The Shark and the Assistant

SPENCER MALONE

Two months ago

The laugh hits me before the dress does, and that’s the part that stings.

Chelsea Henley’s head tips back at something the man beside her says, that loose auburn hair catching the low light like a struck match, and the sound she makes—rich, unguarded, pulled from somewhere deep—rolls across the ballroom and finds me right where I’ve been standing with a silent auction paddle, I haven’t looked at once.

My hand tightens around my bourbon glass.

I let myself look.

The burgundy silk caressed her curves like a lover’s hands. She has always moved with effortless grace, and for that thing alone I find her mesmerizing. Chelsea always had power over me, a secret I guarded ever since my brother said she was off limits. I listened and fucking obeyed. And ever since that day, I stayed away from red heads.

Chelsea laughs again, and my jaw tightens before I can stop it.

That laugh was mine.

That laugh she’s never once aimed in my direction cuts clean through the ballroom chatter and into my chest.

I don’t know when I decided that. But I’ve been deciding it for three years, quietly, in rooms like this one, and watching it leave for someone else feels like a door shutting somewhere I didn’t know I needed to get through.

Ryan Philips’s hand rests on her elbow—thumb moving in a slow circle on the silk, patient and proprietary, the way a man touches something he’s already decided is his.

Ryan Philips.

The name slots into place with the quiet click of a round in a chamber. And for a wild moment I thought of aiming my gun at him. The one that currently is strapped on my right leg. I wanted to press the barrel to his temple until he let her go.

Philips - Tech wunderkind. Flush with seventy million in venture capital and a fresh divorce settlement. He’s shopping for his next acquisition and has a reputation for using women—the very thing she’s always accused me of.

I stopped tasting this bourbon the moment she laughed. For three years, I got the professional smile she gives everyone. But that laugh—the real one, the one that comes from the chest, she saves for other men.

Men like Ryan Philips, apparently.

I set my glass down on the nearest tray with more force than necessary. The bourbon sloshes.

This isn’t about me. That’s what I tell myself as I move through the crowd, weaving between tuxedos and dresses and the low murmur of tax-deductible philanthropy. This is about watching out for someone who doesn’t know what she’s walking into. Ryan Philips has a type and Chelsea fits the mold.

That’s all this is. A warning. A courtesy between... whatever we are.

I reach them just as Ryan leans in to say something in her ear. Her sapphire blue eyes flash with amusement, and she touches his forearm lightly. The gesture is casual. Intimate. My jaw tightens before I can stop it, and I push it down beneath the surface where it belongs.

“Chelsea.” My voice comes out with the voice that’s never failed me in a boardroom or a bedroom. “Mind if I steal you for a moment?”

She turns, and for a fraction of a second, I see something flicker across her face. Surprise and the familiar flash of annoyance. My jaw tighten. That mask of annoyance I wanted to peel off her, exposing what she hides underneath, was a challenge.

Every instinct screams to erase that look, to back her into a corner until the only thing she can focus on is me. Until she remembers my name and forgets his.

“Malone. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

I savor my name that came out a bit breathlessly from her pink glossy lips.

“Surprise.” I take her arm, the contact sends a jolt through me that I refuse to acknowledge. I’m already steering her, cutting a clean line through the crowd before Ryan can form a protest. “Walk with me. There’s something you should know.”

“Spencer—”

“Two minutes.”

I guide her through the archway into the adjoining room, a smaller space, dimly lit, lined with display cases of auction items no one has bid on yet. The noise of the gala dulls to a hum behind us.

When I release her arm and turn, her expression stops me cold. The polite mask is gone, replaced by something sharp, precise, and absolutely furious. She’s coiled, ready to strike. I clench my fists in my pockets, restraining myself from touching her.

“You pulled me away from a conversation with the chair of the education committee,” Chelsea says. Her voice is clipped, efficient, each word placed with the precision of a legal filing. “Whatever this is, it had better be worth the impression you just made on everyone in that room.”

“Ryan Philips,” I say harshly, pulling the conversation back to solid ground. “He’s got a reputation. Recently divorced, flush with cash, and looking for an easy prey.”

Chelsea looks at me. Just that steady, unblinking blue that sees straight through me. “Easy prey,” she echoes. “You think I am easy?”

Fuck! That wasn’t what I meant.

I waited a beat too long, but it was enough for her to think my silence was what I thought of her.

“You are warning me about a womanizer like Ryan?” she continues while I stand there like a coward.

Then she comes in with the kill.

“It takes one to know one,” she says with that bite of hers.

The words hit harder than anything with emotion behind it ever could, because she’s right, and she knows she’s right, and the worst part? She said it without even raising her voice.

Something cracks in my composure. I felt it, she saw it. The careful exterior of charm-as-weapon, the lazy smile and the measured distance I always wore fractures, and what comes through is raw and stupid and entirely unplanned.

I close the distance between us in one step, suddenly my hands were stretching - one hand finding her shoulder, the other gripping her hip in a move that she couldn’t tear herself from.

And I kiss her.

Not gently. Not the way you kiss someone you’re trying to seduce. My teeth catch her lower lip, suck it in, and she gasped and let my tongue slip passed her lips. Exposing my hunger that have been simmering, something I’ve been swallowing for months comes out in the pressure of it.

My hand finds the back of her neck and holds. Fingers slides into her hair.

She goes rigid. Every muscle in her body locks, and for one suspended second, I feel the heat of her mouth, the shock of my punishment. Just as I decided to sooth it into something gentler, she hit my shoulder.

I pull back, and my voice comes out low, raspy and stripped of every layer I usually wear. Hiding my regret of taking her lips for the first time in that way.

And what I say next is out before I can stop them. The words that will keep me awake for months comes out raspy, heavy with wanton. Underneath it, a sharp jealousy bleeds trough.

“You can take that and compare notes.”

The slap is instantaneous. Her palm connects with my cheek with the measured, clinical precision of a woman who has decided exactly how much force to apply and executed it flawlessly.

My face turns with the impact. I don’t move to stop it. I don’t even raise my hand. I deserved it and a sick part of me relished in that pain.

When I look back, she’s already stepping away. Her expression hasn’t changed—still that contained, unreadable composure, but her chest is rising and falling faster, and the only tell is a flush along her collarbone that the burgundy silk can’t hide.

“A warning? From you?” Her voice was dangerously level. “You’re worse than him. You got engaged three days ago to a pregnant woman. Don’t you ever touch me again.”

Her fists clenched, and for a second, beneath the fury in her eyes, I saw a flash of hurt that was a thousand times worse than her anger. She was close hitting me again, we both knew it. The difference was that she could hold back where I couldn’t.

All I could think about was...

What the fuck have I done?

She turns and walks out; all grace and elegance. She doesn’t hurry, just moves through the archway and back into the gala with the steady, unhurried pace of someone exiting a casual meeting.

I stand in the dim room, my cheek burning, the taste of her still on my lips, and listen to the sound of her heels fading into the hum of the crowd. Her footsteps fade, leaving me alone in the dim light.

My cheek burned, but it was nothing compared to the sickening certainty that I had just made everything even worse.

I stand there for a while with the foul taste of regret in my mouth. My hands shake, still watching where she disappear, as if she would run back to me.

Instead, a pink dress approaches. Another regret in my life, the one that my dick should have stayed away from. My fiancée.

“There you are,” Laura says with that high pitch that makes me flinch.

“We should leave,” I state coldly.

“Leave? Already? But…”

“You can stay if you want, but I am going.”

I was done.

Laura’s hand finds my forearm. Her fingers are cool, deliberate, the grip firmer than her smile would suggest. Her eyes pleading.

“Spencer, you can’t just—we came together.” Her voice drops half a register. “People saw us arrive. If you leave without me, what does that look like?”

I look at her hand on my arm. At the engagement ring catching the dim light—a three-carat emerald cut I let her pick out herself, because I didn’t care enough to object. I look at her face, at the careful arrangement of concern and confusion she’s curated for this moment, and I feel nothing.

Not anger, not guilt.

Just the flat indifference of a man looking at a stranger. I felt nothing for my future bride, and that alone was something that made me laugh under my breath without an ounce of humor.

“What it looks like,” I say flatly, “is that I’m leaving.”

I pull my arm free and turn toward the service corridor I scouted an hour ago. I know the layout of this building the way I know most buildings—the exits, the blind spots, the routes that keep you unseen. This I could handle, those I left behind was something else entirely.

I texted Logan and asked him to meet up at Nova Bar in thirty minutes. The remedy for this disastrous evening was an old-fashioned hangover, hopefully it would wipe out some of the memory of Chelsea and Ryan Philips.

If that didn’t help, I knew where to go to beat the anger, resentment and jealousy out of my system with bare knuckles.