Page 30 of Babies for the Big Shot

I’m so screwed…

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nick

“You pouredespresso into your water bottle this morning. That isn’t a power move, Nick. That’s a clinical sign of collapse.”

I lift my gaze from the contract spread across my desk and glare at Jonah over the rim of my actual coffee cup. “If you’re finished diagnosing my caffeine intake, feel free to get back to your job. Unless you’d like me to schedule time in your calendar for a follow-up evaluation.”

He doesn’t flinch. Instead, he tilts his head slightly to the left and gives me that infuriatingly calm, perceptive look that has made me want to punch him at least once a week for the better part of twenty-five years.

“You kissed her,” he says, his tone as casual as if he were commenting on the weather forecast. “Or she kissed you. It hardly matters which. Look at yourself.”

I don’t answer him. The silence is louder than words.

Jonah lets out a low whistle, long and edged with something almost sympathetic. He leans back in the chair opposite mine, lacing his hands behind his head in a gesture of lazy superiority I find especially intolerable today. “Well. That explains the caffeine overload, the permanent scowl, and the fact that you’veread the same paragraph in that contract three times since I walked in.”

“It was one kiss,” I say, my voice clipped. “It didn’t go any further.”

This time.

“But you wanted it to.”

Of course I did.

She had looked up at me with those wide, furious eyes, her mouth swollen from the force of what we were doing, her breathing ragged in the quiet space between us. When I leaned in, when she closed the remaining distance and pulled me down with a desperation that eclipsed reason, everything else fell away. Control fractured. Logic disintegrated. Restraint ceased to exist.

Now I’m here, sitting behind my own desk, feigning interest in projected earnings and pipeline metrics, when the only thing occupying any real estate in my mind is her—the taste of her, the feel of her, the sound she made when she kissed me back with the intensity of someone fighting for breath.

“Damn, Nick,” Jonah mutters, his voice stripped of sarcasm now. “You’re deeper in this than you realize.”

“No,” I say quietly. “I have it contained.”

He snorts without humor. “Is that what you think? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks more like you’re circling the drain with no plan to stop.”

I push back from the desk and cross to the window because staying seated is suffocating. Outside, the skyline stretches in a perfect grid of steel, ordered and cold, a panorama of everything I’ve built and controlled. Under any other circumstances, its precision would calm me. Today, it only reminds me that I’m standing in a sealed box, pretending I’m not coming apart at the seams.

“She works for me.”

“So?” he replies without pause.

“She’s younger.”

“Still not hearing a problem.”

“She deserves better.”

Jonah exhales through his nose, an irritated, restrained sound. He rises from his chair and stands with his arms crossed, his gaze sharp and unwavering.

“Your problem is that you’ve spent your entire life controlling everything. The boardroom. The company. Your time. Your mind. Your own goddamn heart. Now you’re standing here shocked that someone exists who makes all that control look like the façade it is.”

I don’t respond. Because he’s right. And the truth of it settles into my chest with punishing weight.

“She isn’t a fling,” I say after a moment, my voice subdued. “She isn’t someone I can fuck and walk away from without consequence.”

“Then don’t walk away,” Jonah says simply, his tone stripped of judgment.

I turn my head just enough to glance at him over my shoulder. “It isn’t that simple.”