And then Tessa said the sentence that detonated the rest of her life.
“My dream is to see him without pants,” she told Juno. “Not in a creepy way. Pure curiosity. I just need to confirm he’s made of flesh like everyone else because the way he carries himself, I’m pretty sure he’s Italian marble from the waist down.”
Juno howled.
Tessa laughed too.
She spun the chair.
And found Rhett Devereux standing in the doorway of his office, arms crossed, shirt collar open, expression so calm it became dangerous.
He had not just arrived.
He had clearly been there long enough to hear everything.
For a few seconds, Tessa forgot how to function. Juno was still talking into the phone, asking why she had gone quiet, but Tessa could only stare. Rhett walked toward her with terrifying patience, held out his hand, and she surrendered the phone before her brain fully agreed to it.
He put it to his ear without taking his eyes off her.
“Juno,” he said quietly, “Tessa will call you back later.”
Then he hung up, handed the phone back, leaned down until they were eye level, and said in a low voice that would haunt her for weeks, “Put it on my calendar, Miss Holloway. I have time for science.”
She should have died right there in his chair from embarrassment alone.
Instead she stood, spine straight, apologized, pointed out the envelope, and did what frightened women with self-respect have always done best: she left before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing her fully unravel.
She made it to the women’s bathroom on 41 before the composure cracked.
By 5:20 that afternoon, the secretary from 58 was calling her back upstairs.
Tessa spent the elevator ride calculating whether she could pay February rent if she got fired.
Instead of firing her, Rhett did something more unsettling.
He assigned her to the Lisbon project team.
It was a major contract. Nine figures. Travel. Late meetings. Direct involvement at a level well above her current rank.
Tessa looked at him in the hallway by the elevator and asked the only question that mattered.
“Is this punishment or work?”
Rhett took his time answering.
“It’s work,” he said. Then, after a beat, “The punishment I’m still thinking about.”
She should have quit then.
Instead she went home smiling in spite of herself, which was the first sign the problem was no longer professional.
The next morning, she walked into a conference room on 52 expecting tension and found Sullivan Marsh instead.
General counsel for Devereux Group. Sharp suit. Thin-rimmed glasses. No small talk.
Tessa liked him immediately.
At nine on the dot, Rhett arrived. White shirt. No tie. Two buttons open. He barely looked at her as the Lisbon team meeting began.
Then the work started, and the room shifted.
A finance analyst named Kavanaugh presented outdated exchange-rate data. Tessa interrupted, corrected him, and projected the updated figures from the Bank of Portugal. The error would have cost them two million euros in the worst case.
No one made a speech about it.
Rhett simply watched her longer than before.
Then the Lisbon architect joined the call and began struggling with technical English. He asked in Portuguese whether anyone could confirm the city-council deadlines for historic-zone projects.
Tessa answered before anyone else could.
The architect blinked in surprise. Asked whether she was Portuguese.
“My grandmother is,” she said. “I’ve spoken it since I was a kid.”
Rhett stopped writing.
That was the first time he looked at her not like the woman who had made a joke in his office, but like a man who had discovered there was much more to her than the file on his desk had ever suggested.
The meeting ended. Sullivan left. Kavanaugh followed with his pride visibly bruised. Rhett stopped Tessa in the hallway and asked if she had any other comments.
“None,” she said, “at least not without coffee.”
Lunch, he told her, was at 12:30.
A few days later, a black car came for her at eight at night and took her to Il Mulino.
He had framed it as work. Contract clauses. Travel terms. Compensation. Formalities.
For fifteen minutes, it was exactly that.
Then, over the second glass of wine, he closed the folder and asked why she accepted the project.
“Because you didn’t give me a choice,” she said.
“There’s always a choice.”
“Then tell me what the other one was.”
He looked at his glass, then back at her, and said the thing that changed the temperature of the room completely.
“I wanted you close, Tessa.”
She put down her glass very carefully.
Then she reminded him who they were. She was an analyst. He was her boss. That sentence did not belong in a work dinner.
He said he knew.
