Chapter 4

I spent four days telling myself he wouldn’t be there.

Billionaires don’t show up to vendor prep meetings. They send people. They send people who send people. I’d be in a conference room with some junior associate from Hartwell Capital, we’d talk timelines and deliverables, and Lucas would leave a name on an email chain where he belonged.

I believed that right up until I walked into the room and saw him standing by the window.

My whole body stopped.

He had his back half to the door, talking to my boss, that same stillness, that same suit, a glass of water in his hand like even water did what he told it to. And then he turned, the way people turn when they feel someone staring, and his eyes found mine.

I watched it land.

Just a flicker. A half-second where his face did nothing and then did everything. Recognition, clean and total, and under it something I couldn’t name fast enough before he smoothed it over.

“Ah,” my boss said, oblivious, “and this is Maya Reed, she’ll be the running point on your account day to day. Maya, Lucas Hartwell.”

“Ms. Reed.” He held out his hand.

I had to take it. There were six people watching.

His grip was warm and certain and I felt it travel all the way up my arm.

“Mr. Hartwell,” I said.

“Pleasure.” His voice gave away nothing. “I’m sure we’ll work well together.”

I let go first.

The meeting happened. I don’t remember most of it.

I talked when I was supposed to talk. Nodded when I was supposed to nod. Walked them through the timeline with a laser pointer and a steady voice that belonged to some other woman, a competent one, while the real me sat somewhere behind my own ribs screaming.

The whole time I could feel him across the table. Not looking at me. He was very good at not looking at me, and somehow that was louder than if he’d stared.

Once, when I said the launch date, he wrote something down. I have no idea what. He didn’t ask a single question. A man who built an empire on questions sat through my entire presentation and asked nothing, and I knew exactly why, and so did he.

When it ended, people gathered their things. My boss walked two of the Hartwell people out, talking the whole way.

I stayed back to stack the printouts that didn’t need stacking.

“You can stop pretending to organize those,” Lucas said.

The room had emptied around us. I hadn’t noticed.

“Excuse me?”

“The paper.” He hadn’t moved from the window. “You’ve straightened that stack three times.”

My hands still went on the pages.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“You do.” He set his glass down. “No name. That was the rule. I followed it.” A pause. “I just didn’t think the next time I’d see you, you’d be handing me a project timeline.”

Heat climbed my neck. “Can we not?”

“Not what?”

“Do this. Here. Now.” I lowered my voice even though we were alone. “Whatever this is.”

“I’m not doing anything.” He almost looked amused, and I hated him a little for it. “You’re the one rearranging office supplies.”

“You should go.”

“Probably.” He didn’t move. “You left before I woke up.”

“That was the point.”

“I know.” He studied me, head tilted slightly, like I was a contract with a clause he hadn’t expected. “I don’t usually mind. I minded.”

I didn’t have anything to do with that. So I said nothing.

“You could’ve told me your name was Maya,” he said.

“I could’ve. I didn’t want to be Maya that night.”

“Who did you want to be?”

“No one.” I met his eyes. “You were good at letting me be no one. Don’t ruin it.”

Something shifted in his face. Just slightly. Like I’d said something he wasn’t braced for.

“Fine,” he said. “Then we’re two professionals who’ve never met. Easy.”

“Easy.”

“Good.” He picked his glass back up, turned toward the door, and that should have been it.

Then he stopped.

“Reed,” he said, slowly, like he was reading it off the back of his own memory. “Maya Reed.”

“That’s my name. You just learned it twice.”

“No.” He turned back around, and the easy thing in his face was gone now. “Evan. Evan Brooks. He had a girlfriend. He used to talk about her.” Something worked behind his eyes. “Maya.”

The floor dropped out of my stomach for the second time that week.

“He talked about you for months,” Lucas said, quiet now, almost to himself. “Then a few weeks ago he stopped. Said you two were, “ He stopped. His jaw tightened. “He said you walked out on him.”

“That’s not, “ I started, and then I didn’t finish, because what was I going to say? That his best friend cheated. That I’d walked into a bedroom with takeout in my arms. That night I spent in Lucas’s bed was the same week.

I watched him do the math.

I watched him land on it.

“The night at the bar,” he said. “That was the night you found out.”

I said nothing. Saying nothing was the only thing I had left.

“God.” He set the glass down again, harder this time. He dragged a hand back through his hair, and for one second the stillness cracked and I saw something underneath, something rattled, something I wouldn’t have thought a man like him still had. “He’s my…… Maya, he’s my best friend.”

“I know that better than you do.”

“Does he know? About, “ He gestured between us, short and sharp. “Does he know?”

“No.” My voice was steadier than I felt. “And he’s not going to.”

“You think I’m going to tell him?”

“I think you do whatever’s useful to you.” I stacked the papers I didn’t need to stack, just to have somewhere to put my hands. “So I’m telling you. It’s not useful. Not to him, not to you, not to me.”

“You’ve got it all worked out.”

“Somebody has to.”

That stopped him. He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his expression changed again, harder to read this time.

“You don’t know the first thing about what’s useful to me,” he said.

“I know your type.” I lifted my chin. “People are either worth something to you or they’re not. I read it to you the first night. So decide what I am and let me get back to work.”

For a second he just looked at me.

Then, low, almost like he didn’t want to say it out loud, “That’s the problem.”

“What is?”

“I decided you weren’t worth anything.” He picked his glass up one last time. “Stranger at a bar. One night. Easy to file and forget.” His eyes held mine. “And then I couldn’t stop thinking about a woman whose name I didn’t even have.”

The air went out of the room.

I didn’t have an answer. My pulse did, but my mouth didn’t.

“Don’t tell Evan,” I said finally, because it was the only solid thing left to hold.

“I won’t.” He moved toward the door. “Not because it’s useful. Because you asked.”

And then he was gone, and I stood there with a stack of papers I’d straightened four times, trying to remember how to breathe.

I gave it a full minute before I trusted my legs.

When I stepped out into the hall, I was already rehearsing the lie I’d tell anyone who asked why I looked the way I looked.

Evan was there.

Standing by the elevators, where he had no reason to be, a visitor’s badge clipped to his jacket, looking at the conference room I’d just walked out of. Looking at me. Then past me, toward the glass where Lucas had been.

“Hey,” he said. Slow. “Didn’t know you worked with Lucas.”

“It’s a new account.” My voice came out even. A small miracle. “Found out this week.”

“Small world.” He pushed off the wall and came closer, glancing past me again, toward the glass. “Does he say anything about me there?”

“We talked about deliverables, Evan.”

“Right. Right.” His smile stretched. “You two looked pretty deep in it, is all.”

“I straighten paperwork. It’s riveting.”

He laughed. It didn’t reach anywhere.

His smile was still there.

But his eyes weren’t smiling at all.