Page 4

It still was.
Because it humanized him.
And nothing about him was human.
“I’m in my room.”
She could tell by his voice that he was in a mood. But then, if he called at midnight, he was always in a mood. He kept the strangest hours of anyone she had ever known. Sometimes she wondered if he slept at all. The truth was, he probably plugged himself into the wall for a couple of hours at the end of every day.
Maybe took off his head for a few minutes and stuck it on a charger.
She strode through his massive living area, her shoes clicking on the black marble tile. And went straight into his bedroom.
He emerged from his walk-in closet just as she did. Wearing nothing but a pair of black pants, resting low on his hips.
He was the robot, but when she saw him her brain short-circuited.
Those broad shoulders, equally broad chest. His well-defined pectoral muscles, his abs...
If she touched him, she would probably find that he was made of steel, rather than flesh and bone. But she had never touched him, so the temptation to do so remained.
After all this time, being in his bedroom shouldn’t signify. Seeing him shirtless shouldn’t signify, and yet it did.
There was something obscenely sexual about his chest hair. She couldn’t get over it.
He was ten years older than her. And her boss.
If she ever confessed her fixation with him to a medical professional she would be clinically diagnosed with daddy issues. But no matter how many times she told herself that she couldn’t stop the fixation.
Regrettably, she had learned that for her a sexual fixation was a near impossible thing to exorcise when the object of said fixation was in her path continually.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I need to pick a suit. For tomorrow night’s speech.”
“You have to do it now?”
“Yes,” he said, as if she was the foolish one. “I need to practice the speech. And everything needs to be as it will be tomorrow.”
“You can’t practice in the venue right at this very moment.”
“Everything needs to be the same with me,” he said.
She felt the last straw descend upon her, and crack her patience completely in half. It had been a monstrous workload in the lead-up to the Singapore conference and Luca had been worse than usual. She’d been toying with taking another job as things got more and more hectic. But she’d been...torn.
Because Luca was...she’d been right. When he’d looked at her the first time she’d known he could destroy her and in many ways she’d let him. Her life revolved around him. Her every move, her every breath.
She’d thought about leaving but she had also felt paralyzed by the thought of a life without him.
Now though...
She could see herself far too clearly.
She’d told herself it was lust. She’d told herself she was armed against all things thanks to her dysfunctional childhood, and in reality she’d...
She’d been holding herself back because of him. Not taking new jobs, not realizing her own potential because she’d let herself get obsessed with him.
Or worse.