Soon to be Groom

Adrian's POV

The projector had been running for forty minutes now, I was getting real bored of this damn meeting. 

"Third quarter projections show a fourteen percent growth margin in the Asian market," Henderson said from the far end of the table. "If we move aggressively on the Seoul acquisition before December—"

"We're not moving on Seoul."

Henderson stopped clicking. Around the table, six other people stopped whatever they were pretending to do and became very still. They knew I meant business whenever I spoke in that tone.

“Page forty-seven of your own report," I said. "The subsidiary agreement with their logistics partner. There's a conflict clause buried in there that activates the moment we absorb the parent company. We'd be walking into a seventy million dollar legal dispute we had absolutely nothing to do with."

Henderson stared at me. "I didn't—"

"I read your report twice, Henderson. I found it the first time."

He closed his mouth and nodded once, bowing his head in shame.

Nobody else at the table said anything. 

Gary, my legal director was already jotting something down. That was why I still had him after six years when three of his predecessors had not lasted three months. He listened to what was said, wrote them down, and did not fill my ear with unnecessary noise.

"The Berlin preliminary is still worth pursuing," I said. "I want revised numbers by Thursday.”

Heads nodded across the table.

“We're done."

Everyone stood up immediately, their chairs scraping back. They gathered their laptops and documents and started filling out. 

Within two minutes the boardroom was empty except for me.

I remained seated with my pen resting between two fingers. My eyes were on the city through the floor to ceiling glass. 

Forty one floors of Kingsley Global below me, from the trading floor analysts who arrived before dawn to the cleaning staff who left after midnight. Every department that moved through this building moved because I understood it well enough to demand the best of it.

My phone lit up on the table.

Richard Hale.

I exhaled through my nose and picked up.

"Richard."

"Adrian." For some reason his voice terribly annoyed me. "Just calling to confirm everything is in order for Saturday. The bride is ready. The family is ready. All you need to do is show up."

All you need to do is show up. Like I was a guest at someone else's wedding and not the actual groom myself.

"I'll be there," I said.

"Excellent. This alliance is going to be very good for both families, Adrian. Very good."

For your family, I thought. You're the one drowning in debt.

"Saturday," I said, and hung up.

I set the phone down and leaned back in my chair.

The thing about the wedding was that I had made my peace with it. It wasn't what I would have chosen if anyone had asked me, but nobody cared.

At thirty eight years old, I was single and not searching. The board had been making increasingly pointed remarks about stability and legacy, about what investors liked to see in the man running a company of this size.

Hargrove had been the one to say it plainly three weeks ago. Eight board members sitting exactly where my team had just been sitting, all of them staring at me.

‘The company needs a family man.’

Very insulting.

I had looked at him for a long moment, thinking about all the ways I could end his career before lunch, then I had thought about the seventeen thousand people who worked in this building and needed it to keep it running at this level.

I told them I'll handle it.

And I had.

The merger with the Hale Group made sense on paper regardless of everything else. The numbers were solid. The market positioning was genuinely good. The marriage was just a clause, one more condition in a contract that really worked in my favor. 

That was all this was.

I pulled my laptop across the table and typed her name.

Victoria Hale.

Her face came up immediately in several photos, articles, charity events, society columns, interviews.

I clicked on the clearest photograph, a charity dinner from eight months ago, and studied it.

Beautiful, obviously. Dark hair, elegant posture, perfect smile.

I had met her three times. Shook her hand, made conversation and moved on. She had been perfectly pleasant. 

But when I closed the laptop ten minutes later, I realized I couldn't even remember a single thing she'd ever said to me.

Not one sentence.

That felt oddly significant.

In four days I would marry her.

In three years, all going well, we would go our separate ways with the terms of the agreement met and the board satisfied. 

Everything would return to the clean uncluttered state I preferred my personal life to occupy.

Simple enough.

I finally remembered my coffee, but when I touched it, it had gone cold.

I stood, buttoned my jacket, and picked up the folder from the table.

There was a company to run.

Saturday could wait.