The office was quiet. Too quiet. He leaned back in the leather chair, fingers steepled, eyes tracing the sharp lines of the polished desk. Everything in the room was in order, controlled, precise. Predictable.

Then the air shifted.

A presence at the door.

He looked up.

His chest tightened without reason. Calm, collected, composed—he told himself—but something in his stomach twisted in a way he wasn’t used to. He straightened in the chair, suppressing the almost childish urge to groan or roll his eyes.

His eyes flicked away to the papers on the desk. Pretend to work. Pretend control. But he couldn’t. He kept glancing up. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to.

There was an unfamiliar tension in the air. He didn’t like it. Yet he couldn’t look away. Every calculated thought he had about duty, order, and discipline was quietly unraveling, thread by thread.

He reminded himself, silently: she’s just a guest. Just someone to manage. Yet even as he repeated the mantra, his mind betrayed him.

Everything else—the office, the reports, the city humming below—blurred. There was only her. And for the first time in years, he realized there was no protocol for this.