BOUND BY DESIRE THE BILLIONAIRES OBSESSION

The thought lodged in me like a second skin as I threaded my way through the sea of glittering gowns and polished shoes, gripping the tray tightly enough that my knuckles ached. The Grand Metropolitan Hotel was a palace of wealth, where people like me were meant only to serve, not to be seen.

And I had to remain unseen.

The dress they’d issued me for this waitressing job seemed like a second punishment too tight, too short, made to make us look appealing rather than professional. Pulling at the hem, balancing those champagne flutes, and offering a polite, rehearsed smile. One night. Just one night. Then I’d take my paltry paycheck and return to scraping by.

The men in wearing expensive suits hardly looked at me, muttering in low, conspiratorial voices. The women gave each other practiced smiles, their diamonds glittering beneath the chandeliers. This had been a smothering world of power plays and secret agendas. And I didn’t belong here.

Until I committed the biggest mistake in my life.

It happened quickly too quickly to cut off. I turned, serving tray in hand, and bumped into something solid. No, someone. A sharp gasp escaped my lips as champagne flutes toppled and an unrelenting cascade of golden liquid drenched the front of an exquisitely tailored black suit.

The noise around me didn’t break. It shifted. The ripple of silence spread outward, eyes turning toward the disaster I had just wrought.

My stomach plummeted.

Damian Blackwood.

And even if I didn’t recognize his face, I would have known. He was the kind of guy who demanded attention tall, broad-shouldered, everything about him screaming control. His dark eyes focused on me, inscrutable, as if judging whether I was quality enough to be destroyed.

A vice grew around my throat. I opened my mouth, my brain racing for something to say, but my voice hardly functioned. “I, I’m so sorry”

Before I could back away, his fingers closed around my wrist. Not painful, but firm. Controlling.

The breath froze in my lungs.

His suit was ruined. I was ruined.

“Do you have any idea,” he whispered, voice like silk over steel, “what you just did?”

“I, I’ll get napkins,” I said abruptly. My voice sounded too thin, too weak.

His grip slackened, just enough to send my pulse racing. “Don’t bother.”

I swallowed hard. He had that kind of intensity in his gaze. This man was danger stuck with a beautiful barista, the kind of man who could shatter a soul at will with a brush of his wrist.

And yet, I didn’t move.

“I could have you fired,” he added, almost thoughtfully. “Humiliated. Or even blacklisted from working here again.”

A wave of panic crashed coldly over me. “Please, I”

“What’s your name?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a demand.

“Elena,” I managed, pulse pounding.

His mouth lifted just at one end, but nothing close to kindness far too dark. Calculating. “Elena.” He let my name brush his tongue, so to speak, testing it, tasting it. “Interesting.”

I struggled to inhale, struggling to breathe fine enough the air too thick as it closed on me. I stood, teetering on the edge of a cliff, one misstep away from plummeting into a world I didn’t know.

“I have an offer for you.”

Those words gave me chills all over.

I should have walked away. I should have said sorry again and ran.

But Damian Blackwood was still gripping my wrist. And the way he kept looking at me made it clear running was never an option.

“A proposition?” My voice came out weaker than I intended, I repeated.

Damian Blackwood hadn’t released my wrist yet. His fingers were warm, firm possessive in a manner that made my pulse skitter like a polygraph needle. The champagne I had poured atop his head was forgotten, but I wasn’t so naïve as to believe he hadn’t written down my name.

People like him did not forget things.

Between us, the air thickened, crackled, with unuttered things. I should have backed up, should have looked away, but there was something in his gaze that gripped me.

“You interest me, Elena,” he said at last.

I swallowed. “That’s not necessarily a positive thing, is it?”

His lips quirked up a smirk, but a humorless one. More like a predator playing with its prey. “That depends.”

I loathed the way my body responded to him that knot in my stomach, the tingling of skin under his hand. Damian Blackwood was the type of man women loved or loathed. And I hadn’t figured out what category I was in yet.

“What … what do you even want from me?” I asked cautiously.