The elevator ride to the 42nd floor felt like ascending to the gallows. Emma Carter stabbed the button repeatedly, as if that could somehow erase the last twelve hours—Daniel's hands in her hair, his mouth trailing fire down her neck, the way he'd growled "mine" against her bare shoulder when—
Ding.
The doors slid open to a wall of silence.
Every head in Sterling & Co.'s open-office floor snapped toward her. The receptionist's coffee cup hovered mid-sip. Two junior analysts froze mid-whisper. Even the office plants seemed to lean in for gossip.
Emma's heels clicked like gunshots as she marched to her desk.
And there it was.
A single red rose lay across her keyboard, its petals dewy-fresh. The attached note bore Daniel's aggressive scrawl:
"You left your earrings on my nightstand. -DS"
Oh god. Her hand flew to her bare lobes. Those were her grandmother's pearls.
"Late again, Miss Carter?"
Daniel's voice—all velvet and venom—rolled across the floor. He stood framed in his office doorway, looking disgustingly put together in a charcoal Tom Ford suit. No trace of the man who'd pinned her to his penthouse wall last night, murmuring "tell me you want this" between kisses.
Emma willed her voice steady. "Traffic was—"
"Unacceptable." He cut her off with a glance at his Rolex. "My office. Now."
The whispers erupted as she followed him, clutching the damned rose.