Cade Capital

# Chapter Two: Cade Capital

The car Harriet Voss sent was a black Escalade with a driver who didn't make small talk, which Ivy was grateful for, because she spent the entire ride uptown rehearsing and discarding approximately forty different opening lines for a conversation she had no script for. *Hi, I hear you need a wife.* *So, marriage.* *I brought nothing, like your lawyer said, but I do have several questions, starting with are you insane.*

By the time the car pulled up outside a black glass tower on Fifty-Third with CADE CAPITAL etched into brushed steel above the entrance, she'd landed on nothing better than silence, which turned out to be the right call, because the moment she stepped out of the elevator on the forty-second floor, she forgot every word she'd ever known.

Not because he was handsome. Although — fine. He was.

It was that the entire floor went quiet when the elevator doors opened, the way a kitchen goes quiet for the chef during service, twenty people at desks angling themselves fractionally toward a corner office without actually looking up, and Ivy understood before she'd taken three steps that whatever Julian Cade was in this building, it wasn't just an heir with a will to satisfy. It was gravity.

His assistant, a young man with an earpiece and the harried calm of someone permanently three tasks behind, walked her to the office and knocked once before opening the door.

"Ms. Reyes."

Julian Cade did not stand up right away. He finished the line he was writing — actual pen, actual paper, which struck Ivy as strange in a room with three monitors — and then looked up, and Ivy had approximately one and a half seconds to catalog him before he spoke: dark hair, gray eyes, a suit the color of wet slate that had clearly never been bought off a rack, and an expression that gave away exactly nothing, which she would learn, eventually, took a tremendous amount of effort to maintain.

"Sit down, if you'd like," he said. Not unkind. Not warm either. A statement of fact, like *the meeting starts at four.*

"I'll stand."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile. "Suit yourself."

"Harriet said you need a wife."

"Harriet has a flair for understatement when it suits her." He set the pen down, folded his hands, and studied her with an attention that made Ivy's skin prickle, though not unpleasantly — more like being appraised by someone who genuinely wanted to get the appraisal right. "My father died eight months ago. His will requires that I be married, and remain married for no fewer than two years, in order to retain controlling interest in this company. If I fail to meet that condition, control passes to a family trust, which is a polite way of saying it passes to my cousin, who has been circling this company since before I was old enough to work here. I am not interested in marrying someone under normal circumstances, largely because normal circumstances would mean marrying someone who wanted something from me that I couldn't audit in advance. This arrangement, by contrast, is entirely auditable. Everyone knows exactly what everyone is getting."

"How romantic."

"I didn't say it was romantic. I said it was clean." He tilted his head slightly. "You catered an event I attended in April. You sent back a risotto."

"It was oversalted."

"It was," he agreed. "Nobody else at that table said a word. Forty people, all of whom could have afforded to buy that restaurant outright, and not one of them wanted to be the person who complained about the food. You didn't work there. You didn't own it. You just thought it was wrong, and you said so, to the kitchen, without checking who was listening first."

"I didn't know you were listening."

"That's rather the point, Ms. Reyes."

Ivy crossed her arms. The office was enormous and mostly empty in the particular way that expensive things are sometimes empty — no photos on the desk, no personal clutter, nothing that told you a single thing about the man behind it except that he could afford not to need anything in the room to prove who he was.

"Harriet told you about my sister."

"She did." Something in his face changed, fractionally — not softer exactly, but more careful. "I'm sorry. Genuinely. I'm not in the business of using someone's worst year against them, and if that's how this feels, you should say so and walk out, and I'll have Harriet find someone else."

"Would you? Find someone else?"

"Eventually. I don't have an infinite runway, but I have some." He leaned back in his chair. "I'd rather it be someone I don't have to spend two years being managed by, though. You clearly don't need managing. You told a room of finance executives their risotto was wrong."

"That's not the same as agreeing to marry a man I met forty seconds ago."

"No," he said. "It isn't. So let me actually answer your questions, instead of assuming what they are." He gestured to the chair again, and this time Ivy sat, because her legs had started asking her to. "Ask me anything. I'll tell you the truth, or I'll tell you it's none of your business — but I won't lie to you. I don't have the patience for maintaining a lie for two years, frankly, which is one of several reasons this needs to be a transaction and not a performance."

Ivy studied him for a long moment. Up close, under the corner-office light, she could see he wasn't as composed as the building around him wanted her to believe — a faint tightness at his jaw, a stillness in his hands that looked deliberate rather than natural, like a man holding something down by main force.

"Three hundred and forty thousand dollars," she said. "That's specific. How do you know that's the number?"

"Harriet's very thorough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the exact number your sister's transplant will cost you, out of pocket, after insurance, according to the estimate her hospital's financial office provided last month. I had someone confirm it." He said this evenly, without apology, and Ivy felt something cold slide down her spine that had nothing to do with attraction. "I understand that's an invasive thing to know about a stranger. I'd rather tell you plainly than have you find out later and wonder what else I haven't said."

"That's — " Ivy started, and stopped, because she genuinely didn't know whether to be furious or relieved, and settled, in the end, on something closer to wary respect. "Okay. At least you're not pretending it's a coincidence."

"I don't deal in coincidences. It's inefficient." He reached into a drawer and slid a single sheet of paper across the desk — not a full contract, just an outline, bullet points, none of the legal density she'd expected. "Two years. You'd live here, in the city, primarily at my residence, for appearances. Public events, when required, kept to a minimum. Separate lives otherwise — separate bedrooms, separate friends, separate everything that isn't strictly necessary for the world to believe this is real. Compensation structured across the term, front-loaded enough to cover your sister's surgery immediately upon signing. And one condition that isn't negotiable, which I'd rather explain to you honestly now than have you discover as a surprise."

Ivy looked up from the page. "Which is?"

Julian's expression didn't change, but something in his voice did — quieter, more careful, like he'd rehearsed this part and still didn't like saying it.

"Neither of us can develop feelings for the other. If it happens — if either of us can no longer credibly claim this is a transaction — the arrangement terminates immediately, and any compensation not yet paid is forfeited." He held her gaze. "I need you to understand that isn't me being cruel. It's the only way this actually protects the company, and it's the only way I know how to protect you, too, from spending two years hoping for something I have no intention of being able to give you."

Ivy sat very still.

"You're serious."

"I've never been anything else."

Outside his window, forty-two floors up, the city had already started going gold with early evening light, and Ivy Reyes sat across from a stranger who'd just offered to save her sister's life in exchange for two years and a rule against ever meaning it, and thought, with a kind of dazed, exhausted clarity: *of course this is what it costs. Of course it's exactly this complicated.*

"I need to think about it," she said.

"Take the night." Julian stood, finally, buttoning his jacket, and for just a moment — brief enough that she'd wonder later if she'd imagined it — something almost like relief crossed his face, as if some part of him had been afraid she'd say no on the spot. "Harriet will have full paperwork ready if you decide to move forward. If you don't, no one outside this room will ever know we spoke."

Ivy stood too, and found, to her own surprise, that she was already, somewhere underneath the fear, doing the math on his terms the way she did math on everything else in her life now — clear-eyed, practical, already three steps ahead.

"One more question," she said, at the door.

"Go ahead."

"Why is it so important to you that I know it's not personal? The no-feelings clause. You could've just made me sign it. You didn't have to explain yourself."

For a moment, Julian Cade looked like he might actually answer that honestly — his jaw tightened, his eyes flicked away toward the window and the gold light beyond it, toward something Ivy couldn't see and wouldn't understand for months yet.

"Because I've seen what happens when people don't explain themselves in time," he said, finally, and opened the door before she could ask what that meant. "Goodnight, Ms. Reyes. I hope I'll see you tomorrow."