EPISODE 8

What nobody tells you about wanting someone you are not supposed to have is that the actual having is both better than you imagined and more complicated than you prepared for.

They did not go further that night. He had driven her home, both of them quiet in the back of his car in a way that was full rather than empty. He had kissed her once more at the entrance to her building, brief and deliberate, and said goodnight. She had gone upstairs and stood in her kitchen for ten minutes doing nothing.

The next two weeks were a careful, delicious kind of torture.

Professionally everything was the same. She was still on the project team. He still addressed her with the same measured distance in meetings. They did not look at each other differently in rooms full of people because they had both apparently been built for compartmentalization.

But after hours was another country entirely.

His driver learned her address without being told twice. She learned that he took his coffee without sugar and that he read actual physical books and that the easiness he wore in public was real, not performed. He was funny in a dry way that snuck up on you. He asked questions about her life and actually listened to the answers.

They had not slept together yet. The tension of that was its own specific kind of madness.

One night in his apartment, a clean, quiet place in Ikoyi with bookshelves along one entire wall, she was sitting on his sofa with her legs across his lap, telling him something about her undergraduate thesis, when he put his hand on her ankle and looked at her in a way that stopped the sentence entirely.

“Stay tonight,” he said.

Not a demand. Not even exactly a question. Just an invitation laid down quietly, like a key on a table.

Amara looked at him for a long moment. His dark eyes, the city light coming through the curtains behind him, his hand warm and easy around her ankle.

“Okay,” she said.

He stood and held his hand out to her. She took it.

And then his phone rang. He glanced at the screen and went very still.

She saw the name before he turned it over.

Shade.

A woman’s name. He set the phone face down and looked back at Amara with an expression she could not read.

“Who is Shade?” she asked quietly.

The silence that followed lasted two full seconds too long.

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THE CEO’S INTERN. A Lagos Adult Romance Series 7