Lockdown with My Billionaire Boss - Sloane Peterson Page 0,1

me, his clean-shaven lips puckering into a frown, and a strand of blond hair dripping down over his eyes.

“I’m talking about us, Annalise. You and I. Things aren’t working out between us.”

I remember furrowing my brow at this, actually feeling confused at the idea.

“Who said that?” I asked, as though it was someone else dictating the terms of our relationship.

“Nobody said anything,” he said. “Look, I know this is hard, I just… You need to understand, you’re a beautiful girl. You’re smart, talented, and funny, I just… I’m not ready to settle, okay?”

The word plunged into my heart like an arrow.

“Settle?” I asked, my skin suddenly prickling.

He’d looked back down at his plate for a moment, but quickly returned his attention to me when I spoke.

“What? Oh… No, I meant I’m not ready to settle down. Sorry, I misspoke.”

I felt a little bit like I’d just swallowed an entire apple whole, and the thing was lodged painfully at the base of my throat.

“Oh. Oh, I see,” I said in a spacy voice, my eyes drifting off into the middle distance, pondering his obvious Freudian slip.

“Like I said, it’s nothing personal,” he continued in a casual tone of voice, and returned to poking at his dinner plate with his chopsticks. “I just think we’re two different people. We want different things. And that’s totally okay. God, this sushi is delicious…”

And so that was that.

Now I found myself sitting at work, a couple of weeks later, still trying to wrap my head around what had been said to me that evening.

Settle? Settle?!

He was settling for me?

He was the one breaking up with me?

I’d tried to force myself not to go on the rebound immediately after the breakup, as badly as I might have wanted to. I was afraid that I might end up making some pretty poor decisions in the aftermath of such rejection, just to convince myself that I wasn’t the kind of girl who someone “settled” for.

By this point, though, the blow to my self-esteem was proving too hard to live with, and so I found myself reactivating several of my dating profiles with my phone out under my work desk, I was feeling so crushed by it all.

Goldfinch’s open-office plan made it tough to sneak onto your phone during work hours. We technically weren’t supposed to be using our phones for non-business-related purposes, but people did it all the time anyway, and no one was ever very strict about it. Still, I really didn’t want anyone to notice that I was trying to meet people through a dating app, which was exactly why I’d decided to avoid using Goldfinch’s own state-of-the-art hookup app for this purpose, despite having had a hand in designing it. I don’t know how realistic it was to worry that someone from the office might find out I was on there, but I didn’t want to risk that possibility.

As casually I could I peered around the office before entering my login info to an old dating app I’d abandoned after meeting Dennis. No one was paying any attention to me, all eyes locked intently on one of any number of screens that filled the room. My gaze flitted gradually over to my boss and CEO of the company, Malcolm Finch, and I found my eyes suddenly locked into place.

He was the definition of tall, dark, and handsome as he stood hovering over the shoulder of a colleague, paying attention to their screen with intense focus. He wore a gorgeously cut suit and had his dark brown hair in an expensive-looking crewcut. A beard skirting the line between bushy and ruggedly handsome graced the billionaire’s angular jaw, and he ran his fingers through it in a contemplative fashion as he stood there, the fine flakes of salt-and-pepper leaping with every stroke of his fingertips.

The man was a masterpiece, positively mesmerizing in every way. And it was precisely because of that fact that I wound up staring too hard for too long at him, until it pretty much became inevitable that he would notice me.

And sure enough, he did just that.

He didn’t even fully lift his head. His face remained angled toward my colleague’s computer, but his eyes darted suddenly up at me, his irises a dazzling color somewhere between mahogany and obsidian.

Our eyes met, and I felt a sizzling current flash through the space between us. The air fled my lungs, and I felt myself drowning above the surface. His gorgeous face cracked, and a blinding