Even with a live deal trying to test everybody’s character before lunch, part of me was still turned toward her. Not only because of last night, either. Yesterday’s texts had changed the temperature too. The bra question. Her asking if I wanted her to go without one. The way both of us let the conversation walk right out of decorum like we had not already left most of it in the truck.
Whatever careful line we had been pretending to hold had gotten thinner.
It was still there.
Barely.
Molly knocked once and stepped in without waiting because she had earned the right years ago.
“Liquidity support is on the way. Legal says if they have it by eleven-thirty, the rest stays on track.” She set two folderson my desk, then looked at me once too carefully. “Also, you’re distracted.”
I sat down. “That your official diagnosis?”
“It is.” She smoothed a tab on the top folder. “You’re still doing your job. You’re just doing it like part of you has better plans.”
That got a laugh out of me before I could stop it.
She lifted a brow. “Mmhmm.”
“You and Devon need hobbies.”
“We have hobbies. Yours is apparently texting somebody back too fast.”
I looked up.
Her face stayed straight.
Mine did not.
“That obvious?”
“To me? Yes.” She turned toward the door, then paused. “If the one o’clock runs long, I’ll move your four. But if you plan on acting new all day, at least eat lunch.”
By noon, the deal was moving again. Documents updated. Legal mollified. Borrower suddenly respectful now that the possibility of losing the property had gotten close enough to smell.
But I still was not treating the day like it belonged all the way to work.
By four, I knew exactly what I wanted.
I did not want another restaurant, another server asking if everything tasted all right, another room where I had to share her with waitstaff, traffic, and a clock sitting on the table between us. I wanted her in my place. Wanted the whole evening under my roof, where nothing had to be rushed or cut short and the city could fall away for a few hours.
That should have made me pause.
It did.
For about one breath.
Because bringing Talia into my home meant something different than kissing her in a lounge or pulling behind a dark building when the wanting got too loud. My place was mine. My quiet. My records. My books. The view I came home to when the day had taken too much out of me. I did not bring women there casually, and I damn sure did not call a private chef for somebody I planned to treat like a passing appetite.
But there was nothing casual left in the way I wanted her.
That was the truth.
I wanted to feed her. Pour her wine. Watch her move through my space and decide what she thought of it. I wanted her laugh in my kitchen, her perfume in my hallway, her eyes on the pieces of my life I had not posted for anybody to appraise. I wanted to sit across from her with no audience, then sit beside her, then touch her with enough time to learn what the truck had only started teaching me.
And when I took her to bed, because that was where this night was headed if neither of us lied, I wanted it to feel like we had chosen it with our whole selves.
Chef Elijah Ware owed me a favor, and more important than that, he knew how to move through my kitchen without turning the whole thing into some corporate-performance version of intimacy. Three courses. Something rich but not fussy. Enough care in it for her to feel it without the food trying to do too much.