Chapter Five: Two Hours

Ian’s POV

One hour.

I looked at my watch for the fourth time in twenty minutes and felt the number settle into my chest with the particular weight of something that had crossed from inconvenient into personal.

One hour and seven minutes, to be precise.

Lateness was one of the things I could not tolerate. Not in business, not in my personal life, not in any context that required another person to value my time enough to show up when they said they would. It was a simple thing — the simplest thing — and the fact that some people moved through the world as though other people’s schedules were suggestions rather than commitments was something that had irritated me since I was old enough to own a watch.

I picked up my water glass. Set it down. Looked at the restaurant entrance. Looked away.

The restaurant my grandfather had chosen for this occasion was the kind of place that understood discretion — private booths, lighting calibrated to suggest intimacy without enforcing it, staff who moved quietly and asked nothing beyond what was required. The kind of place that cost enough that you never saw the prices and never needed to ask. I had been here before. I knew the menu. I knew the wine list.

What I did not know was why I was still sitting here.

I checked my watch again.

One hour and twelve minutes.

If she was not here in the next forty-five minutes I was leaving. Genuinely, completely, without apology leaving — because the time I was spending in this booth doing nothing was time that could be used for any number of things that actually required my presence and would actually produce results.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment.

The betrothal.

Even the word felt wrong in my mouth. Betrothal. Like something from a period drama about people who did not have the option to make their own decisions. My grandfather had signed a contract — had signed my name to a future — when I was a teenager who had no idea it was happening, and had then leaked it to the media before telling me, because he knew — he absolutely knew — that I would never have agreed quietly.

That was the part that hurt the most. Not the arrangement itself, not even the specific person involved, but the calculation behind it. Alan Lawson had looked at his grandson and decided that the only way to get what he wanted was to make it impossible to refuse before the conversation even started.

My mother had begged me to come today. That was the only reason I was here. She had sat across from me at breakfast with her hands folded and her eyes soft and said please, Ian, just meet her, just once, just give it a chance — and I had looked at my mother’s face and found, as I always found, that I did not have the specific combination of resolve required to disappoint her.

She was convinced Layla Thompson was wonderful. She had said this multiple times, with the certainty of someone who had done extensive research via magazine profiles and social media and the opinions of people who moved in similar circles. She’s accomplished, Ian. She’s smart. She built that company from the ground up after her grandfather handed her the reins.

My mother had not been in Manhattan three months ago.

My mother did not know what Layla Thompson was actually like when she thought no one important was watching.

I checked my watch.

One hour and twenty-three minutes.

“Honestly,” I said, to no one in particular, to the empty seat across from me and the untouched bread basket and the restaurant that was beginning to feel like a very expensive waiting room, “this is bullshit.”

I stood up.

I picked up my phone from the table and turned toward the exit — already composing in my head the message I would send my grandfather, the one that would be polite enough not to start an argument and firm enough to make my position clear — when the restaurant entrance opened.

She walked in.

White suit, fitted, the kind of thing that looked simple until you looked closely enough to see that every detail had been chosen with care. Her blonde hair was pinned up neatly, a few strands escaping around her face in a way that was probably not accidental. She moved with the particular confidence of someone who had never once in her life walked into a room and wondered whether she belonged there.

Golden eyes. I remembered those.

Layla Thompson scanned the restaurant, found me standing beside the booth with my phone in my hand and my jacket half-gathered to leave, and walked toward me without changing her expression or her pace.

I sat back down.

Not because I wanted to. Because standing while she approached felt like a statement I had not decided to make yet, and I needed a moment to recalibrate.

She sat down across from me and settled into the chair with the ease of someone who had arrived exactly when she intended to.

“Are you leaving already?” she said.

The voice. I remembered that too — sharp and unimpressed and entirely unbothered by whoever was receiving it.

“Why,” I said, keeping my voice level with a specific and conscious effort, “did you keep me waiting for over an hour.”

She looked at me with those golden eyes. “What are you talking about? My grandfather told me two o’clock.”

“I have been here since twelve.”

“Then that sounds like a miscommunication between our grandfathers.” She reached for the water glass in front of her and poured without asking. “Not something either of us needs to be upset about.”

I looked at her.

She looked back at me with the complete composure of someone who had decided she had nothing to apologise for and was not going to perform contrition she didn’t feel.

No sorry for the confusion. No I hope you weren’t waiting too long. Nothing that acknowledged that I had been sitting in this booth for over an hour while she — presumably — had been doing whatever she had been doing without any particular urgency.

I made a very deliberate effort to keep my expression neutral. We were in public. My mother liked this woman based on a portfolio of magazine features. My grandfather had arranged this meeting and my father had told me personally this morning, with the quiet seriousness he reserved for things he meant completely, that he hoped I would try.

I was trying.

The trying was taking considerable effort.

She set her water glass down and looked at me across the table with that same composed, assessing expression — and then she extended her hand.

“Hi. I’m Layla Thompson.” The smile that accompanied it was technically a smile. “I believe we’ve met before.”

I looked at her outstretched hand.

I looked at her face.

“I tend to forget,” I said, “meaningless people and things.”

The words came out with the particular precision of someone who had chosen them carefully and meant every one of them.

She held my gaze for exactly one second.

And then she laughed.

Not a polite laugh. Not the controlled, social laugh of someone managing a difficult situation with grace. A full, genuine, entirely unself-conscious laugh — loud enough that the couple at the next booth glanced over, bright enough that it filled the carefully calibrated quiet of the restaurant like something that had no business being there.

I stared at her.

She was still laughing.

I had called her meaningless. I had said it directly to her face across a dinner table that had been arranged specifically for the two of us to begin the process of becoming engaged to each other. And she was laughing.

This woman, I thought, is completely insane.

She pressed her fingers to her lips and composed herself — or attempted to, the laughter still visible in her eyes even after her expression had arranged itself back into something resembling neutrality.

“Sorry,” she said, and did not sound sorry at all.

I looked at her.

She looked back at me.

Outside the restaurant, New York continued its afternoon entirely indifferent to the fact that I was sitting across a dinner table from the most infuriating woman I had ever been in a room with — who was, apparently, going to be my wife.

God help me.

*******

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— Ruthie ❤️