Excerpt:

Her lips felt tender, bruised from the hard pressure of his, and she rested her fingertips on them.

“I don’t know why I find you so beautiful now.” He’d regained control over his pitch and he said it like he was commenting on the weather, but the words fell into the silence between them with the impact of a heavy weight shattering a piece of glass.

Freddy dropped her hand and stared at him, and he turned his head. As compliments went, it was a bit backhanded, but somehow it didn’t come across that way.

There was a moment of quiet breath and assessing eyes.

“I don’t know why I fancy you so much,” she said, with equal frankness.

“I would have thought Charlie was more your type.” It was still like talking to the ice sculpture his mother had once tossed out as a comparison, but Freddy didn’t make the mistake of looking at the surface.

She felt like she’d lied by omission to everyone lately, keeping so much of what she was thinking and feeling about her career to herself, but she’d at least always tried to be honest in her private life. She might be a flirt, but guile was not a weapon in her romantic arsenal. “I don’t think there is a type.” She swallowed and looked blindly at the surface of the desk, where the earrings were still glinting suggestively under the glow of the ring light. “Right now, I think…there’s just you.”

In the silence that followed, her hand clenched into a fist against the desk.

Then Griff touched her bare arm, and her cheek, just two light touches. Freddy breathed in, a long, slow inhale.

“I promised not to interrupt your work,” she said on the exhale.

“Yes.” A familiar note of the sardonic, which was actually a relief in the current tension. “That lasted about as long as I expected.”

She cast him a look over her shoulder. “Foresaw this, did you?”

“No. This definitely wasn’t the scenario I imagined.”

“I expect not. After all the very gallant things you’ve said about me over the years. Just think, if this had happened earlier, you might have given me a better review for Masquerade.” She reflected on that for about two seconds. “No, you wouldn’t.”

He snorted and said at the same moment, “No, I wouldn’t.”

Perversely, that made her laugh. That wash of unexpected gladness suddenly wrapped around her again, and she smiled at him. It was a bright, instinctive gesture, and it made something change in his face. “Isn’t it great?”

The question just bubbled up spontaneously from that pool of happiness, and he shook his head. It wasn’t a negative action. More like someone recovering from a sharp punch to the nose, actually, which she chose not to read too much into.