It was an impossible thing, this slow, honeyed panic.

Ryland Moore circled her with maddening patience, each stride fluid as spilled oil, unhurried, predatory. His attention lingered on the blonde before him with the detached focus of a man deciding precisely where to strike.

He hated blondes.

She stood almost six feet tall, all elegant angles wrapped in a navy silk trouser suit that skimmed her figure with quiet confidence. The fabric caught the office lights like midnight water against her sun-kissed skin. Thick-rimmed glasses framed storm-grey eyes, oversized enough to dominate her face, while the faint gap between her front teeth softened features that might otherwise have seemed intimidating.

“I hate you in this suit,” Ryland murmured, his voice low enough to brush against her skin. “It’s too severe. Too tailored. Too masculine.”

One dark eyebrow arched.

“I rather like it.”

He believed her. She wore confidence the way other women wore perfume.

Isobella Michelle Ross had always been told she was unusual. Beautiful wasn’t the word people settled on. Striking was closer. She had the sort of face that interrupted conversations, that arrived like lightning across a clear sky—unexpected, impossible to ignore.

Ryland worried the corner of his mouth between his teeth, sapphire eyes gleaming with dangerous fascination.

There was something about her that unsettled him.

People revolved around Isobella. They circled her instinctively, drawn by curiosity, challenged by her composure, desperate to crack the immaculate shell she wore with such effortless grace. She fascinated him precisely because she refused to be fascinated by him.

“Murder needs motive,” he said softly. “You’re a lawyer, not a detective. The police already have their man.”

“And yet here you are,” she replied with theatrical innocence, waving one graceful hand through the air. “Appearing. Disappearing. Like my own personal Houdini.”

The corner of his mouth curved.

Ryland Moore’s charm worked spectacularly well on most women.

If you were foolish enough to mistake charm for kindness.

Issy had watched Diana Compton unravel herself over him. The memory still lingered bitterly. It wasn’t simply that Ryland couldn’t love Diana. The more unsettling truth was that he seemed incapable of belonging to anyone at all.

He kept the world close enough to admire him and distant enough never to touch him.

Tall, impeccably dressed, devastatingly handsome, he looked as though he’d stepped from the pages of a luxury magazine. But trouble clung to him the way smoke lingered on expensive cologne—impossible to wash away.

And now Aidan Long was dead.

A blade through the abdomen. A crushing blow to the head.

“He was last seen arguing with you.”

“Everybody argues with me.”

His reply was almost amused.

Then he stepped closer.

“What were you arguing about?”

Silence stretched between them.

Neither looked away.

Grey eyes held sapphire in a contest neither intended to lose.

She could feel the warmth radiating from him before he closed the final inch separating them. Close enough for the faint scent of cedar and peppermint to eclipse the coffee cooling on her desk. Close enough that her own lavender perfume wrapped itself around them both, soft and intoxicating.

The space between them hummed with invisible electricity.

He was chaos disguised as elegance.

A warning wrapped in an expensive suit.

A question she already feared she wanted answered.

Issy swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

She had always loved order.

Her office reflected it perfectly. Rows of leather-bound law books stood shoulder to shoulder like disciplined soldiers upon the curved pine shelves. The Persian rug beneath them exploded with rich Picasso-inspired colours—deep sapphire, crimson, amber and emerald colliding in beautiful rebellion. Beyond them, broad French windows overlooked the city, where rivers of headlights threaded through the darkness and crowds flowed endlessly beneath the glow of streetlamps.

Normally, the rhythm of the city soothed her.

Tonight it only echoed the turmoil gathering beneath her ribs.

Allowing Ryland Moore into her thoughts was reckless.

Her grandmother would have declared the cosmos itself out of balance—that planets had slipped from their courses and fate had begun amusing itself at her expense.

Issy almost laughed at the thought.

Almost.

Because the tightening low in her stomach, the warmth spreading beneath her skin whenever he looked at her, the impossible awareness of every stolen breath between them…

None of it belonged to reason.

It certainly wasn’t born from a murder investigation.

It came from the man standing inches away, looking at her as though he intended to dismantle every certainty she’d ever built—and enjoying every second of the attempt.