Page 12
“They believed that.”
“No. But they stopped asking, which is functionally the same thing at this hour.” Victor fell into step beside him toward the elevator, undisturbed by his boss’s total lack of clothing in a way only a hundred years of this could produce. “Whatever this is — and I have a guess — try to get some sleep. You’re no good to me exhausted and enormous.”
“Noted.”
“Was that a joke? Did you just make a joke?”
“No.”
“Devastating. I had money on tonight.”
“How much.”
“Fifty says you’re insufferable about her by Friday. Darius has you making it to next Wednesday before anyone notices. I told him he was an optimist about your restraint, and he told me the same thing about mine, so we split the difference.”
“There is no ‘her.’”
“Sure. Keep telling yourself that at a hundred and forty miles an hour over the harbor.” Victor held the elevator door, unmoved. “Get dressed. You’re indecent, and it’s affecting my ability to respect you as a boss.”
“You’ve never respected me as a boss.”
“True. But usually you’re wearing pants when I don’t, which I do appreciate more than I let on.”
He didn’t sleep. Lying in the dark with the city bleeding faint light through the curtains, he decided he didn’t especially mind that either — the alternative was closing his eyes and losing the one clear image he had of her, and he wasn’t ready to trade it for anything as mundane as rest.
He’d built an empire on knowing exactly what he wanted before anyone else in the room had finished forming an opinion. He’d never once been wrong about it. He didn’t intend to start now, over a woman he hadn’t technically met, whose voice he’d never heard, who had no idea a dragon had already rearranged his entire life around the shape of her.
Tomorrow he’d have more than a photograph. Tomorrow he’d have a reason to be in the same room as her, and after that, given enough time, he intended to have a great deal more than a reason.
Distance, her own reluctance, the surveillance Victor was already chasing down, the small matter of introducing himself as more than a name on a contract — none of it would stand for long. He’d remove each piece, one at a time, without hurry, the way he removed everything foolish enough to stand between him and what he’d already decided was his.
Tonight, he had a photograph, a word his dragon refused to stop saying, and every intention of getting used to neither one going anywhere.
FOUR
ROMILY
The Sharpe Global flagship saw her coming from three blocks away, or at least gave that impression — all glass and pale stone, a forecourt of granite so polished it looked personally insulted by pedestrian traffic. No flashing signs. No need for them. The building didn’t announce itself so much as assume everyone had already heard of it.
She stood on the sidewalk and gave it the same look she gave any piece of raw material before she touched it: assessing, unimpressed, already planning what she’d change. This was going to be a problem. A gorgeous, deeply well-funded problem, but a problem.
The doors moved before she reached them, which she found unreasonably irritating for a door doing what it was designed to do. Somewhere, a sensor was watching her walk toward it and deciding, on her behalf, that she was ready to enter. She hadn’t decided that yet. The door had decided it for her.
She’d debated, on the ride over, whether to dress the part — a blazer, maybe, anything that read as I belong in a building like this — and decided against it in the three seconds it took to remember she didn’t want to belong in this building. She wanted the building to belong to her plans for it. A different goal altogether, and a far more interesting one.
Her studio boots didn’t belong on the lobby floor, and the floor knew it.
She’d expected marble. The website had four hundred photos of marble. What she hadn’t expected was the sound, or the absence of it — the hush a floor got when it cost more per square foot than most people’s cars, swallowing her footsteps like it resented having to deal with them at all.
The ceiling rose high enough that her own footsteps disappeared before they finished happening, swallowed by a room built to make people feel small in a way that made them tip well and ask fewer questions. Light poured down from somewhere overhead, engineered to a warm, flattering gold that didn’t flicker, didn’t dim, didn’t do anything except perform morning at every hour of the day whether morning had shown up outside or not.
It was beautiful. She hated how beautiful it was — beautiful the way an airport terminal was beautiful, right before they told you your gate had changed for the third time and your flight now boarded from a different country.
She had her site notebook out before she’d made it ten feet past the entrance, sketching the ceiling’s sightlines without deciding to. This was the itch that showed up whenever she walked into a room she hadn’t built yet — the need to make it hers whether or not it had asked.
The woman found Romily at the base of a support column, notebook open, one hand pressed flat to the marble like she was checking its pulse. She looked like she’d been issued by the building itself — tailored charcoal suit, not a hair out of place, an expression calibrated to read as warm from exactly the right distance and no closer.
“Ms. Devlin.” Her heels crossed the floor at a clip that suggested she’d timed the walk from her office and was already slightly behind schedule. She had the kind of polish that came from a garment steamer and personal discipline in roughly equal measure, and a smile assembled with the same precision as everything else on this floor. “Welcome to the flagship. I hope your trip in was easy.”
