Chapter fourteen
Tessa
The glass door swings shut behind me and I'm already losing the battle with my bag, strap sliding off my shoulder, coffee tilting at a dangerous angle, when I see Noah.
He's leaning against George's office doorframe with his arms crossed and a smile that has absolutely nothing innocent in it. The kind of smile that means he's been sitting on something and waiting for an audience.
"So this is the 'strictly professional' situation," he says, and somehow manages to make audible air quotes without using his hands at all.
My stomach drops like an elevator.
I keep walking, because stopping would be an admission, and I haven't decided what I'm admitting yet. I set my coffee on my desk with great deliberateness and do not look at him.
"If this were real," I say, arranging my bag like its contents are suddenly fascinating, "I'd have negotiated better perks."
Noah's laugh is loud, genuine, and the kind that rolls across the whole open office and makes three people look up from their screens.
I finally glance toward George's doorway, where George is standing with a tablet in his hand and an expression that tells me absolutely nothing.
He doesn't deny it. Doesn't clarify, deflect, or offer any kind of rescue.
Somehow that's so much worse than if he had.
The tips of my ears go warm. I open my laptop with more force than necessary and stare at the screen like it owes me something.
"For the record," George says, still looking at his tablet, still perfectly calm, "the arrangement is working beautifully."
Noah nearly chokes on his coffee.
I pull up the operations dashboard before anyone can see my face do whatever it's currently doing. The monitors blink to life around me with social feeds scrolling in real time, news alerts stacking in thin columns, the relationship metrics dashboard pulsing soft blue across the screen. George's system. His numbers. His quietly terrifying ability to quantify how love looks from the outside.
I pull up the Camden and Lila feed first. My chest tightens before my brain even catches up to why.
The paparazzi clip has already cracked two million views. It's a photo of Camden's hand cupped around the back of Lila's head, her face turned into his shoulder. The whole image is achingly, accidentally perfect.
"Public sentiment jumped four points in ninety minutes," one of the analysts calls out from the far desk.
George moves to stand beside me without announcing himself, close enough that I catch the faint smell of whatever soap he uses.
"Affection display shifted the narrative from accusation to relationship," he says, in the tone of someone reading a weather report.
"Good," I mutter, eyes on the screen. "That buys them breathing room."
His shoulder is almost touching mine. Neither of us moves away. I become very, very focused on a comment thread I do not care about at all.
Across the room another alert fires. I check it and see a paparazzi video, grainy and vertical, of Seamus stepping between Rosanna and a camera lens with one hand raised and the other steady at the small of her back. The kind of gesture that feels genuine and protective.
The headlines are already spinning:Protective Billionaire Husband?andSeamus O'Malley Defends Wife in Viral Moment.
Around the room, the team exchanges looks. George pulls up the sentiment ratio. His expression doesn't change, which means it's fine. George's face is an extremely reliable instrument.
"Positive across the board," he says. "People respond to protection."
"That's the Irish hero effect," I say, meaning it as a joke.
George tilts his head slightly, like he's considering logging it as an actual variable.
I have to look away from him before I do something embarrassing, like laugh.
