CHADLABS Scholarly Hub
Eleanor
She couldn’t sleep.
Again.
It had been two days since the Friday confrontation in Marcus’s office, and the words still echoed in her skull like a melody she couldn’t stop humming.
“You’re the one I see when I close my eyes.”
She hated him for saying it.
She hated herself more for needing to hear it.
Now, lying in bed at midnight, the city murmuring outside her window, Eleanor stared at the ceiling with her phone clutched to her chest. She hadn’t touched her wine. Her laptop sat unopened at the foot of the bed.
What she had opened—twice now—was her browser history.
The Sterling Masquerade Ball.
Five years ago.
The night that changed her life.
Something about Marcus’s restraint, about the honesty in his voice that night, had shaken something loose inside her. It wasn't enough to feel it anymore—she needed to know. Needed to silence the spiral of suspicion that had been gnawing at her since the first moment she’d seen him.
She tapped into old society blogs, socialite photo galleries, archived gossip columns—any place that might have covered the masquerade. Her fingers worked on autopilot, her stomach tight.
An hour passed. Then another.
And then, finally—buried in the scroll—she found it.
A short article from a society site dated the night of the ball. The photos were blurry, most guests masked, laughing into champagne flutes. But the caption caught her breath:
“The host, Marcus Sterling, left unexpectedly before midnight due to an undisclosed family emergency. Sources say he was seen taking a phone call near the east terrace before vanishing for the night.”
Her lungs locked.
The east terrace.
That was her terrace.
Their terrace.
The puzzle pieces didn’t just fall into place—they slammed.
She clicked on the grainy photo. A tall man in a tailored black suit stood in profile, talking urgently into a phone, his other hand raking through dark hair. Even in low resolution, the shape of his jaw, the slope of his nose… they were unmistakable.
It was him.
Marcus.
Her stranger.
She clutched the phone to her chest like it could steady her heartbeat.
No more denial. No more doubt.
It was him.
And if he hadn’t already figured it out…
He would. Soon.
Marcus
He couldn’t get Eleanor out of his head.
Even in meetings, even while reviewing financial projections for the Chicago merger, her face kept flickering behind his eyes. The way her voice cracked when she said she’d make arrangements. The way she’d nearly fled his office.
But it was more than lust now.
It was… need.
Not polite, clean need.
Raw, urgent, blistering.
His body responded to her with a force that bordered on violence. Every time she walked past his desk, every time her scent lingered too long in the elevator, he felt it—a tightening, a pulse, a fire that started in his chest and burned straight down.
He wanted to touch her. To hear her gasp again. To feel her arch into him like she had that night in the elevator. He wanted to fill her, feel her walls clench around him, make her moan his name in surrender.
It scared the hell out of him.
He sat alone in his penthouse, bourbon glass sweating on the table, watching the city glow beneath him. But all he could see was her—Eleanor, undone. Her lips parted, her breath shallow, the way she had looked at him like she didn’t know whether to run or reach for him.
He opened his laptop on impulse and pulled up archived invitations to past Sterling Foundation galas. Something gnawed at the back of his mind. Something about the perfume she wore—something about that scent, that night.
He ran a search.
It wasn’t until he dug into the RSVP guest logs for that particular ball, cross-checked with Eleanor’s name—and found nothing—that the suspicion fully bloomed.
She hadn’t been invited.
She had crashed that night.
A stranger.
A mystery.
And now—his assistant.
Something in his chest turned cold and electric.
He didn’t know why.
Not yet.
But his body did.
It remembered.
And it wanted her.
Again.
