All of them. Tomorrow. You lose everything you haven't lost yet."

I finally turned to face him.

He was smiling.

"So whatever Carver's planning for this deal," Derek said, "you'd better not help him. Or I'll bury you."

Behind us, the door handle turned.