I kissed along her jaw, down her throat, across the collarbone that her camisole’s neckline exposed. Her skin tasted like expensive moisturizer and something underneath it that was just her. Warm. Clean. Faintly sweet in a way no product replicated.
"Ahh... hah..." She shuddered when my lips found the curve of her breast above the silk’s edge. Her back arched off the desk and her fingers gripped my shoulders hard enough that I felt her nails through the shirt. The sound she made was higher than her usual register, breathy and unguarded. The sound of a woman who had spent three weeks in a house that remembered what her body sounded like at two in the morning and refused to let her forget.
I pulled back far enough to see her face. Diane Fitzgerald, CEO of the highest-grossing hero PR agency in California, sat on my student desk with her hair falling loose from its careful arrangement and her lips swollen. Her cold blue eyes carried a heat that Read the Room could measure but could never adequately describe. Her cheeks held a flush that her Luster Aspect could not have produced because it was genuine rather than enhanced, spreading from her cheekbones down her throat.
She cupped my face with both hands and pressed her forehead to mine. Her breath came unsteady and warm against my mouth. This close I could see every detail of the blue eyes Sloane had inherited. The same shade but different in context. Older. Sharper. Weighted with decades of decisions I wasn’t present for and couldn’t account for in any read.
"Mommy’s missed you."
The words landed in the inch between our mouths and did something structural to my nervous system. Her voice carried the specific register she used behind locked doors. Part Charleston drawl and part something else entirely. Something built from nine weeks of encounters that nobody else knew about and she intended to keep that way.
My grip tightened on her hips. She made a soft sound and her legs pulled me closer. The desk creaked under us in a way that suggested Gerald’s joinery wouldn’t hold up to repeated stress testing.
"Mmm..." She kissed me again, slower, like she was cataloging the experience. She tasted like expensive lipstick and sweet tea and something underneath both that registered as pure Diane. The taste of a woman who’d spent forty-seven minutes in traffic thinking about exactly this.
Her phone buzzed.
Inside the portfolio. On the desk. Six inches from where her hip had been pressing down.
Diane broke the kiss the way someone pulls their hand back from scalding water. Not slowly. Not with hesitation. The practiced efficiency of a woman who had spent twenty years managing crises and couldn’t shut the reflex off even when every other part of her system was running somewhere else entirely.
She reached for the phone. Her expression shifted from the woman who’d just been whispering mommy against my mouth to the CEO who ran thirty-one Hero contracts and never missed a notification. The transition took maybe two seconds. I watched it happen and couldn’t tell if I was impressed or mourning the loss.
"Odette Reyes has confirmed fourteen hundred. Fourth floor conference room."
She set the phone down with the deliberate care of someone placing something fragile on a surface they no longer trusted. Then she smoothed her camisole with both hands in a motion that took considerably longer than the fabric actually required. Her fingers moved slowly across the silk like she was checking for damage she couldn’t name.
When she looked at me again her eyes carried the full weight of Diane Fitzgerald in all the contexts that name represented. The CEO who would walk into that meeting in ninety minutes and manage three separate agendas without breaking composure. The mother who had raised me in the same house as the daughter currently occupying the top slot on my Temptation Gauge. The woman who had locked the door to my student apartment, sat on my desk, wrapped her legs around my waist, and said words I was still processing the implications of.
All of it present simultaneously. All of it true at once. All of it looking at me with the specific focus that meant she was about to say something I needed to hear whether I wanted to or not.
"You have one hour and forty-five minutes to eat lunch, review Percy’s insurance document, and prepare yourself mentally for a meeting that will determine whether your registration survives scrutiny from the Lang family’s professional apparatus."
She picked up her portfolio. Slid off the desk with the controlled grace of someone who’d spent decades moving through rooms where people were watching. Stepped back into her heels and gained three inches of height and what looked like an entire layer of personality. The woman who’d been breathing unsteadily against my mouth a minute ago was gone. The version standing in front of me now ran the highest-grossing Hero PR firm in California and had opinions about time management that she expected you to take seriously.
"I suggest you use them wisely."
She paused at the door. Her hand rested on the deadbolt she had not yet turned.
"And Lukas?"
"Yeah."
"Fix your collar. I’ve ruined it."
She unlocked the door, checked the hallway with the practiced glance of a woman who had navigated more dangerous exits than a student dormitory, and left room 205. The scent of expensive botanicals and the particular disruption that Diane Fitzgerald’s presence left in every space she occupied.
I stood in my apartment with a desk that smelled like her perfume, a collar that was indeed ruined, and one hour and forty-four minutes before the meeting that would determine whether Lukas Belmont’s carefully constructed fictional identity survived contact with people whose entire profession was dismantling fictional identities.
Marcus and Reina’s photograph watched from the desk. Silent. Unaware that the surface they sat on had just been used for purposes their son’s education trust had never anticipated funding.
I fixed my collar. Sat down in the sage reading chair. Pulled Percy’s thirty-six-page insurance document from the drawer where I’d stored it.
One hour and forty-three minutes.