CHAPTER 1: The Gala

Amara Whitfield had exactly one dress that still fit the way it used to, and she’d worn it three

times too many. Tonight made four.

She smoothed the deep green silk over her hips one last time in the mirror of the town car

and tried not to think about what the dress cost versus what her father’s company was

currently worth. The math wasn’t kind either way.

“You look like you’re about to walk into a courtroom, not a ballroom,” her sister Nia said from

the seat beside her, adjusting Amara’s earring with the casual bossiness of someone who’d

been doing it since they were teenagers.

“I feel like I’m about to walk into a courtroom.”

“It’s a gala, Amara. Free champagne. Terrible small talk. You’ll survive.”

Amara didn’t answer. She was already running the numbers in her head the ones her

father had shown her that morning with hands that shook slightly more than they used to.

Whitfield Textiles owed Cross Industries an amount with more zeroes than Amara had ever

seen attached to her family’s name, and the payment deadline was three weeks away. Three

weeks, and then forty years of her father’s work, and his father’s before that, would belong

to someone else.

She hadn’t planned on meeting Julian Cross tonight. She’d planned on standing near the

hors d’oeuvres, smiling at people who mattered more than she did, and leaving before

anyone asked her a question she couldn’t answer without lying.

The plan lasted about eleven minutes.

She felt him before she saw him a shift in the air near the terrace doors, the kind of quiet

that happens when a room recalibrates around someone without meaning to. Amara turned,

and there he was: tall, dark-suited, unreasonably composed for a man who apparently ran

three companies before breakfast, according to the profile Nia had read her in the car. Julian

Cross didn’t have the practiced smile of most men in this room. He had the look of someone

doing complex math behind his eyes and finding the room, on the whole, unimpressive.

Until his gaze crossed hers.

It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t stop walking, didn’t do anything a stranger would notice. But

something in his expression sharpened, like he’d been handed a problem he hadn’t

expected and was already three steps into solving it.

“Miss Whitfield.” He was in front of her before she’d decided whether to move. Up close, he

was younger than his reputation suggested and colder than his face, which was,

infuriatingly, a good one. “I was told you might be here tonight.”

“Mr. Cross.” She kept her voice even, the way she’d practiced in the mirror that morning,

back when this had been hypothetical. “I didn’t realize we’d been introduced.”

“We haven’t. I make it my business to know who I’m about to have a conversation with.” He

said it without arrogance, which was somehow worse than if he’d said it with some. “Your

father’s meeting with my legal team next week. I assume you know why.”

“I know the deadline. I know the number.” She lifted her chin. “I don’t know why you’re

telling me instead of him.”

“Because your father is trying to protect you from a conversation he thinks you’re not ready

for.” Julian’s eyes didn’t leave hers. “I don’t think that’s true. I think you already know exactly

how bad it is, and I think you’re the only person in his company sharp enough to understand

what I’m about to offer him.”

Amara’s pulse did something complicated. “And what is that?”

“A way out that doesn’t end in liquidation.” He glanced past her, toward the crowd, toward

the board members and investors who were, she realized now, watching this exact

conversation with far too much interest. “Not here. Come by my office Thursday. Bring your

father, or don’t. Your choice.”

“You’re offering my father a deal you won’t explain in a room full of people who’d love to

know his company’s in trouble.”

“I’m offering your father a deal that requires more privacy than a gala can give it.”

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth not quite a smile. “You’re quicker than the

file on you suggested.”

“There’s a file on me?”

“There’s a file on anyone whose family owes my company eleven figures.” He said it plainly,

no cruelty in it, which somehow made it land harder. “Thursday, Miss Whitfield. Ten a.m.

Wear something you’d wear to a negotiation, not a gala.”

He was gone before she could answer, absorbed back into the room the way he’d emerged

from it a shift in the air, and then nothing, as if he’d never stood in front of her at all.

Nia appeared at her elbow half a second later, drink in hand, eyebrows somewhere near her

hairline. “Okay. What was that?”

“That,” Amara said slowly, watching Julian Cross’s dark head disappear into a cluster of men

twice his age who all seemed slightly afraid of him, “was apparently a job interview.”

She didn’t sleep that night. She lay awake running through everything she knew about Julian

Cross self-made, ruthless in negotiations, engaged once to a woman named Selene

Marchetti in a relationship that ended so badly it made three gossip columns and then,

oddly, never came up again. Cross Industries under his leadership had swallowed four

competitors in six years. He did not, according to every article Amara found at 1 a.m. with

her laptop glowing in the dark, do favors.

Which meant whatever he was about to offer her father wasn’t a favor.

It was a deal. And Amara had a sinking, certain feeling that she was going to be the one

paying for it.

She closed the laptop somewhere around two in the morning, no closer to a plan than she’d

been at midnight, and lay in the dark replaying the eleven minutes at the gala over and over

the way his eyes had sharpened when they landed on her, the file he apparently kept on

families like hers, the particular quiet confidence of a man who never had to raise his voice

to be obeyed. She told herself the unease she felt wasn’t fear. It was preparation. Whatever

Julian Cross wanted from her father’s company, she intended to walk into that office on

Thursday already knowing the shape of it, so that whatever he offered, she’d be ready to

negotiate instead of simply accept.

She just didn’t yet know how wrong she was about how much negotiating room she’d

actually have.