Ashley’s POV

“You were laughing with her for twelve minutes and forty seconds.”

Cassian’s voice is pure ice when he finds me in the empty conference room after the client mixer. The door clicks shut behind him. I do not bother pretending I was not watching the clock either. The blonde from the development team had her hand on his arm and her head tilted just so, and the black mood that settled over me was immediate and ugly.

“I was being polite,” I say. “Something you might try sometime.”

He crosses the room in three long strides. “Polite looked a lot like flirting from where I stood.”

“And the...