CHAPTER FOUR: MARRY ME

The invite came at seven-thirteen in the morning. Anne knew this because she had been awake since trying to shut her brain off as it was going on overdrive. It was already a week since the summit, since she embarrassed herself in front of Royce and since she gave her contact to Marcus. And now…. Now she’s reading an official mail from NeuroPont asking her to come to the DuPont tower for a meeting by 9am?!!

She read it three times like the message would disappear anytime soon. Then she sat up, which disturbed the cheshire cat Steve, her room mate and her best friend Jade found. 

“They got back to me” Anne said “they actually got back to me.” Steve stood, turned around once, and lay back down facing the wall. This was his standard response to information he considered beneath his attention.

She had to get ready.

Jade was in the kitchen when Anne emerged from her room, already dressed, already second-guessing the dress.

Jade was Anne’s roommate, best friend, and her moral support since they met as freshmen at college and discovered they’d been assigned the same orientation session by accident and had both shown up twelve minutes early, which had told each of them everything they needed to know about the other. 

She was currently eating toast over the sink.

She looked at Anne. Looked at the dress. Looked at Anne again.

“Where are you going to?” she said.

“DuPont Tower for a meeting.”

Jade put the toast down. “DuPont Tower as in–“

“Yes.”

“Royce DuPont as in–”

“Yes.” Anne said nodding with excitement. 

“The man from the summit–”

“Jade.”

”–who you crashed the suite of–”

“I didn’t crash it, I entered it incorrectly–”

”–and then apparently impressed enough that he’s calling you into his actual tower at nine in the morning–” Jade stopped. Looked at her properly. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to take an exam.”

“I am about to take an exam.”

“It’s a meeting.”

“It’s an exam with better furniture.” Anne looked down at herself. She was wearing a navy wrap dress that she’d bought two years ago for a university awards ceremony and had since been designated her serious but approachable outfit, which was a category she’d invented specifically for situations where she needed to be taken seriously by people who would use her age against her if she gave them anything else to hold. “Is this too much?”

Jade tilted her head. “Too much what?”

“Too much, I don’t know. Like too deliberate?”

“You want to look like you didn’t try.”

“I want to look like I always look like this.”

“Wear that blazer from walstreet mall.”

“The burgundy one?”

“The one that fits wrong. It works for you in a way that makes no sense. You look like you have better things to worry about than how your blazer fits, which is exactly what you want.”

Anne considered this. “That’s either brilliant or insane.”

“Both. It’s always both with fashion.” Jade picked her toast back up. “Go with the navy. It’s better for a first real meeting. Save the blazer for when you know him well enough that it reads as charming instead of accidental.”

“If he funds ANGEL, I will wear that blazer every day for a year.”

“Please don’t.”

Anne went back to her room, looked at herself in the mirror and made some adjustments, hair down instead of up, small gold earrings instead of the hoops, and the flat shoes instead of the heels because she’d already embarrassed herself with footwear once in this man’s presence and had no interest in a repeat.

She picked up her tablet to scroll through the pitch deck.

Everything was where she’d left it. Everything was as solid as she could make it with the resources she had.

She closed the tablet, picked up her bag.

“Text me,” Jade called from the kitchen.

“If it goes well.”

“Text me either way. If it goes badly I’ll have wine ready.”

“It’s nine in the morning.”

“I’ll have wine ready by the time you get home.”

Anne smiled at the front door, and left.

###

DuPont Tower was on the east side of the Strip corridor not on the Strip itself, which would have been a statement, but close enough that from certain floors you could see the Bellagio’s fountains if you pressed your face to the glass and Royce DuPont was the kind of man who would never press his face to the glass. It was forty-eight floors of dark glass and structural steel. The lobby was all polished concrete and the kind of indoor plants that needed a professional to stay alive. The reception desk was a long, clean plane of white stone with two people behind it who both looked up when Anne came through the revolving doors.

“Anne Brooke. I have a nine o’clock.”

The receptionist checked her screen her eyes widening. “Of course, Marcus Webb’s office is handling you today, he’ll be with you shortly.”

She sat waiting in the lobby sofa looking at the street outside while she ran the pitch one more time in her head.

“Ms. Brooke.”

She turned looking at the man she gave her information to “Good morning”

“Good morning, I hope you found the building without difficulty.”

“I found the building fine. Finding a parking space was its own journey.”

A hint of something like amusement, crossed his face. “I should have mentioned in the invite. There’s visitor parking on the lower level. I apologize for the oversight.”

“Not an issue”

“If you’ll follow me.”

They arrived at Royce’s office, he was sitting on a sofa when she entered. He wore a grey suit that was almost identical to the one she saw at the summit. Expensive and unbothered.

“Ms. Brooke have a seat” he gestured to the empty sofa directly across from him.

Marcus set a coffee on the coffee table in front of her beside a document labeled contract. She looked at it.

Oat milk flat white.

She hadn’t told anyone how she took her coffee.

She looked up at Marcus, who was already moving toward the door and back to Royce who was looking at her with interest. 

She picked up the coffee and drank.

“Marry me.”

“What???” She coughed out the coffee she was drinking.

“I would fund your startup, give you everything you need if you marry me.” 

The silence that followed had a shape to it.

Anne was aware of several things simultaneously at once the coffee cup in her hands, the city outside the window and the absolute, almost aggressive calm of Royce DuPont’s expression, which was the expression of a man who had said a strange thing and was prepared to wait as long as necessary for the room to catch up.

She put the coffee down.

And then, because she was Anne Brooke and there was genuinely no other appropriate response to the sentence “Marry me” delivered across a coffee table at nine in the morning by a man she’d met by falling over his briefcase, she laughed.

Royce watched her laugh and waited. 

She got it under control. Mostly. “I’m sorry,” she said, and did not sound sorry at all.

“You’re not,” he said.

“No,” she admitted. “I’m-I’m not because that is genuinely the most–” she stopped. Started again. “Is that why you accepted my pitch?”

“No, I have interest in your work as an investor however i would like to do it on the basis of mutual benefit. You have nothing to loose, you just have to act as my wife on paper attend events, mostly, the gala happening in a month time.” This was the longest she had ever heard Royce speak. 

She was quiet for a long time. True she had nothing to loose at all, she would have money for her start up and Royce had no reason to lie to her and this was her only option to get ANGEL started. This isn’t the time for pride.

“How many months?”

“12” 

“Why not date somebody else?”

“The timeline for the gala is in six weeks and I need to build a public image before then. The board wants me to have a credible partner to soften my image since I am perceived as someone who’s cold.”

Twelve months of fake marriage for fundings?? She needed to think about it

“I need to think about this.”

“Of course.”

You have twenty four hours.”

“I need more than a day.”

“Forty eight hours then.”

She stared at him then grabbed the contract and stood, he stood too which surprised her, the automatic courtesy of it. 

“Before I go,” she said. “The  coffee, you had Marcus found out how I took it before I arrived right?”

“Standard meeting prep,” Royce said.

“It’s a nice detail,” she said. “For someone who looks and act cold.”

She left.