Her skin prickled where the leather touched her, anchoring her to the present as everything inside threatened to fracture. Her pulse thundered—not just fear, but heat, awareness, something sharp and alive blooming in her veins. No one had ever gotten under her skin like this—not the polished heirs who took her to galas, nor the ambitious executives who tried to bed her as a power move. They’d seen her name, her pedigree. Dawson saw something else. Something raw. And it made her feel exposed in a way she couldn’t name, much less control.
What was it about this man that undid her so completely?
Part of her already knew the answer—because he saw what no one else had the courage to look for.
And for the first time, Evangeline wasn’t sure which version of herself she was trying so hard to protect. The polished executive who never flinched? Or the woman who wanted something—someone—real enough to shake her apart. One wore armor; the other longed to set it down.
4
DAWSON
The conference room had smelled of fear and arrogance—an expensive blend, like cologne masking something rancid beneath. Dawson had stood at the rear of the room, arms folded, jaw locked, scanning the faces around the polished mahogany table with the precision of a sniper—calculating, clinical.
Each board member had been a study in tells: the VP of Operations had drummed his fingers, too fast and too loud; the General Counsel, red-faced and silent, had clutched his leather portfolio like it held a lifeline.
He had noted every twitch, every tight-lipped smile, every sideways glance toward Peter Rhodes. Not a single one of them had met his gaze directly. He hadn’t needed to be a profiler to read the truth—there had been rot beneath the corporate sheen, and too many of those polished professionals had been knee-deep in it.
One or two might have been clean, but Dawson had staked his life on worse odds before—and never without a weapon within reach. He hadn’t bothered hiding the fact that he was watching, that he was cataloging every face, every movement, every carefully measured lie.
Evangeline had sat straight-backed at the head of the long table, her posture regal but edged with tension. Dawson had kept his gaze moving, reading the room. One board member had tapped nervously at a Montblanc pen, shooting glances toward Rhodes like a dog waiting on a command. Another—the CFO—had tugged at his collar and refused to meet Evangeline’s eyes.
Only one woman near the end—older, sharp-eyed, legal—had watched Evangeline with what might have been concern. Or calculation. Dawson hadn’t decided which. Either way, he’d filed her away with the rest.
Every twitch. Every shift in posture. Every non-answer. They had painted a picture far louder than any of the polished words being spoken aloud.
Evangeline’s voice had remained calm, her expression polished to an ice-smooth veneer. A princess on her throne, fending off wolves in designer suits. But Dawson had seen the cracks she didn’t want anyone else to notice—the slight tremble of her hand as she adjusted her glasses, the fractional pause before responding to Rhodes’ veiled threats.
She had been holding on by a thread, and something in that—something raw and fraying—had sparked a firestorm inside him.
He'd never expected to feel it again—the need to steady someone else, to shield them from the storm. But watching Evangeline sit there, barely holding the line, it had slammed into him hard. He wanted to be the one to strip away the armor she wore like silk and steel, to show her what it meant to be protected without condition. What it meant to be truly seen—and still held anyway.
The knowledge that she was barely keeping it together hadn’t made him dismiss her. It had made him ache to hold her up. To command her into stillness. To bring her to her knees—not to break her—but to show her that surrender wasn’t weakness.
Not when it was given to someone who could carry the weight.
And seeing that—seeing those vulnerable edges peeking out from all that polish—had hit him harder than he liked.
It had called to something deep and anchored inside him. Something that wanted to wrap her in silence and steel. To strip away the mask and rebuild her from the ground up, on his terms. Because dominance, as he understood it, had never been about breaking someone. It had always been about holding them together when they couldn’t do it themselves, and damn if he hadn’t wanted to be that anchor for her.
And what twisted low and dark in his gut wasn’t just that he’d seen it.
It was that she hadn’t known. Hadn’t realized how clearly he’d read her fragility, how deeply he’d cataloged every flicker of vulnerability she’d tried to hide.
And he wasn’t sure if that made him feel protective—or predatory.
He’d followed her into her office, watching her carefully, noting the way her shoulders stiffened beneath the calm facade she wore like armor. They'd exchanged barbs and then gone to neutral corners as Evangeline worked and Dawson watched.
Rhodes, oily and confident, had joined them later in the afternoon and tried to plant himself in her space like he owned it. Dawson stepped in, quiet but unyielding, and the man slithered away, muttering. But not before Dawson noticed the flash drive half-hidden in Rhodes’ palm—a whisper of silver sliding into a pocket that had no business holding it.
That was his second red flag of the day. He couldn’t shake the way that flash drive had glinted beneath the fluorescents—just for a second, it had caught the light like a blade, sharp and deliberate. A warning, maybe. Or a signature. His gut twisted with recognition—the kind that came from years in thefield, when a detail too small to matter suddenly screamed for attention. The first had been earlier that morning when his laptop caught a flagged outbound signal—a data packet sent from a shadowed server in the Shaw Petrochemical system. Dawson had already begun pulling logs and IP histories. Someone was siphoning files.
He should be focused on tracking the breach, not cataloging every flick of Evangeline’s lashes. But hell if his brain was cooperating.
He watched her now from the threshold of her office, noting the contrast between the soft drape of her borrowed sweater and the steel in her spine. The deep V of the top exposed just enough to make his thoughts stray—her curves were distracting in ways he hadn't prepared for. But it was the way she held herself, cowboy boots grounded and battle-ready, that got under his skin. The incongruity hit him hard—this woman was grit wrapped in silk, command cloaked in vulnerability—and his control slipped another inch. Her posture rigid as she answered emails, the line of her throat exposed where she’d tied her hair into a loose knot. Her clothes—clingy, too casual for the corporate shark tank—did nothing to dampen her authority.
Or his distraction.
Dawson leaned against the frame, watching. The image of her bent over that desk— one that had never actually happened, but was just now taking root in his imagination—had triggered the moment she squared off with him across it, and it pissed him off. Not because he didn’t want it—God help him, he did—but because he did want it, and that want was a distraction he couldn’t afford.
