CHAPTER 14

Carter Cross had built a reputation in this building as the one person in Marketing who could make a spreadsheet feel like a personal attack. It wasn't intentional, exactly. It was just that when numbers didn't add up, he said so, loudly, and with the specific outrage of a man who considered creative overspending a moral failing.

Which was why, when Chloe Bennett walked into the fourth-floor conference room with a mockup board under one arm and a budget request that was forty percent over what Finance had approved, Carter's first reaction was to stand up.

"Absolutely not."

Chloe didn't even blink. She set the board down, unhurried, and looked at him the way a person looks at a vending machine that's eaten their dollar. "I haven't said anything yet."

"You don't need to. I've seen the number. The number is a crime."

"The number," Chloe said, propping the mockup against the wall with the kind of theatrical patience that suggested she did this often, "is what it costs to make the Solaris relaunch look like something people actually want to buy, instead of the beige nightmare your department signed off on in March."

"My department didn't design that campaign."

"Your department approved the budget for it, which in my experience is the same thing as endorsing it." She crossed her arms. "You want fewer mistakes like March? Fund the version that doesn't look like a tax form."

Carter opened his mouth, closed it, and gestured at the board instead, buying himself a second to regroup. It was, annoyingly, good. Clean typography, a color palette that didn't scream at you, photography that actually made the product look like something a person would want in their home rather than something they'd been assigned by a court. He hated that it was good. It made the argument so much harder.

"It's over budget," he said again, weaker this time.

"By eleven thousand dollars, on a campaign projected to bring in four hundred times that if it performs the way the research says it will." Chloe tilted her head. "I read your notes on the Q2 projections, by the way. You're better at your job than you're being right now."

"Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

"It's supposed to be a fact you're ignoring because you like being the guy who says no." She picked up a marker, uncapped it, and started circling line items on the board with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd had this exact fight in six other companies. "Here. This line — cut it, and we're only nine thousand over instead of eleven. That's a number you can defend to Nigel without him having an aneurysm."

Carter watched her work for a moment, off guard by how quickly she'd found the actual soft spot in her own proposal instead of digging in and defending every dollar out of pride. Most people in this building would rather lose the whole budget than admit any part of it was negotiable.

"You're not what I expected," he admitted.

"Nobody ever is." Chloe capped the marker, looking pleased with herself in a way that made it hard for Carter to stay annoyed. "So. Nine thousand over. Yes, or do I need to bring Elena in to make you feel embarrassed in front of someone you respect?"

"I respect you," Carter said, before he'd fully thought it through.

Chloe raised an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth twitching toward a smile she was clearly trying to suppress. "That's new information."

"Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late." She gathered the board back under her arm, then paused, glancing at the stack of budget folders still cluttering the table. "For what it's worth — I looked into you a little before this meeting. People said you were impossible to work with."

"People are usually right about that."

"They said you were impossible," Chloe repeated, "not that you were wrong. There's a difference. Half the department just wants someone to say yes to everything so nobody has to feel bad about the number. You actually read the projections before you fight about them. That's rarer than you'd think."

Carter didn't have a ready answer for that, which was, in itself, a rare enough occurrence that he filed it away to be uncomfortable about later. "Nine thousand over," he said finally. "Send the revised number to Finance by end of day, and I won't tell anyone in the building that Carter Cross said something nice to a creative."

"It'll be our little secret," Chloe said, and Carter found, with some alarm, that the words landed less like a joke and more like something closer to a promise.

---

She was almost to the door when she stopped, turning back with an expression that had shifted — the sharp confidence dimming into something more careful.

"Actually — while I have you. Off the record."

Carter set down the pen he'd been using to mark up the revised numbers. "Go on."

"It's about Barnaby."

"The dog."

"The dog," Chloe confirmed, and something in her voice went tight. "Mark's basically stopped feeding him on schedule. Left him alone at the penthouse for two full days last week while he was 'handling business.' The housekeeper's the only one keeping him fed at all, and she's not even supposed to be responsible for him — Mark just decided that was her problem now."

Carter's jaw tightened. Whatever he thought of Mark professionally, this was worse, uglier, the kind of casual cruelty that told you more about a person than any boardroom failure ever could. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're close with Elena, and Elena is close with Alexander, and Alexander is the only person in this building with enough weight to actually do something about it without it turning into a whole custody battle over a golden retriever." Chloe hesitated, some of her earlier bravado slipping. "I'm not saying anyone should do anything drastic. I just — I can't stop thinking about him sitting in that apartment alone."

Carter studied her for a moment, recalibrating everything he'd assumed about the woman who'd walked in ready to fight him over a budget line. "I'll mention it," he said. "Quietly. No promises what happens after that."

"That's all I'm asking." Chloe managed a small smile, some of the warmth returning to her expression. "For a numbers guy, you're not completely terrible, Cross."

"High praise," Carter said, and watched her go, already thinking about how to bring it up with Elena without it sounding like the beginning of something far more complicated than a rescue mission for a dog.

He had no idea, yet, how right he was.