Chapter 6: She passed

The knock came at 6:23 PM, precise and professional. Mike didn't wait for permission...he never did, which was exactly why Dominic kept him.

"The last candidate from the testing assessment," Mike said. "Should we schedule her for additional sessions?"

Dominic's eyes remained fixed on the contract in front of him. Ashford Enterprises' acquisition of a boutique real estate portfolio in Singapore. Numbers that should have demanded his full attention, but his mind was elsewhere.

"She passed," he said."Have HR send her the employment email and compensation details. First session scheduled for two days from now."

"Understood, sir."

Mike was already turning to leave when Dominic added, without looking up: "And cancel my dinner meeting tonight. Reschedule it for next week."

"The Nakamura dinner, sir? They've been waiting...."

"I don't care what they've been waiting for." Dominic's voice dropped and became colder. "Handle it."

Mike nodded, then walked out of the office.

***

Alone again, Dominic set down his pen. The contract blurred in front of him. For a moment...just a moment, he let the mask slip. His eyes closed, and he saw her.

Not her face. Her response. That precise moment when the vibrator touched her breast and her entire body went rigid with shock. The way her breath caught. How those electric blue eyes widened, then darkened with something that looked like hunger.

How she responded to him.

His jaw tightened. He reached for the pen again, forcing the image away, but it lingered like smoke....impossible to fully disperse. He worked for the next seventeen minutes, methodically moving through contracts, correspondence, the endless machinery of empire.

The phone rang at 6:47 PM.

He didn't need to check the caller ID. He knew that ringtone, had chosen it himself....old-fashioned, insistent, demanding. Like the man who was calling.

"Yes," Dominic answered.

"You said you'd call me yesterday." His grandfather's voice came through like gravel being poured into a machine. 

"I've been occupied."

"With what? Building your empire that you'll never fully control unless you do what I've been telling you to do?"

Dominic's grip on the phone tightened. The empire was his. Every brick, every contract, every decision. His grandfather had given him the blueprints, but the fortress he'd built was entirely his own.

"I have a dinner meeting tonight," Dominic said. It was a lie but he needed to see if his grandfather would accept it.

"Then cancel it."

"No."

"Then I'll assume you don't want what's yours."

The silence that followed was a physical thing. Dominic's office suddenly felt smaller, the walls pressing inward with the weight of a dozen different expectations, pressures, deadlines that existed in his grandfather's mind but nowhere else.

"The company won't function if I take an evening off," Dominic said, and even as he spoke, he knew it was a lie. The company would function perfectly. It was he who wouldn't. Who couldn't.

"The company will function fine. What it won't do is thrive if you don't take the steps necessary to ensure your legacy. You're running out of time, boy. The clock is ticking, and unlike you, I don't move on other people's schedules."

It was the same conversation they'd had a dozen times. The inheritance clause. The year-long deadline. The cousin waiting in the wings, ready to take everything if Dominic didn't produce an heir.

"What do you need, Grandfather?"

"I need you here. Tonight. We have things to discuss." The way he said it made it clear these things were not optional. "Your cousin is bringing his fiancée. Your mother is asking questions about your own arrangements. And I'm dying, which apparently is not enough motivation for you to visit."

The word landed like a punch. Not because Dominic didn't know his grandfather was dying, he'd known for months. 

"I'll come," Dominic heard himself say. "But not tonight. I have..."

"Tonight, Dominic. Don't test me on this."

Then line went dead.

For a long moment, Dominic simply sat with the phone in his hand, staring at nothing. The office was silent except for the faint hum of the city outside his floor-to-ceiling windows. Seventy-two stories up, and the world still felt too close.

He set the phone on his desk and leaned back in his chair. His eyes drifted to the door that led to the testing room....the laboratory of his designs, the one place in his empire where he created instead of conquered.

Her face flashed in his mind again, uninvited and unwelcome.

That moment when he'd told her to spread her legs and she'd obeyed, trembling. That moment when his fingers had found her entrance. The slight gasp she'd made when he inserted the dildo....not pain, but surprise that her body could be used like that, could be assessed like that.

The brightness in her eyes when pleasure crested through her. That startling flash of green.

Dominic reached up and wiped his mouth, a small gesture of irritation directed at himself. Control. He was a man who controlled everything....his company, his family, the women who passed through his life in carefully measured increments. He did not lose focus because of inexperience and electric blue eyes.

He picked up the phone again and dialed.

"Get the car ready," he said when Mike answered. "We're going to the estate."

"Tonight, sir?"

"Now."

***

Dominic stood and moved toward the windows, watching the city lights blur and multiply in the glass. 

Two days until he'd see her again.

He turned from the window and moved toward the door, his expression settling back into the familiar mask of cold authority. 

By the time he reached the parking garage, the car was waiting.

"To the estate," he told Mike, settling into the back seat.

As they pulled out into the night traffic, Dominic closed his eyes and tried very hard not to think about anything at all.

And most importantly, he tried not to think about a pair of electric blue eyes that seemed to have become ingrained on his mind