Page 51 of Unapologetic Obsession

“What?”

“You have glanced at the door eighteen times since I’ve arrived. You’re waiting for someone, and since you hate everyone, I am guessing a woman has caught your attention. I didn’t think that was possible. Who is she?”

“No one.”

“So you’ve said. Is she from around here?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Nineteen times.”

I gnashed my teeth together.

“Can we give the all clear to the captain if you aren’t waiting for anyone? The poor man’s scared shitless of you and sent me to find out when we could leave.” He nodded at a man in a blue hat with a gold band around the base.

The captain of the boat was antsy to set sail and stole glances at me whenever he thought I wasn’t looking. It was comical to see a grown man shake in his boots. It was funnier that he had sent Damon to do his dirty work.

Damon RSVP’d as soon as he found out I was hosting a school-sponsored event. He assumed the dean twisted my arm into it and wanted to make sure I didn’t throw everyone out within the first ten minutes.

Understandable.

The dean also thought I was playing a practical joke when I offered to host, and he asked for the cameras to come out with a boisterous laugh. Little did they know that for the first time, I was looking forward to a party. I needed an excuse to spend time with Rose in a social setting.

I had forced her to eat most of her meals with me for weeks. Our connection had been steadily intensifying as a result. Rose was reserved, with an aversion to touch, but she was beginning to thaw under my attention. There was a heaviness in the way she watched me, like she wanted to uncover everything about me. She blatantly put herself out there with daily home-baked goods, often accompanied by handwritten notes.

“Thank you for helping me, Professor Maxwell.”

“Great lecture today, Professor Maxwell.”

The things she couldn’t say in person, she put them on paper. She wouldn’t go to such lengths unless she had feelings for me. One day, after lunch, she suggested an activity outside the lab—a team-building exercise at an amusement park. As my soon-to-be lab manager, she said such outings needed to be normalized to boost morale. If anyone else had suggested such an absurd waste of time, I would have laughed in their faces. But there I was, agreeing to an after-work bonding experience with the entire research team. Once we arrived at the park, Rose had dragged me to a ride. I accidentally brushed my fingers against her chest when strapping her belt. After that, I was solely focused on her body for the rest of the evening and the following two days.

It was pathetic how much power that girl wielded over me. If one accidental brush of a finger could ignite this reaction, it was disturbing what the real thing would unleash in me. Nowadays, just her scent got me hard. Her company, while stimulating, was unfulfilling when I couldn’t touch her. My work was sufferingas a result, and I had reached the point where refraining from touching her was proving nearly impossible.

This intense need had to be mutual, I was sure of it. It was impossible for something this magnetic to be one-sided.

The problem?

She was too self-conscious to give in to her primal instincts, especially with her professor and someone in a position of power. If I made a move before she felt completely secure, she would retreat and never give me an inch.

I had to enlist our head of security’s services to figure out her insecurities. I called Alex a week after he started investigating her past.

“Tell me you have something useful,” I had demanded.

“I have something useful.”

“I’m listening.”

“They never found the culprit who attacked Ms. Ambani. There was no description of the person. I can keep digging into it, but the gist of it is that someone stabbed her and then vanished into thin air.”

I scratched my stubble. “I don’t need you to find the culprit. I already know who did it.”

I initially had Alex explore Rose’s case to find out who had attacked her. But one night, a thought came to me, and I started digging into the Ambani family’s finances. It wasn’t difficult as we kept extensive logs on them—know thy enemy and all that—including the beneficiaries for each family member. Following the money was an age-old trick that never failed. I considered who had the most to gain if Rose died and stumbled on the answer. It was painfully simple.

“The person who attacked Rose is dead,” I told him.

There was a surprised pause on the other end of the line. “You didn’t do it, right?” he had asked, unsurely.

“No.” But only because someone had beaten me to it. Otherwise, I would have taken great pleasure in burying them six feet under. “I thought you said you found something useful?—”