EPISODE 5

She wore the green dress. She had stood in front of her wardrobe for fifteen minutes choosing between sensible and honest and ended up going with honest, which was the green dress, which sat off her shoulders and fit her hips like it had been made to have opinions.

The dinner was at a private dining room in a Victoria Island hotel, the kind of place where the menu did not have prices and the waiters refilled your water without being asked. There were eight people total. Amara knew two of them. She sat three seats from Dami, which was close enough to feel his presence in the room and far enough to maintain the fiction that this was strictly professional.

She spoke twice during dinner. Both times he watched her the way you watch something you are trying to decide about.

The clients left first. Then the senior staff peeled off in twos, promising early mornings. Then it was just Amara and Dami and two unfinished glasses of wine and a room that had gotten very quiet.

“You did well tonight,” he said.

“Thank you sir.”

“You can drop the sir when it is just us.”

Amara looked at him across the table. He was leaning back in his chair, jacket still on, completely at ease. There was something about a man who was never visibly uncomfortable in his own skin that she had always found difficult to look away from.

“Dami,” she said. Testing the shape of it.

Something moved behind his eyes. Small. Controlled. But she caught it.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-seven.”

“I am thirty-eight.”

“I know.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You should know that I do not make a habit of this.”

“Of what?” she asked, and she held his gaze when she said it.

He smiled then. Slow. The first real one she had seen from him and it did something to the room.

“Amara.”

“Dami.”

His driver was waiting outside. So was hers. They left separately, professionally, correctly. She sat in the back of her taxi watching the island lights blur past and pressed her fingers to her own warm cheek.

She was in serious trouble and some part of her had already decided she did not mind.

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THE CEO’S INTERN. A Lagos Adult Romance Series 4