I straightened, smoothing my dress with hands that weren’t entirely steady. When I turned, the balcony was empty.
He was gone.
And I never even got his name.
The ballroom hit me like a wall of perfume and privilege when I pushed back through the doors, the string quartet swelling into something triumphant and oblivious. I grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing server and positioned myself near the back wall, notebook ready, trying to remember how to look like a person who hadn’t just done something spectacularly inadvisable on a forty-floor balcony.
Get it together, Rivera.
I’d been imagining Sebastian Laurent for months. I’d pictured a silver-haired power broker. Someone paunchy from too many charity galas, with the kind of entitled sneer that came from never being questioned.
The massive screen behind the podium flickered to life.
Dark hair. Storm-gray eyes. A jaw that could cut glass.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our host and the visionary behind the Lakefront Development Project—Sebastian Laurent.”
The man from the balcony stepped into the spotlight.
My champagne glass nearly slipped from my fingers.
The city lights. His hand warm against my stomach. My numbers keep changing.
Our eyes met across the crowded ballroom. His expression was unreadable—carefully, deliberately unreadable, which told me everything.
He’d known. The entire time, he’d known exactly who I was.
The corner of his mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite an apology.
The heat that had been pooling in my chest since the balcony curdled into something sharper. Something that felt a lot like fury—at him, at myself, at the spectacular stupidity of what I’d just done.
I set my champagne down with deliberate precision and pulled out my pen.
Game on.
Chapter Two
Emilia “Em” Rivera
The champagne tasted like expensive regret.
Which was fitting, really. That was precisely what I’d just manufactured for myself on a forty-floor balcony with a man whose name I still didn’t know.
Had not known. Past tense. Because now I knew exactly who he was, and the knowledge sat in my chest like a stone.
I stood near a towering floral arrangement that probably cost more than my rent, watching Sebastian Laurent work the room like he owned it. Which, technically, he did. The man had just delivered a keynote speech about sustainable development and community investment while I stood in the back of the ballroom with a clutch full of evidence that he was full of shit — and trying very hard not to think about the way his hands had felt against my skin twenty minutes ago.
Digging up dirt, are we?
His words from the service corridor played on repeat in my head, tangled now with other words, other sounds — the low, unguarded groan he’d pressed into my hair, the way his voicehad fractured when he couldn’t finish his sentence. You feel— He’d stopped. Like I’d broken something in him he hadn’t expected to break.
I’d been broken first. That was the problem.
“Get a grip, Rivera,” I muttered into my champagne flute. “He’s the enemy.”
The enemy who had known exactly who I was while his hands were in my hair. The enemy who had said for now like it was a promise, while already holding cards I didn’t know existed. The enemy whose cedar-and-leather scent I could still detect on the collar of my dress, which was humiliating in a way the rest of it wasn’t.
That was the part that really pissed me off.
