NOT IN FRONT OF EVERYONE

Aria's POV

The break room at noon was always the loudest part of the day.

Laughter spilling over lunch containers. Conversations overlapping. The smell of heated food mixing with fresh coffee and the particular energy of people who had been holding their professional faces in place since morning and were finally allowed to exhale. I usually loved this part of the day. The few minutes where the 34th floor stopped being a machine and remembered it was made of human beings.

Today I walked into that noise and felt nothing but the dull familiar ache that had been sitting in my chest since morning.

I had thought about what happened at my desk all day. The way I had stood in front of Daniel Cole and forgotten every word in the English language. The way he had looked at me in that moment with those dark focused eyes that missed absolutely nothing and I had felt completely and terrifyingly exposed. Like every feeling I had spent eight months carefully folding and hiding behind professionalism had chosen that exact moment to rise to the surface and announce itself without my permission.

I had spent the rest of the morning overcompensating. Answering every call before the second ring. Delivering files with military precision. Keeping my eyes on my screen every single time I heard his footsteps near his office door.

It had not helped.

I was pouring coffee at the break room counter when the noise shifted.

Not dramatically. Just a subtle change in the energy of the room. The way conversations slow when something unexpected enters the space. I turned around with my cup in my hand and found Marcus Reed standing in the center of the break room with a bouquet of roses so large and so red that several people had already stopped eating just to look at them.

He was looking directly at me.

My stomach dropped.

"Aria," he said.

His voice was clear and unhurried and loud enough for the entire room to hear and I understood immediately with the particular dread of a woman who has no exit strategy that this was not a private conversation. This was a declaration. Phone screens were already rising. Eyes were already bright with the anticipation of witnessing something they would talk about for weeks.

My mouth went dry.

"Marcus," I said carefully. "What are you doing."

He smiled and it was the most sincere smile I had ever seen on a man about to make my life extraordinarily complicated. He crossed the room toward me slowly and the crowd parted for him the way crowds do when they sense something significant is happening and want the best possible view of it.

He stopped in front of me and held out the roses.

I took them because refusing them in front of forty people felt cruel and I was not a cruel person even when I desperately needed to be.

Then he reached into his jacket pocket and my heart stopped functioning correctly.

"I have watched you for a long time," Marcus said and his voice was steady and genuine and completely serious. "I have watched you work harder than anyone on this floor. I have watched you give everything to this job and still have warmth left over for every person around you. I have never met a woman like you Aria Blackwood and I am not willing to let more time pass without telling you that."

The room was so quiet I could hear my own breathing.

He opened the small box in his hand.

The ring caught the light and several people made sounds that I could not process because my brain had stopped receiving information properly. My eyes went wide and my chest tightened and I looked down at that ring and felt the most overwhelming urge to disappear completely.

I could not say yes.

That truth sat in my body like stone. Solid and immovable and completely indifferent to how good Marcus Reed was or how sincerely he meant every word he had just said. I could not say yes because my heart was not mine to give him. It had not been mine for a long time.

But I could not say no like this. Not here. Not in front of all these cameras and all these watching eyes and all these people who would carry this moment back to every corner of the building before the afternoon was over.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

My eyes moved without my permission. Scanning the room the way they always did when I was overwhelmed and looking for something I could not name out loud. Past the crowd. Past the phones. Past the faces bright with curiosity and excitement.

I was looking for him.

I knew I was looking for him and I could not stop.

And then the room changed again.

The energy shifted the way it always did when Daniel Cole entered a space. Backs straightened automatically. Voices dropped. And the crowd between me and the door parted slowly to reveal my boss standing at the entrance of the break room in his full composed authority, eyes moving across the scene with the quiet efficiency of a man who assessed everything before he responded to anything.

His eyes found mine.

Everything in the room fell completely away.

"Miss Blackwood," Daniel said. His voice was calm and even and final in a way that closed every other sound in the room like a door shutting. "My office. Now."

Marcus straightened slowly. "Sir, I was just"

"I know what you were doing Reed," Daniel said without looking at him. "Miss Blackwood. Now."

Nobody spoke.

I set the roses down on the counter behind me and followed my boss out of that break room with forty pairs of eyes burning into my back and a heart beating so loudly I was certain he could hear it walking beside me.

We entered his office.

He closed the door.

And for two full minutes neither of us said a single word. We simply stood on opposite sides of his desk and looked at each other and the silence between us was so loaded and so heavy and so full of everything we had never said that breathing inside it felt like an act of courage.

His eyes searched mine.

Mine searched his.

Then he spoke.

"Do you love Marcus?"