Mag-log inAaronThe ballroom at the Grand Atrium was a sea of practiced smiles, popping flashbulbs and whispers with teeth.This was my battlefield. I could walk the city's money through it blindfolded. Tonight, under cover of an engagement gala, I was publicly hammering the last nail into Marcus Vance's corporate coffin.And my weapon of choice was holding a glass of champagne in the ivory silk dress that had kept me awake for two nights.The wedding dress.She had worn it to the engagement party.Elena had seen her come down the hall and gone white. "Ms. Vance. That dress is for the wedding.""Then he can buy me another one," Raven had said, and walked into the elevator.I hadn't said a word. I hadn't trusted myself to.The dress was lethal engineering. The cowl neck dipped too low. The silk clung to her hips like a second skin. Her whole spine was bare to the room. She looked like something sent to ruin empires."Smile, CEO," she murmured, appearing at my side.Before I could brace, she slip
RavenThe hangover was a war crime.I woke up buried under a mountain of silk in the guest suite, my skull split open and filled with hot lead. I was still in his shirt. It still smelled like cedar and him, which was unfair, because my head was punishing me enough.The last thing I remembered was his heart. The way it had pounded under my palm in the library. The silence.After that, nothing. A dark, merciful blank.If I had braced myself for a lecture over breakfast, or for that cold little smirk he wore whenever he thought I'd done something spectacularly stupid, I needn't have bothered.Aaron was gone.Not that morning. Not the next one.For two days, I barely saw him. I heard the private elevator sometime before dawn, then footsteps fading down the hall. Late at night, I caught the smell of coffee and scotch outside his study. But by the time I came out of my room, he was gone, and by the time I went to bed, his study door was still shut.His side of the bed stayed cold. So much
AaronShe weighed almost nothing.Her arms hung loose around my neck. Her damp hair brushed my throat, and she smelled like my soap and her own berries, and with every step down that dark hallway, the hem of my shirt shifted against her bare thighs.It was testing the absolute limits of my sanity."You're heavy when you're annoying," I said.She laughed against my collarbone, soft and hazy. The warm puff of her breath went straight down my spine. "Liar. You love carrying me.""I'm putting you to bed before I throw you off the balcony."My arms tightened around her anyway.I walked past the master suite. Item three. My rule. I didn't stop.Tonight, I didn't trust myself in that bed.I shouldered open the guest-suite door. The room was silver with city light. I crossed to the bed and lowered her onto the sheets.I meant to straighten up immediately. I meant to be the man who had everything under control.Instead, as her back touched the mattress, her fingers closed on my lapels and pull
RavenThe whiskey glowed like melted gold in the crystal.Aaron handed me the glass without letting his fingers touch mine. Whatever had been in his eyes by the bookshelves was gone. They were dark and closed again.He didn't pour one for himself. He went back behind his desk and picked up a black ceramic mug that sat beside his keyboard. Coffee, at midnight. Of course.I took a sip. It burned all the way down, slow and expensive.I curled into the corner of the big leather sofa, tucked my bare legs under the hem of his shirt, and took another sip. Then another.He didn't look at me. He read. Columns of numbers scrolled across his screen, and his eyes ate them.So I watched him.You don't grow up with Marcus Vance without learning to read people. You learn to find the cracks. The little tells. The cufflink.Aaron Wylder didn't have many.But I started finding them anyway.He didn't slouch. Not an inch, not even at midnight in his own library. And he didn't hold the mug by its hand
AaronI poured two fingers of Macallan into a crystal glass and drank it straight.It didn't help.I stood at the library windows and didn't see the city.All I could see was ivory silk.Four hours since the boutique, and she was still burned into the back of my eyes. The silk on her hips. That neckline. The long, bare line of her spine.When I looked up and saw her in that dress, my brain stopped.For five seconds, I forgot Marcus Vance. The merger. The cameras. I was just a man looking at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, fighting a sudden, violent urge to clear the building, lock the door and take that price tag off her with my teeth."Control," I told myself, and set the empty glass on the desk. "She's an asset. An acquisition."The library doors opened."I'm bored," Raven announced.I turned around, and whatever control I had just scraped together broke in half.She had showered. Her hair was damp, falling in loose, messy waves over her shoulders.That wasn't what locked
RavenThe top floor of L'Éternité, the most exclusive bridal boutique in the city, had been cleared for us.No other brides. No other customers. Just a nervous army of women in matching black wrap dresses, trays of champagne nobody touched, and Aaron.He sat on a velvet sofa in the middle of the viewing room like a dark king who had been forced to attend a tea party. Long legs crossed. An espresso in one hand, his tablet in the other. He had said maybe two words since we walked in.Makeup covered most of the bruise. Not all of it. Every woman in the building had looked at my cheek once and then very carefully never looked at it again.I stood in the dressing room and looked at myself in the mirror.The dress was beautiful. A classic A-line with lace sleeves and a long, sweeping train. I looked elegant. I looked like the perfect, respectable senator's daughter.I took a breath, pushed through the curtain and stepped up onto the round pedestal."What about this one?"He didn't look up.







