I'm The Thorn Stuck In The Billionaire Celebrity's Foot

The floor buffer screamed against the marble like it had a personal grudge, and Ivy Calloway let it. Two in the morning was the only hour of the day nobody told her to be quiet.

Vane Tower's lobby stretched out in front of her, forty feet of imported stone that cost more per square foot than her mother's entire hospital bill, which was a fact Ivy knew because she'd done the math out of pure spite one night in October. She liked the lobby best of all the floors she cleaned. No cameras pointed at her here. No tenants stepping around her cart like she was something spilled on the floor. Just her, the buffer, and the hum of the building settling into itself after everyone important had gone home.

Except tonight somebody important hadn't gone home.

He came out of the elevator bank like he owned it, which, Ivy would later learn, he did. Tall, dark coat, tie loosened around his neck like he'd been fighting with it for hours and lost. He didn't look at her. People who looked like that never looked at people who looked like her.

"Move the cart."

She kept buffing. "Almost done with this section."

"I don't care what section you're on. Move it."

Ivy straightened up and actually looked at him then, which she realized later was her first mistake, because looking at him meant noticing things. The hollow, furious set of his jaw. The way his hands were shoved so deep in his coat pockets they looked like they were trying to disappear. Whatever had happened to him tonight, it had happened somewhere with better lighting than this lobby, somewhere with a camera, because there was a particular kind of stillness in him, the stillness of a man used to being watched and hating every second of it.

None of that made him less rude.

"There's a whole other half of this lobby that's dry," she said. "You could walk on that."

"I could also have you fired."

"You could." Ivy went back to the buffer. "Won't get you across the room any faster, though."

Something moved behind his eyes that she didn't have time to name, because he didn't say anything else. He walked around the wet section instead, in a wide, irritated arc, shoes clicking against stone, and Ivy told herself the small, ugly satisfaction she felt watching a man in a five-thousand-dollar coat detour around her mop water was not going to cost her anything.

She was wrong about that too.

He stopped at the security desk instead of leaving. Ivy heard him say something low to the night guard, Marcus, who went pale in a way that made her stomach drop even from thirty feet away. She didn't catch the words. She caught the tone. It was the tone of a man used to fixing problems by removing whatever was in front of him.

She should have left it alone. She had a bus to catch at four and a mother whose oxygen levels the nurse had texted her about at midnight, sitting steady but not good, not good enough for Ivy to stop being terrified every time her phone buzzed.

Instead she walked over, because apparently four years of getting pushed around by men who thought a uniform meant she didn't have a spine had used up whatever patience she'd started the shift with.

"Whatever you just said to him," she said, "I did it. Not him. Say it to me."

The man turned. Up close he was younger than she'd assumed from the arc of his shoulders, thirty maybe, and better looking than any man had a right to be while also being this insufferable. His eyes did something complicated when they landed on her, something between disbelief and the beginning of interest, which she'd have found flattering on literally anyone else on the planet.

"You have no idea who I am," he said. It wasn't a question. It was closer to wonder.

"I know you're the guy who almost walked through wet floor signage twice tonight." Ivy crossed her arms. "That's really all I need to know."

"Sterling Vane." He said it like it should mean something, like it usually detonated a reaction he could watch happen on someone's face in real time.

It meant nothing to Ivy except a faint memory of the name on the building's brass plaque, which she'd read approximately eight hundred times on her way to clock in and never once connected to an actual human being.

"Okay," she said. "Ivy Calloway. I clean this lobby six nights a week and I have exactly forty minutes left to do it, so if you're not going to fire me, can you get off my floor."

For one long second, nobody in the history of Vane Tower's lobby, guard, tenant, or ex-fiancée splashed across every gossip site that morning, had ever moved him less. Then, unbelievably, the corner of his mouth twitched, like his own face had betrayed him by finding this funny.

"You're serious."

"I have a bus to catch."

He looked at her for another beat too long, the kind of look Ivy would spend the next several weeks trying not to think about, and then he reached into his coat and pulled out a money clip so thick it looked fake, and peeled off a bill she didn't let herself look at the number on.

"For the floor," he said, and set it on her cart.

Ivy picked it up between two fingers like it was something dead and held it back out to him. "I don't need your money for doing my job."

"Everyone needs my money."

"I don't."

That landed somewhere it clearly wasn't supposed to. His jaw did the hollow thing again, and for just a second the exhausted, furious man from the elevator was back, underneath the money and the name that was supposed to mean something.

"Keep it," he said, and walked out through her wet floor sign without looking back once, tracking two perfect footprints across marble that had taken her twenty minutes to buff.

Ivy stood there holding a bill she still hadn't looked at, staring at the door he'd disappeared through, absolutely certain she had just made a very expensive mistake and with no idea yet how expensive it actually was.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from the hospital.

Please call when you have a moment. Regarding your mother's care plan.

She looked down at the bill in her hand for the first time.

It was a hundred. There were at least nine more behind it in the clip he'd flashed at her, and Ivy had just watched a thousand dollars walk out a revolving door because her pride wouldn't let her keep it.

The buffer kept running behind her, forgotten, screaming its one long note into the empty lobby.