Page 46 of Forbidden Boss

“As soon as the rooms are ready. Tomorrow, if possible.”

She closes the notebook and looks at me for a long beat.

“I can work from the office. I have everything set up. I don’t want to be a prisoner in your country house.”

“You’re not a prisoner,” I remind her. “This isn’t a request.”

She exhales through her nose. “I have a team here. Files here. My routine here.”

“Your team can call you. Files can be mirrored. Routines can move.”

“Why now?” she asks.

“Because I’m not risking it,” I say. “Not with you. Not with the baby.”

She flinches at that and looks down at the tea.

“I want to keep working. I want to finish the pull on vendor shells. I want to sit with banks if I have to. I’m not sitting in a room while you fight every fire and tell me to be good.”

“You’ll work,” I say. “Nothing stops there.”

She lifts her eyes to mine. “You’re being unreasonable again,” she says. “I understand why my safety matters to you, I really do. But I’m here in your penthouse, I’m driven by your guards, I work at your company. What do you really think is going to go wrong?”

“Everything,” I warn. “Anything that could go wrong will go wrong. Isn’t that some kind of law of physics?”

She cocks her head and shoots me a sarcastic smile. “I’m not sure,” she quips. “I was too busy studying accounting.”

“Well, while you were studying accounting, I was watching people die. So I don’t see any of this as unreasonable.”

“Well, I do,” she says. “And I need you to put a little more faith in me. Or, if not me, put faith in the people you’ve trusted with my care. Do you really think they can’t handle protecting me?”

I mull it over. She has a point. I sip my coffee and think it through. Finally, I land on a compromise we can both live with.

“I can give you a month of controlled movement,” I say. “That means you can go to the office with a full team, always taking direct routes, no detours. The first hint of a threat and we move that same day. And when you start showing, you go to the compound and don’t leave except for appointments I approve. If you hate it, you can tell me you hate it. The rule stands.”

She folds her arms, clearly not happy with the compromise. Naturally. “A month?” she asks.

“A month,” I confirm. “If the field goes quiet, or if we manage to weed out the threat, we can reevaluate. If things heat up, though, the clock stops.”

She presses her lips together in a hard line. “I don’t like it,” she says. “What’s to stop you from seeing the smallest inconvenience as a threat?”

“I don’t care if you like it,” I say, ignoring her last question because I can’t answer that fairly. “I care that you’re breathing.”

She looks away, then back. “Fine. A month.”

“It starts today,” I say. “I want you packing after work in case we need to move quickly.”

She mutters something about tyrants and then opens her notebook again. She writes a list and underlines three items. I give her the time. This is the closest I get to compromise.

At ten, I call a meeting. Yuri, Marcus, Pavel, Elyan, and Thom. We keep the door locked and I make them put their phones in a basket.

“You already know the state of things,” I tell them. “I’m adding a new priority. Mari and the baby sit above every other concern. That isn’t up for debate.”

Heads lift. They look at one another. Yuri keeps his eyes on me. He already knows. Marcus and Thom exchange a glance. Pavel watches the screen, reading amounts like they’re people.

Marcus clears his throat. “Family changes the field,” he says, his tone careful.

“It changes everything,” I agree.