Page 6

She typed his name next. Norden Sharpe.

The internet had a lot of opinions about Sharpe Global and almost none about the man running it. Three interviews, all recycled quotes about discipline and long-term vision. Not one photo taken from closer than twenty feet, every angle arranged so his face stayed mostly shadow. A business profile used “exceptionally disciplined” twice and “notoriously private” in the next, like the writer had gotten a list of approved adjectives and a warning not to improvise.

One forum comment, six replies deep: met him once at a fundraiser, he’s intense in a way that makes you want to apologize for existing. Least helpful review she’d ever read. Also possibly the most accurate.

An older article quoted a rival hotelier calling him the most controlled person he’d ever negotiated against — and he’d negotiated against people who technically weren’t people. Five years old, that quote, and nobody had touched it since. Romily sat with that for a second.

His age, finally, buried in a photo caption: thirty-eight. Built the whole empire out of one property, twelve years ago, and had been expanding fast enough that real estate journalists kept reaching for words like aggressive and inevitable in the same sentence.

No candid photos. Not one. Every single image looked cleared by security before it made it online.

“Oh, good.” She told her laptop this like it owed her an apology. “A control freak. My favorite personality type. I’ll bring a helmet.”

Smart money, given the total absence of casual photography and the general vibe of a man who probably ironed his own patience, said old. Very old. Possibly with a tail.

Fine. She had a studio to save. The species question could wait its turn.

The studio door didn’t so much open as get announced — Jessa and Marco hit the room at a volume that suggested they’d been building momentum since the sidewalk.

Marco Alvarez came in first, coat still on, already talking. “I heard. I heard everything. Jessa texted me eleven times.”

“I texted you four times.” Jessa dropped her bag by the door hard enough to make a point of it.

“It felt like eleven.” Marco crossed straight to the laptop without asking — the same total commitment he brought to everything — and angled the screen toward himself with two fingers like he was handling evidence. “This is the hotel? Oh, this is beautiful. This is disgustingly, aggressively beautiful. I hate how good this photography is.”

He scrolled through three more pages, narrating as he went, already building the arc in real time. “Okay. Self-made. Media-shy. Aggressively private. This is a man with a past, Romily. This is a man who doesn’t smile in photos because his last relationship ended in a way we’re not allowed to know about yet. I’m sensing tension.”

“You’re sensing a website.”

He didn’t even look up. “I’m sensing tension.” He turned to Jessa. “Am I wrong?”

“You’re never wrong.” Jessa dropped into the office chair, spun it once, and pointed at Romily like she was about to deliver a verdict. “She’s already obsessed.”

“I’ve spoken to the man never. I’ve seen one photo, and it was blurry.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re obsessed with the idea of him. That’s worse. That’s the kind you don’t recover from.”

“That’s not a real diagnosis.”

“I don’t need a license to see the truth.”

Marco straightened, hand pressed to his chest, doing his best impression of a man about to deliver testimony. “I’m sensing a shift in the atmosphere. Possibly professional. Possibly sexual. The data’s inconclusive, but I have feelings about it, and my feelings are rarely wrong.”

“Your feelings are wrong constantly.”

“Rarely. I said rarely.”

Marco climbed onto the office stool like it was a stage, one hand out toward the laptop as though presenting it to a sold-out theater. “Picture it. A glass artist. A dragon — probably a dragon, we’re workshopping the species — with a heart he’s welded shut. He hires her for a job. She hates his marble. He’s never met a woman who insults his lobby to his face. And somewhere between the scaffolding and the signature on that contract⁠—”

“There’s no scaffolding yet.”

“There will be. I’ve seen enough of these to know there’s always scaffolding.” Marco pressed both hands to his chest. “Somewhere between the scaffolding and the signature, he falls.”

“You’ve built an entire love story out of a website.”

“I built an entire love story out of a website in three minutes. I’m very good at my job.”

“You’re a metal sculptor.”