Chapter 5 Five

Reina's POV

I saw Orion was working at the big glass table and I couldn’t help but admire his face that was lit up by the screen of his laptop.

He had that look, his jaw was tight, and his eyes were not blinking enough.

City people forgot to blink.

I made tea and I brought it over in a mug as a peace offering. I used my favorite mug from home to make this more heartfelt and I looked around for a coaster.

The table was huge and empty, except for his computer and one thin, sad-looking folder.

There were no coasters.

Who has a table this big with no coasters?

The tea was hot, and I couldn’t just stand there holding it. The laptop was flat and solid. It was the only sensible spot.

I set the mug down gently on the right side, away from the letters he was tapping, and I turned to get my own tea from the kitchen.

There was a sharp fizz, a sound like a small animal getting shocked. Then a pop before the screen went black.

Orion went very, very still.

He slowly swiveled his head to look at me. His eyes were a storm over dark water. “You put a wet, boiling mug on an electronic device.”

“It wasn’t boiling, and the computer was on the table.” I could see the problem now. The little light was off. “Did it… break?”

A harsh, humorless sound escaped him. It wasn’t a laugh. “Break? Yes, it broke! It’s fried and everything on it is gone. Every deadline I have for this week was thrashed because you needed a coaster.”

The way he said it, ‘coaster’ sounded like a stupid, childish word.

My own frustration sparked.

It was an accident.

A simple, honest accident.

“It was an accident,” I said, my voice firming. “I didn’t throw it. I set it down gently.”

“It doesn’t matter!” He stood up so fast his chair screeched. He was taller when he was angry, a wall of tailored frustration.

“Nothing is gentle with you! You are a walking, talking catastrophe in a dress! You shred, you bathe, you break! You are a human wrecking ball!”

The words hit me like slaps.

Catastrophe.

Wrecking ball.

They weren’t just about the computer.

They were about me. All of me.

Heat flooded my cheeks. This wasn’t about a machine. This was about me being in his space. Me being here at all.

He looked down at me, his breath coming hard. My words hung there: “You don’t yell at the rain.”

I saw the conflict in his face.

The raw, untamed anger, and shock.

Maybe no one had ever yelled back at him before.

Maybe everyone in his life was as fragile as his things.

“I am not a catastrophe,” I said, my voice lower now. He trembled, but I held his gaze. “I am a person, and I was trying to bring you tea.”

Something flickered in his eyes. The storm didn’t calm, but it changed.

The anger wasn’t aimed at me anymore; it was a chaos inside him, and I was just the lightning rod.

The space between us was charged, and I could feel the heat from his body. His jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped.

My heart was pounding, not from fear, but from the sheer, terrifying charge of the moment.

He was close enough to grab.

Close enough to hit.

Close enough to kiss.

The thought came from nowhere, shocking me as much as the broken computer.

The look in his eyes wasn’t anger anymore. It was darker and hungrier. It made my skin feel too tight.

I had to get out, so I took a step back, then another.

He kept watching me without moving.

I turned and walked to the terrace.

I slid the glass door open and stepped out into the cool air, leaving him alone with his broken machine and whatever that was that had just happened between us.

Orion's POV

A ceramic mug on my laptop.

She put a steaming ceramic mug directly on the aluminum casing of my three-thousand-dollar, custom-configured, irreplaceable-for-48-hours laptop.

I watched, in slow motion horror, as a tiny bead of condensation from the bottom of the mug dripped into the seam near the power button.

The machine made a dying groan before the screen flickered once, a last gasp of light, and went dark.

My laptop.

My connection to my entire empire.

My open documents, my pending deals, the analysis for the Mercer account are due in three hours.

The silent, obedient center of my controlled universe was murdered by chamomile tea.

I didn’t move.

I couldn’t.

The final thread of my patience, already frayed by confetti-projects and goat-scented investors, snapped.

“What,” I said, my voice flat and dead in the quiet room, “did you do?”

The dam broke. Everything I’d held in since she arrived with her spotted barnyard stowaway came pouring out.

“You have destroyed my peace, my work, my sanity since the moment you arrived! Don’t you get it? This isn’t a farm! Things here are expensive! They are fragile! They matter!”

She didn’t cower. She didn’t cry. She took a step forward, right into the space I was trying to dominate. Her eyes weren’t soft now. They were sharp, green flints.

“Things break!” she fired back, her voice loud and clear. “That is a fact of life! On a farm, in a city, anywhere! Things break! You fix them! Or you get a new one! You don’t just stand there and yell at the rain for falling!”

She was a foot from me, her head tilted back, her body taut with a righteous energy that vibrated in the air between us. She smelled like tea and defiance. Her chest rose and fell with quick breaths.

The fight shifted. It wasn’t about the laptop anymore. It was a primal clash of worlds.

My ordered, fragile world against her robust, practical one, and she was standing her ground, blazingly beautiful and furious, telling me my anger was as pointless as shouting at the weather.

You don’t yell at the rain.

The simplicity of it was a gut-punch. My whole life was built on yelling at the rain, on controlling every drop, predicting every storm, sheltering every valuable thing.

And here she was, the storm personified, telling me it was pointless.

She was breathing hard, her lips parted. Her eyes were wide, not with fear of me, but with the intensity of the moment. The fight had flushed her skin. A strand of hair had come loose from her braid and stuck to her neck.

The urge to do something violent was overwhelming, but it had morphed.

It wasn’t to push her away but to pull her towards me.

To crush that stubborn mouth under mine and see if she’d still fight or if she’d melt.

To see if that practical, furious energy could be redirected into something else entirely. The realization was more shocking than the laptop’s death rattle.

I wanted to kiss my catastrophe.

The contradiction locked my muscles.

I couldn’t move forward.

I couldn’t step back.

She left me standing there as I looked at the dead laptop, the shape of her mug’s circle still visible on its surface.

My immediate future was a nightmare of data recovery and apologies.

But my mind wasn’t on the deadlines.

It was on the fire in her eyes.

The way she’d gotten in my face to say : “You don’t yell at the rain.”

My pulse was hammering in my ears, a frantic beat that had nothing to do with work stress. My hands were clenched at my sides. I could still feel the heat of her body, so close to mine.

The final straw had broken. But it hadn’t driven her out. It had revealed something worse.

I didn’t want her to leave.

I wanted to strangle her.

I wanted to kiss her.

The two desires were tangled together so tightly I couldn’t find the end of one or the start of the other.

She was on the terrace while I was in the ruins of my office.

It was no longer about whether I would kick her out.

It was about how long I could stay away from her.