Corner Office Confessions

Blessedly alone on the bottom deck at the stern of the yacht, she watched the full moon’s reflection shimmer on the waves in the motor’s churning wake.

Arlie felt herself unraveling. The anxiety she’d battled all evening returned to her in a vicious gust. Her lungs refused to fill with air despite her rapid, panting breaths as her whole body began to shake. Tears stung her eyes and she bit her lip to keep them from overflowing and spilling down her cheeks. Gripping the silky wooden railing, she fought to compose herself.

She couldn’t do this here.

She couldn’t do this now.

“Strange night.”

Gasping, Arlie whirled around, squinting into the darkness. Through the pocket of blue-black shadow, she could just make out a man seated alone on the leather bench, a rocks glass of amber liquid in his hand.

Samuel.

He leaned forward, his patrician profile unmistakable against the backlit window behind him.

She drew in a long, slow breath of the cooling night air and turned to lean on the railing. “I thought you didn’t drink at these functions,” she said, trying to sound more casual than she felt.

Ice rattled as he swirled the glass’s contents. “Tonight is an exception.”

She heard him rise, his solitary footfalls on the deck as he approached her.

Warmth draped itself over her shoulders, the sudden and unexpected comfort startling her.

He had given her his coat.

Arlie shifted, as much to feel the silky lining of the jacket still warmed by his body heat on her skin as to make sure she hadn’t just dreamed this. Tilting her chin, she rubbed the edge of her jaw on the coat’s collar, his scent filling her nostrils. Soap and skin. Cotton and subtle cologne.

“Thank you,” she said.

He came up beside her, stooping to lean on the railing that came to the bottom of Arlie’s breasts. They stood side by side looking out over the river, elbows barely touching, that single point of contact becoming the axis of Arlie’s awareness.

“I’ve made many unfortunate choices, by the way,” Samuel said, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. He brought the glass to his lips and sipped.

Feeling the weight of all that implied, Arlie remembered Taegan’s earlier comments. More ruthless than his father.

“If you’re speaking of your and Mason’s sixteenth birthday party,” Arlie began, a film reel of memories already unspooling on the screen of her mind, “you shouldn’t worry. I don’t think anyone remembers what happened that night especially well.”

Now that was a bold-faced lie.

If any single image persisted to this day, it was Samuel Kane naked beneath the full moon.

Self-conscious and godlike all at once. His perfect dive into dark water. Coming up right next to her, the first spray of his exhilarated exhale landing on her cheeks and wet hair. The scent of it more intoxicating than the pilfered whiskey they’d been passing around on that long, hot summer night.

Which was precisely the point at which he’d realized that, contrary to what Mason had told him, no one else had taken off their bathing suits.

“I’m not,” Samuel said, those sensuous lips tightening into a displeased line. “And I would prefer to never again.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Arlie gripped the wood railing. “I don’t think anyone’s first experience with whiskey ends well.”

“Actually...” He slid her a secretive, sideways glance. “That may not have been my first experience with whiskey.”

“Is that so?” Arlie feigned an air of scandalized disbelief.

An entire ship full of investors and potential acquisition targets, and here they were, discussing high school hijinks.

Her heart fluttered like a nervous bird. Samuel Kane was talking to her.

To her.

How often had she laid in her narrow single bed, the princess canopy above her a dream catcher for feverish teenage fantasies of just this sort?

A passing gust of wind teased the hair from Arlie’s neck. Sailboats skimmed across the river around them, their white sails like the fins of overgrown sharks.

“My father used to hide the keys to his liquor cabinet,” Samuel said.

My father.

Arlie had to work to listen to the rest of the sentence after these two words. At this casual mention of the man who had destroyed her mother’s life and, by extension, their family.

“Did he?” she asked a beat too late.

“He did,” Samuel said. “Imagine my surprise when I found them in his hollowed-out copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Naturally, I was curious.”

“Naturally,” Arlie mimicked. “What did you do?”

A rare, soul-warming smile spreading across his lips. “Research.” He paused and cocked his head. Then his hand slowly moved toward her face.

For one fleeting moment, Arlie imagined it coming to rest on her jaw, guiding her mouth toward his until the unaccountable geography of their lips aligned. Something heavy and molten spilled through her middle as she realized that she wanted this.

Wanted it badly.

“Eyelash.” Samuel’s thumb grazed her cheekbone. “Make a wish.”

Gazing up into emerald eyes full of nostalgia and moonlight, stars scattered like diamonds on a bolt of sapphire velvet overhead, Arlie was utterly and completely helpless to stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth.

“I wish I had known you wanted to take me to prom.”