Chương 5: Uncontrolled Desire
Leon's hand is still tangled in hers when he says, low and rough against her hair, that this cannot happen again, and Maeve feels the lie in it before he's even finished the sentence, the way his fingers tighten instead of letting go.
He doesn't believe that either, she thinks, listening to his heartbeat slow beneath her palm. Not even a little.
That was near midnight. First, there was the message.
She'd walked into his office that morning already braced for something, because we need to talk had sat unanswered in her inbox for exactly eleven hours, long enough for her imagination to build several increasingly bad versions of what it might mean. Leon was standing at the window when she arrived, back to the door, and he didn't turn around until she'd already crossed half the room.
"Wyatt Lang emailed me yesterday," he said, without preamble, sliding his tablet across the desk toward her. "I want you to read it before I tell you what I think of it."
Maeve read it standing up, and felt something cold settle low in her stomach with every line. It was polite. It was, on its surface, almost generous, a former fiancé graciously wishing his ex well in her new position, congratulating Leon on the hire. Underneath the politeness, though, ran exactly the kind of careful poison Wyatt had spent two years perfecting on her behalf, phrases like she tends to disappear when the pressure gets to be too much and I only mention it so you're not blindsided the way the studio was.
"He does this," she said quietly, setting the tablet down. "Not always this politely. He controls the narrative before anyone else can offer theirs. It's how he kept me for two years."
Something shifted in Leon's expression, the careful stillness she'd learned to read in their first meeting cracking, just slightly, into something sharper. "I have already replied," he said. "Three lines. I told him your performance here will be judged by me, based on work I have personally witnessed, and that I would ask him not to contact my staff again regarding matters that no longer concern him."
"You didn't have to do that."
"I wanted to." Something dark moved behind his eyes, brief and quickly banked. "I have been lied about by someone I trusted, once, in a way that cost me more than I have ever told anyone in this company. I recognize the shape of what he's doing. I do not intend to let it work twice in my lifetime, and I find I mind considerably more when the target is you."
She studied him for a moment, understanding arriving slowly. "You're not just angry on principle."
"No." The admission seemed to cost him something. "I am angry because a man who threw away something extraordinary still believes he retains some right to describe it to strangers. I find that particular arrogance considerably harder to remain neutral about than I expected to."
The gala that evening had been on her calendar for a week, a black tie fundraiser for the city's opera house, and Maeve had told herself, dressing for it, that it would be nothing more than a professional obligation. She had not accounted for the particular effect of watching Leon work a room with the same unhurried authority he brought to everything else, nor for the way his jaw had tightened, once, sharply, when a board member mentioned, in passing, that a certain American actor's public statement about her was making the rounds again.
She watched him recover his composure within seconds, smiling politely, redirecting the conversation toward the evening's charitable pledge total, and only the white of his knuckles around his champagne glass gave away how little of that composure was real. It was, she thought, the first time she'd seen him perform for a room the way she'd once had to perform for Wyatt's, and something about watching him do it on her behalf, rather than his own, settled strangely warm beneath her ribs.
He asked her to dance only once, late in the evening, his hand settling at the small of her back with a grip that felt, tonight, less careful than usual.
"You've been watching the door all night," he said, quiet enough that only she could hear it. "Waiting for him to walk through it."
"Old habit." She let herself admit it. "Two years of learning to brace for an entrance ruins a person's ability to simply enjoy a room."
"He is an ocean away," Leon said, "and I find I do not care for how much space he is still occupying in this evening. Or in you." His hand flexed once against her spine. "I have never once in my life wanted to put my name on something simply to keep another man's hands off it. Tonight I understand the impulse perfectly."
That's not just protectiveness, she thought, feeling heat pool low at the raw, possessive edge in his voice. That's jealousy, plain and unhidden, and it should not affect me this much to finally hear it out loud.
They ended up on the same elevator afterward, both staying at the hotel hosting the event, and neither of them spoke until the doors closed.
"Say it again," she said, watching him in the mirrored wall. "What you just said. On the dance floor."
"I don't like another man's name in your mouth," Leon said, low and stripped of all his usual careful measure, "even in complaint. I do not like that he still believes he has any claim on deciding how you're perceived. I have spent three years being told my restraint is my most valuable asset. Tonight I find I have very little interest in being valuable for that reason."
The number above the doors climbed in silence for a long moment, neither of them looking away from the other's reflection, and Maeve felt the particular charge of a decision already made settle over both of them before either had said another word about it.
The doors opened on the top floor, and Maeve followed him without a single question, down a hallway to a suite larger than any apartment she'd lived in, pale wood and low lamplight, a bottle of wine breathing on the table as though he'd hoped for this hours ago.
"This is either very presumptuous," she said, "or very confident."
"Both," Leon said. "I have not been either, about anyone, in longer than I am comfortable admitting."
"Why me," she asked, closing the distance between them. "You don't email a candidate's ex the same week you hire her. You don't dance like a man staking a claim over someone you're simply managing."
"Because he is still trying to write the story of what you are," Leon said, his hand finally, deliberately, coming up to cradle her jaw, "and I find I want to be the only man who gets to know the true one." Something raw cracked all the way open in his voice. "I want to be the reason he understands, completely, that he has already lost."
She kissed him first, and whatever restraint he'd worn through every meeting since the interview came apart entirely, fast and hungry in a way she hadn't seen from him before. He backed her against the wall beside the door, mouth hot at her throat, hands already dragging her dress off one shoulder, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something low and guttural, half English, half rough, unraveling German she didn't need translated."Tell me his name doesn't belong anywhere near what I'm about to do to you," he said against her skin.
"It doesn't," she breathed. "It never will again."
"Say it like you mean it." He caught her wrists and pinned them lightly above her head with one hand, the other working the zip of her dress down in one long, deliberate pull, baring her inch by inch to the lamplight. "Tell me whose name you'll be saying."
"Yours." The word came out wrecked already. "Only yours."
He made a low, satisfied sound against her collarbone and let the dress pool at her feet, lifting her against the wall so her legs wrapped around his waist, carrying her the last few steps to the bed without breaking the kiss. He undressed her the rest of the way with none of his usual patience, more urgency than finesse, and when she reached for his shirt he let her tear the buttons rather than wait, dropping his own restraint the moment her hands found bare skin.
"Look at me," he said, settling between her thighs, and she did, holding his gaze as his fingers found her slick and aching, working her slow at first, then faster, until her hips rose helplessly to meet his hand and his name broke out of her, unguarded, exactly the way he'd demanded.
He didn't wait long after that. He pushed into her in one deep, unhurried stroke that dragged a ragged moan out of both of them at once, and for a moment he simply stayed there, buried to the hilt, forehead pressed to hers, hips flexing in slow, deliberate rolls that built rather than rushed.
"Mine," he said against her mouth, and began to move in earnest, deep and relentless, one hand braced beside her head and the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise, driving into her with a possessive urgency that had nothing careful left in it at all. She met every thrust with her nails dragging down his back, his name tearing out of her over and over until the two syllables stopped sounding like language and simply sounded like need. He fucked her thoroughly, murmuring filthy, worshipful things against her ear in a rough mix of English and German, until the pleasure coiling low in her belly finally snapped all at once, dragging a broken cry out of her that he swallowed with his mouth, following her over the edge only seconds later, her name breaking apart against her throat as he found his own release.
Afterward, tangled together with his hand still not quite releasing hers, Leon said the words rough at the edges. "This cannot happen again."
He doesn't believe that either. Maeve almost smiled against his shoulder. "You keep saying things you don't mean tonight."
"I keep meaning them less each time I say them," he admitted, and drew her closer instead of further away.
It was his phone, buzzing once against the nightstand sometime near two, that broke the stillness between them. Leon reached for it without urgency, and Maeve watched his expression change in the low lamplight, the careful control returning all at once, colder now than before.
"What is it," she asked, already sitting up.
He turned the screen toward her without a word. An email, flagged urgent, from the company's head of communications. Wyatt Lang's legal team has requested a formal meeting regarding, quote, concerns about a former employee's professional conduct.
Maeve read it twice, feeling the warmth of the last hour drain out of the room entirely. "He's not done," she said quietly. "He's never done."
Leon set the phone down slowly, his jaw tightening, and when he spoke again his voice had gone flat and certain in a way that frightened her slightly. "Then he has just made a mistake that I intend to make considerably more expensive than he's prepared for."
Maeve sat in the dark beside him, the city's lights scattered cold and distant beyond the glass, and felt the particular vertigo of watching two entirely different men decide, on the same night, exactly how far they were willing to go to keep hold of her, one through quiet legal threats sent from an ocean away, the other from six inches away with her hand still folded inside his. She did not yet know which version of being fought over frightened her more, and found, to her own surprise, that she wasn't in any hurry to decide.