Before she could, he stepped forward. He gripped her elbows with his hands, the way he had in the woods. But this time, he wasn’t doing it to help her up. This time, he felt like he needed to hold her to keep him from falling as it hit him all over again, the fear he’d felt when he couldn’t see her in that river.
“Davis,” she croaked.
He lifted his hand from her elbow to her cheek, discovering it was ice-cold. “Are you okay?”
She let out a choked laugh. “Are you kidding me? Of course not. But maybe this will help.”
She leaned into him and he took a step back, dropping his hands to her elbows to keep her at arm’s length. “I want to,” he whispered, his voice deeper, gruffer than it should have been. “Believe me, I do. But—”
“What? The smell of river water and mud isn’t an aphrodisiac?” she joked, then immediately averted her gaze and moved out of reach.
A smile trembled on his lips. She wasn’t the too-serious, all-business CEO with him anymore. Even if he’d messed things up repeatedly, she was starting to let her guard down. Enough to let him see glimpses of who she really was. The more he saw, the more he liked her.
Still, he couldn’t believe they’d almost kissed yet again. But he couldn’t cross that line. He might know in his gut that she was innocent, but the FBI hadn’t truly eliminated her as a suspect. She was connected somehow to the person who was guilty, the person he needed to find and arrest. To do that, he had to stay impartial.
But staring at her now, her clothes sagging with water, her hair a ragged mess and her makeup smeared down her face from being in the river, he wished things were different. It actually physically hurt how much he wished that he’d met her under different circumstances, that he was free to truly pursue her. That he could really forgive her for running a business that had sent out the armor that had killed Jessica.
When she met his gaze again, he knew she could see longing there from the way her eyes dilated. Then she was back to serious, but something had changed—something important. He could see it in her eyes, could feel it in the more relaxed way she was moving. “I’m going to get in a hot shower for five minutes and then change. I don’t have anything here you’ll fit, but there’s a dryer in the mudroom we just came through. Then we can talk.”
She left the room, not giving him a chance to disagree. Not that he would have, when she’d finally decided to trust him.
When she returned downstairs a few minutes later, he’d tossed his pants, button-down, and socks in her dryer and set his gun and badge on her coffee table. He’d wrapped himself in a throw blanket he’d spotted tossed over the couch in her living room next to a paperback romance novel.
Her gaze slid over him, seeming to burn a trail across any exposed skin even as her lips quirked upward with obvious amusement. “Nice look.”
Then, she sank onto the other side of the couch, close enough to talk easily but not close enough to touch.
She’d changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, scrubbed her face clean of any makeup and pulled her hair out of the remnants of its bun. Now it fell in loose wet tangles past her shoulders, and he longed to reach out and run his hands through it, follow the trail of water that dripped down her bare arms.
Instead, he hugged the blanket more tightly to himself and told her, “Eric stopped by to check on you. I told him you were overtired, so I drove you home.”
She nodded, seeming uninterested, and he waited for her to ask him what was happening.
He expected her to want more details about the illegal gun sales. Or maybe to know whether he had any idea who her attacker was, why he’d come after her. When she finally did speak, her words were soft and surprising.
“Thanks for having my back, Davis. Thanks for making me feel like I have someone I can count on when everything in my world seems to be falling apart.”
SHE WAS BACK at work like nothing had happened, like someone hadn’t tried to kill her yesterday.
Leila shivered in the confines of her office, where no one could see how freaked out she was. She’d already turned the heat up several times, but it was never enough.
At least it was a Saturday. Far fewer employees here to notice her acting strangely, to wonder why. She and Davis had agreed that no one in the company should know what had happened to her yesterday evening. He’d told her the attack was from someone connected to a criminal enterprise, and that group might have been sold Petrov Armor pistols illegally. He still didn’t know why that person would attack her. Apparently, so far, the guy wasn’t talking. And somehow, Davis had managed to keep the police report out of the media.
Despite the fact that she’d probably been followed from the office yesterday, she felt safer here right now than she did at home by herself. It probably didn’t hurt that she’d started carrying a small pistol in her handbag. She planned to keep it there until she was sure the threat was over.
Even the idea of it made her slightly uncomfortable. Despite having sold weapons for so many years, she’d never liked firing one. The regular classes her dad had made her take, to stay refreshed in proper shooting technique, hadn’t changed that. But right now, she was glad for it. She touched the outline of the gun through her bag, then locked it in her desk drawer and tried to focus.
The plan had been to distract herself with work, but instead she was distracted by Davis. He’d come in to
