The Heiress in the Dog Cage

I had been in love with Damian Moretti for two full years.I knew how pathetic that sounded. Falling for your boss was already a bad idea. Falling for a man like Damian was practically a warning label in human form.He was the heir to the Moretti family, the CEO of Moretti Holdings, and the kind of man Upper East Side socialites watched the way people watched a loaded gun: with fear, curiosity, and terrible judgment.The Moretti name came with rumors. Private docks. Black Bentleys. Men in dark suits who appeared before trouble and disappeared before police did. None of that had anything to do with me.To me, Damian was the man in the top-floor office who wore black suits like armor, spoke in clipped sentences, and made grown executives sweat with one quiet look.With everyone else, he was brutal.With me, the blade always seemed to stop short.I started at Moretti Holdings as an assistant trainee. In my first month, I sent legal the wrong merger attachment, and the entire support team

That night, in my tiny Brooklyn apartment, I set the velvet box on my vanity and stared at it until the rain outside turned the windows silver.The pizza place downstairs blinked red through my curtains. My apartment was small, ordinary, and worlds away from Damian's glass offices, private drivers, and Central Park views.Yet his lipstick sat under my lamp like a crack in that world had opened just wide enough for me.I reached for it, then pulled my hand back.I liked him. Too much.Because I liked him, I did not want to become someone who used the advantage he had handed me just because I could.The comments, naturally, had no such restraint.[@SteamQueen: He is in the shower. This is not a drill.][@KindleKiller: Hot water, tattoos, bad decisions. Perfect.][@RomanceGremlin: He looks less like an heir and more like a man being haunted by his crush.]I covered my face.Do not think about it. Which meant, of course, that I thought about it immediately.What did Damian look like withou

Martin recovered fast. He straightened, wiped the slime from his expression, and smiled like a loyal employee greeting his boss. "Mr. Moretti."Damian stepped into the elevator and looked him over. "Out."Martin nodded so quickly he almost folded in half, then slipped past him and disappeared.The doors closed again.Damian turned to me. "What did he do?"I said nothing.Not because I wanted to protect Martin. I wanted him fired, sued, and afraid of elevators for the rest of his life. But another anger had been sitting in my chest since noon.After the lounge, Damian had not explained, confessed, or named whatever we had become. He had only booked dinner, as if a restaurant reservation could make up for two years of silence and a lipstick that made him unravel in my hand.I had waited long enough.I did not want to keep guessing.Damian saw my face and started to panic."Nora, did I do something wrong?"He reached for me. I took the lipstick from my pocket and closed my fingers around

After we went public, I thought everything would become complicated.It did. Most of the trouble never reached me because Damian handled it before I even knew it existed.He did not ask me to quit or move me into some pretty, pointless role. Instead, he had legal redraw the top-floor reporting lines and promoted me to project coordinator."You are not my accessory," he said when he handed me the new badge. "If you stay at Moretti Holdings, you stay because you earned it."I told him he had finally said something human. Inside, I melted.That weekend, Damian took me to a private Moretti family charity dinner on the Upper East Side.The party was held in a century-old limestone mansion lined with black cars, dark suits, diamonds, champagne, cedar, and old money. It was the closest I had ever stood to his family world.Damian's father, Vincenzo Moretti, was still the man everyone listened to. If outsiders insisted on using an old-fashioned word, they would call him the Don. Damian was onl