The heavy office door clicked shut behind her. The sound was soft, but it echoed in the cavernous silence, a final, definitive sound of a cage being locked.
Beck didn't return to his throne-like chair. Instead, he leaned against the edge of his massive desk, crossing his arms over his broad chest. The pose was casual, but the effect was anything but. It was a posture of pure, predatory dominance.
He broke the silence, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through the floor. "You're avoiding me, Aubree."
It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact.
Her heart skipped a beat. She forced herself to meet his gaze, to project a calm she was nowhere near feeling. "No, sir. I've just been... busy with the quarterly reports."
A corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk that held no humor, only ice. He didn't believe her.
He pushed off the desk and took a step toward her. The air crackled, thick with a tension she could taste. Involuntarily, she took a step back. Then another, until her back was pressed flat against the cold, unyielding wood of the door.
He didn't stop. He closed the distance between them, placing a hand on the door next to her head, caging her in. The scent of his cologne-sandalwood and something sharp, like gin-filled her senses, a scent she remembered with a horrifying clarity. It was the smell of her biggest mistake.
The nausea from the restaurant returned with a vengeance. She swallowed hard, fighting it down.
He leaned in, his face just inches from hers. "About a month ago," he began, his voice dropping to a rough, intimate whisper. "We need to talk."
Panic, stark and blinding, seized her. This was it. The moment she had been dreading. If she didn't stop this, right now, her career, her entire life, would be over.
A desperate, reckless idea formed in the chaos of her mind. She needed a shield, something so absolute he would have no choice but to back away.
She lifted her chin, forcing herself to look directly into his stormy gray eyes. She marshaled every ounce of strength she had and spoke, her voice surprisingly clear and steady.
"Sir, that night was a mistake. A mistake I will never make again. Because I'm engaged."
The air in the room seemed to freeze, to crystallize into a million tiny shards of ice.
Beck's expression didn't change, but she saw something shift deep in his eyes. A flicker of... something. A cold light that hadn't been there before.
To make the lie believable, to sell it completely, she pushed on, the words tumbling out. "My fiancé... we're getting married soon. That night... I had too much to drink. I feel terrible about what I did to him."
She deliberately took all the blame, positioning herself as a woman consumed by guilt, a woman who belonged to someone else. A woman who was off-limits.
It worked. He slowly straightened up, pulling back and creating a chasm of space between them.
The look on his face had transformed. The cold curiosity was gone, replaced by an expression of mingled disgust and contempt.
She thought he was repulsed by her "infidelity," that her lie had successfully erected the wall she so desperately needed. She had no way of knowing that she had just stumbled into the one, unmarked minefield of his psyche. Beck Franco didn't care about one-night stands, but he had a pathological, unyielding contempt for disloyalty. In his mind, she hadn't just made a mistake. She had cheated. And she had used him to do it.
He thought he was just a pawn in her tawdry little drama.
A humorless laugh, little more than a puff of air, escaped his lips. "Engaged?" he said, the word dripping with scorn. "Congratulations, Miss Hamilton."
He turned his back on her and walked to his desk, picking up the limited-edition pen from the gift box. He tossed it from one hand to the other.
"Since you're about to be another man's wife," he said, his voice dangerously smooth, "I think, to avoid any future... 'misunderstandings'... you should reconsider your position here."
The blood in her veins turned to ice. Reconsider her position? Was he firing her?
Her lie hadn't saved her. It had just handed him the gun to execute her with.
She opened her mouth to protest, to explain, to take it all back, but it was too late. He pressed a button on his intercom.
"Alex," he said, his voice hard as steel. "Inform HR that Miss Hamilton is on an immediate and indefinite leave of absence. All access privileges revoked. I want her to go home and await further instructions." He paused, his cold eyes finding hers, pinning her to the door. "Escort her from the building."
