“What are you doing?” she asked, nervously standing by the door as he moved toward an ornate lacquered closet.

“Unlike you,” he sighed, opening the door and kneeling to open his safe, “I believe you deserve privacy.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, freshly embarrassed. It wasn’t just that she had blown things up so spectacularly, it was that she had spent ten years building this power that she was so eager to give away for a moment under his touch—and now, here he was, holding all the cards again.

“You didn’t need to put it in the safe, it’s not real,” she muttered.

“That’s not why I put it there.” His long fingers turned the dial, back still facing her as he spoke. “I wanted to protect it because it’s important to you.”

At his final turn, the metal door popped open, and he reached inside to remove the necklace from a tufted jewelry tray. “You might want to try doing that sometime.”

“We get it.” She sighed, too exhausted to fight. “You’re a much better person than I am.”

“That’s rich.” He laughed, examining the small stone pendant in his palm. “Coming from the woman who’s been getting off on feeling superior to me for ten years straight.”

She swallowed hard, fighting her instinctual attraction to any provocation from him. “Superior to you?”

“Yes.” He kept his eyes fixed on the necklace. “Because of your big, important work and your modest salary and all your good-girl decisions.”

His words felt like a quiver of arrows, hitting so many exposed areas of her at once that she could only challenge the most inconsequential blows: “Right. I’m making great decisions, obviously,” she muttered, eager to change the subject, “like following you in here last night.”

His eyes flit up to meet hers as her heart leapt into her throat.

“You’re going to hold that against me, too?”

“I’m not holding anything against you,” she replied, matching the intentionality of his phrasing. “Including your job.”

He looked behind her, to the door he’d pinned her against not twelve hours earlier, and placed his free hand on the back of his neck, stretching slightly as he considered his next words. She could see him bringing himself to focus in real time, returning to the heart of the matter. “Yes, you are. You’ve always looked down on me for my career choices. You think I want to work twelve hours a day, wasting the best years of my life?”

“Yes, actually,” she snapped, thoughtlessly. “I think you have a work addiction.”

“My mother has Parkinson’s, Alex.”

She inhaled sharply. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”

She hadn’t known, but it made perfect sense: his constant centering of her, Elena asking after her, even the charity races Dev posted about running with him on Instagram. Of course.