Chapter 6: The Truth Beneath the Suit

“Who is she?” I asked.

The question came out before I had fully decided to ask it. That was the thing about sitting across from a man like Damien Cole in a restaurant this quiet with a number that large on a page between us and a mysterious message lighting up his phone. Caution started to feel like a luxury I could not afford.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he picked up his wine glass and took a slow measured sip and set it back down with the particular deliberateness of a man choosing his next words the way other men chose investments. Carefully. With full awareness of the cost.

“Her name is Victoria Haines,” he said.

“And she wants you to tell me the truth,” I said.

“Which means there is a truth you have not told me yet.”

He did not deny it.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at him and waited, because I had learned from twenty six years of life and four years of dealing with difficult customers that silence was often the sharpest tool in any conversation and the person who broke it first was usually the one with the most to lose.

Damien Cole broke it.

“Victoria and I were engaged,” he said. “Eighteen months ago. The engagement ended. She is now engaged to my younger brother and the charity auction I mentioned is being held in both their names.” He paused. “I am expected to attend.”

I absorbed that slowly, the way you absorbed cold water on a hot day, letting each part of it settle before moving to the next.

“You need someone beside you,” I said. “So you don’t walk into that room alone.”

“I need someone beside me,” he said, “so I walk into that room like a man who has not spent the last eighteen months building walls around himself so high that even his own board of directors has started to notice.”

The honesty of it caught me completely off guard. It landed in the space between us raw and unguarded and so unlike everything else about him that for a moment I forgot to breathe properly. I looked at his face and saw something there I had not seen before. Not vulnerability exactly.

Something harder than that. Something that had been through the fire and come out the other side still standing but permanently changed.

Something in my chest responded to it in a way I did not appreciate at all.

“And Victoria,” I said carefully. “She knows about this arrangement?”

“She suggested it,” he said.

I blinked. “She suggested you hire a companion.”

“She suggested I stop punishing myself by showing up to things alone and giving people something to pity.” His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Victoria is very practical.”

“She sounds like a complicated woman.”

“She is,” he said simply. “She was also not the right woman. I understood that too late and not late enough, which is its own particular kind of problem.”

Outside the window the city burned quietly with ten thousand lights and I sat in the warmth of Eleven Restaurant in Rosa’s red dress and looked at Damien Cole and tried to remind myself that this was a business arrangement. That the number on that page was the only thing on this table that was relevant to my life.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that.

“I have a condition,” I said.

Something shifted in his eyes. Interest. Controlled but present.

“One condition,” I continued. “Whatever this is, however many events, however many rooms we walk into together, you are honest with me. About everything relevant. No more messages on phones with truths I haven’t been told yet.”

He was quiet for a moment. Studying me with that look that made me feel simultaneously seen and exposed.

“Agreed,” he said.

“Then I have one more question.”

“Ask it.”

I leaned forward slightly. Just enough. And I watched his eyes drop for one single unguarded second to the neckline of Rosa’s red dress before they came back up to my face, and the fact that he had looked, the fact that that small involuntary thing had happened on the face of a man who controlled everything about himself with such precision, sent a slow curl of heat moving through me that I had absolutely no business feeling.

“The number on this page,” I said. “Is this what you pay everyone you make arrangements with or did you look me up and decide what my desperation was worth?”

The silence that followed was the longest one yet.

And then Damien did something I had not seen him do once since I had walked into this restaurant. He smiled. A real one. Small and brief and devastating in the way that rare things were always devastating precisely because of how seldom they appeared.

“I looked you up,” he said. “And then I added more because anyone who talks to me the way you do in a situation like this is worth considerably more than desperation.”

The heat that had been curling slowly through me turned into something more insistent and I pressed my knees together beneath the table and reached for my water glass because I needed something cold in my hands immediately.

“I’ll need a few days to think about it,” I said.

“You have until tomorrow morning,” he said.

“That is not a few days.”

“No,” he agreed, completely unapologetic. “It isn’t.”

I looked at him. He looked back at me. And the air between us was doing something it had not been doing at the beginning of this dinner, something warm and charged and layered with an awareness that had nothing to do with numbers on pages and everything to do with the fact that we were two people sitting very close together in a golden lit room and my body had apparently decided to develop opinions about that entirely without my permission.

The server arrived with menus and the moment broke apart like smoke.

But as I looked down at words I was not reading on a menu I could not afford, I was acutely aware of his hand resting on the table beside mine. Close enough that if either of us moved even slightly our fingers would touch.

Neither of us moved.

But neither of us moved away either.

And when I finally looked up from the menu and found his eyes already on me, dark and steady and holding something in them that he had not put into words yet, I understood with a clarity that settled deep in my bones that saying yes to the number on that page was the smallest of the risks I was about to take.

The biggest risk was already sitting across from me in a dark suit.

And he was looking at me like he knew it too.