Just like that, I’m dismissed. She doesn’t want to see me.

This is a disaster.

* * *

“Raise your chin, Mr Onasis.”

“Look here, Mr Onasis.”

“Annie! Straighten his collar.”

For the next four hours, I’m poked and prodded. Dressed and combed. Six different women bring me jackets and shirts, trading them out for pieces which are still warm from my body, smiling up at me from beneath their lashes.

I don’t care about them. Don’t care about any of this.

Kara won’t look at me.

“Will this take much longer?” I ask between gritted teeth, a spotlight shining in my eyes and shutters clicking all around. “I have another appointment.”

Kara glances up at that, her lips parting as she looks over at me, and for a second it’s all there, the emotions marching across her face in a damning slideshow: surprise, curiosity, hurt, bitterness. A desperate wish for this to be over already.

And beneath all that, there it is: the heat that’s always been there, simmering in her deep brown eyes. Energy crackles in the air between us. A silent what-if. I dismissed it before, wrote these stolen glances off as the wishful thinking of a lonely man, but standing on this platform and staring at my assistant, I can’t deny it anymore.

It’s not shallow.

Not a passing infatuation.

It’s obsession. If Kara doesn’t meet my eyes in the next few minutes, I will howl.

“Just two more outfits,” a magazine worker says sweetly.

No.

Kara’s shoulders have slumped, and that means I’m done here, Titan feature be damned. They can bill me for wasted time if they must, but I won’t spend another minute watching my assistant’s composure slip away.

Kara is grace personified. She’s always calm and serene—a goddess. For these cracks to show, she must be more hurt than I ever realized.

“We’re finished. Thank you.” Eight different magazine workers open their mouths to argue, but I stride past them, hopping off the raised platform. This starched shirt is strangling me, and I tug at the collar as I approach Kara, working the top buttons undone.

“You’re coming back to the office with me.”

She blinks, staring wide-eyed at the bared sliver of my chest like a deer in headlights. The muscles on my back tighten as I feel her hot gaze on my skin; my pulse pounds with her so near again. Then the moment is over as, shaking herself, Kara says, “Surely you’re coming back with me.”

Touché.

Fine. Whatever. I don’t want to nitpick, I just want this woman by my side again. Speaking to me in her soft voice; smoothing down the skirt of her pinafore dress. I want the rigid set of her shoulders to ease, and I want to inhale enough of her vanilla scent to last me another six days.

“I’ll call the car around.”

Kara’s mouth is tight as she snaps her laptop closed. “Alright. I’ll need two minutes, Mr Onasis.”

So will I. To hunt down my own clothes and down a bottle of spring water; to find the nearest mirror and glare my own worst instincts into submission.