Chapter 7

 Chapter 7: The Contract

*Sloane*

I walked into the meeting room the next morning with a legal pad, three pens, and enough sleep deprivation to make me either extremely sharp or slightly unhinged. I hadn't decided which yet.

Rhys was already there, sitting across the table, arms crossed like he was bracing for a fight he already expected to lose. Our eyes met the second I stepped through the door, and neither of us bothered pretending to be pleased about it.

"Miss Reyes," Marcus said, standing to greet me, all warmth and business smiles. "Please, sit."

I sat. I didn't smile back.

"Before we start," I said, pulling out my legal pad, "I have conditions. I didn't come here to sign whatever you put in front of me."

"Didn't expect you to," Rhys said. "You strike me as someone who reads the fine print on cereal boxes."

"I strike you correctly," I said, not looking up. "It's called literacy. You should try it sometime."

Marcus cleared his throat, the sound of a man deciding not to referee yet. "Of course. We expected conditions."

"One," I said, laying the pad flat. "Ten million dollars for the season."

Marcus didn't even blink. "Noted."

"Two. If you need me for appearances outside the agreed schedule, that's additional compensation, negotiated separately, every time."

"Reasonable."

"Three. My career stays independent. I keep every assignment, every byline, every source. Nothing about this arrangement touches my actual job."

"Fine."

"Four. My family stays private. My mother, my brother, nobody gets their names, their faces, or their business dragged into this. Ever."

Rhys's jaw shifted, just slightly, like that one landed somewhere he hadn't expected me to aim. He didn't comment. I noticed anyway.

"Five," I continued. "Rhys doesn't interfere with my journalism. Not my assignments, not my sources, not my editor, nothing."

"I wasn't planning to," Rhys said flatly. "I have better things to do than read your drafts."

"Good, because you wouldn't understand half the vocabulary."

That got the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, gone as fast as it came. "Careful. You almost sound like you enjoy this."

"I enjoy winning. This is just what winning looks like today."

"We'll see about that," he said, and there was something almost pleased in his voice, like he'd just decided this was going to be more entertaining than he'd planned for.

"Six," I went on, before he could get too comfortable. "I control my own availability outside agreed public events. I'm not on call for you."

"You expect me to just guess when you're free?"

"I expect you to ask. Like a normal person. Try it, you might survive the experience."

Marcus cleared his throat again, louder this time. "Go on, Miss Reyes."

"Seven. This ends when the season ends. No extensions, no renegotiating that point later."

"Understood."

"Eight. Neither of us controls the other's private life. What I do off the clock is my business. What he does is his."

"Fine," Marcus said. Rhys said nothing, just watched me with an expression I couldn't quite place, something between irritation and attention, like he'd stopped waiting for me to finish and started studying how I built an argument instead, the way you'd study an opponent worth taking seriously.

"And nine," I said, setting my pen down, holding his gaze on purpose this time. "No physical intimacy beyond what we mutually agree to, case by case, for whatever the public appearance requires. Nothing assumed. Nothing extra."

The room went quiet for a second.

"You want a contract," Rhys said slowly, "for how much I'm allowed to touch you."

"I want boundaries. Since apparently that's a foreign concept to you, puddles, remember?"

"That was months ago."

"And yet here we are, still discussing your impulse control."

Marcus jumped back in fast, the practiced tone of a man who'd clearly refereed worse. "These are all reasonable requests. We can build most of this into the agreement without issue."

"Most of it works," Rhys said, leaning forward now, elbows on the table, "if she'd actually let this feel like a relationship instead of a merger. Nobody's going to believe we're together if you're treating every hallway conversation like a business transaction."

"It is a business transaction," I said. "That's the entire point. You wanted a fake relationship. These are my terms for providing one."

"You can't fake chemistry by reading off a checklist."

"Watch me."

His eyes stayed on mine a beat too long, like he was doing exactly that — watching, measuring, deciding whether to believe me. "You're that confident."

"I'm that prepared. There's a difference, and you'd know it if you ever bothered with either."

"Keep talking like that," he said, "and people really will believe we're dating. You've got the attitude down already."

"That's not attitude. That's me not being impressed by you. Learn the difference."

He leaned back, jaw tight, something almost like a smile fighting to show up and losing. Good. Let him sit with it.

The money took longer. Marcus laid out the number, ten million, structured across the season, with bonuses tied to specific milestones and campaigns and Rhys pushed back hard, arguing it was excessive, that no fake relationship needed to cost that much. Marcus calmly walked him through it: the sponsorship value, the media cycle it would generate, the boost it could give an already-stalled Player of the Season campaign, the return on investment that would make ten million look small by comparison. By the time Marcus finished, Rhys didn't look happy about it, but he stopped arguing, which was close enough to agreement for my purposes.

An hour later, the papers sat in front of us, clean and final. I read every line twice before I signed. Rhys signed after me, his signature quick and sharp, like he wanted it over with.

I looked at the contract. Then at him.

"This is temporary," I said. "One season. Don't mistake it for something real."

Something flickered across his face, irritation, maybe, or something harder to name and then his expression shut down into something colder.

"Don't worry," he said. "I wasn't planning on making any mistakes." A pause, and then, quieter, meaner: "You should be grateful, actually."

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me." He stood, buttoning his jacket, looking down at me like I was something he'd decided to explain slowly. "You're a junior reporter living in a building you can't actually afford, in an apartment your company pays for because you sure didn't earn it yourself. Being seen with me gives you access to rooms you'd never get into on your own. Events. People. A whole world you'd spend the rest of your career trying to reach, and I'm just handing it to you."

I felt my whole body go still.

"You don't know anything about me," I said.

"I know you're a broke wannabe rich girl playing dress-up in a neighborhood you can't afford," he said, and every word landed exactly where he meant it to. "Ten million dollars and suddenly your principles disappeared pretty fast, didn't they? Funny how that works. Everyone's got a price. Yours was just cheaper than I expected."

That last part landed somewhere deeper than the rest, somewhere I hadn't braced for, like he'd reached straight past the argument and found the one thing I actually lie awake worrying about.

The room went quiet. Marcus looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.

I didn't cry. I wasn't going to give him that.

I stood up slowly, and when I spoke, my voice came out low and steady, sharper than I expected it to.

"You don't know one single thing about my life, Rhys. Not one. You don't know why I need that money. You don't know what I carry every single day that has nothing to do with you or your building or your money. You looked at me and decided you already had the whole story, the way people like you always do. That's not knowledge. That's laziness wearing a suit."

He didn't answer. His jaw was tight, his eyes fixed on me.

"And let's get one thing straight," I said, picking up my copy of the contract off the table and holding it up between us. "You may have bought my time. You didn't buy me."

Something shifted in his face at that, quick and involuntary, like the line had caught him somewhere he hadn't guarded. Most people who heard his money attached to a sentence either softened or sharpened around it. I did neither, and for one second, he looked almost thrown by that, like he didn't know what to do with someone who wasn't negotiating with his bank account.

I let the silence sit for a second longer before I tucked the contract into my bag, grabbed my coat, and walked toward the door without looking back.

"Sloane" Marcus started, but I was already out.

I didn't slow down until I was outside, the cold air hitting my face, my hands still shaking slightly from how hard I'd been gripping that pen.

Behind me, through the glass, I could see Rhys still standing where I'd left him, watching the door I'd just walked through, not moving, not looking away, like something about that last line was still sitting with him.

One season. That's all this was. One season of pretending, of cameras and appearances and a man who clearly thought his money and his name made him entitled to say whatever he wanted about people he didn't understand.

I could survive one season of anything.

What I wasn't prepared for was the fact that our first public appearance was tomorrow.

And according to the contract, Rhys Calloway was expected to kiss me in front of the entire city.