Chapter 4: What He Wouldn't Say

Weston's penthouse was the kind of quiet that came from money — no street noise, no upstairs neighbors, just the low hum of a city that couldn't reach this high. Claire stood at the window with a glass of wine she hadn't touched, watching Manhattan glitter below like something that belonged to someone else.

"You said tonight," she said, when he finally came in, jacket gone, sleeves rolled, looking like a different man than the one who'd stood in front of cameras that morning. "It's tonight."

"I know what I said."

"Then talk. Someone out there already knows more about my father's company than I do, Weston. A reporter asked you a question today that you didn't answer, and you didn't answer it because you couldn't because there's a truth under this arrangement you haven't told me."

He was quiet long enough that she almost thought he wouldn't answer at all. When he did, his voice had lost the polish it wore in boardrooms.

"There are things I did before this deal that I'm not ready to explain. Not because I'm hiding something ugly. Because the moment I explain it, it stops being mine to control and I've spent my whole life making sure nothing that mattered was ever out of my control."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have tonight."

"You expect me to stand in front of a city tomorrow and keep lying for you when you won't even tell me what I'm lying about?"

"I expect you to trust that I haven't done anything to hurt you." His jaw tightened. "Which, given everything, is apparently a lot to ask."

"You bought my company. You bought *me*, Weston, whatever softer word you want to put on it and now you're asking for trust like it's something you're owed instead of something you earn."

"I know exactly what I bought." His voice cracked, just barely, on the last word — the first unguarded thing she'd heard from him since the moment they met. "I bought myself a woman who looks at me like I'm a problem to be solved instead of a person, and somewhere in the last two days I stopped being able to remember why that used to be exactly what I wanted."

The silence after that had weight to it. Claire set the wine glass down, her hand not quite steady.

"That's not fair," she said. "You don't get to make this about wanting something real when you won't even give me the truth."

"You're right." He stepped closer, close enough that she had to tilt her head to hold his gaze, close enough that she could see the exact moment his composure gave out entirely. "I don't get to want anything real. That was the deal. I just can't seem to remember that when you're standing in my apartment looking like you'd rather set it on fire than let me lie to you again."

"Weston—"

Whatever she meant to say next never made it out. He kissed her — or she kissed him, neither of them would ever agree afterward on who moved first — hard and unplanned and nothing at all like the careful, camera-ready performance from that morning. Her hand fisted in his shirt. His found her jaw the way it had at the press conference, except there was no publicist watching now, no stylist to interrupt, nothing performed about it at all.

When they broke apart, they were both breathing like they'd been running.

"That," Claire said, "was not part of the contract."

"No," he agreed, low, his forehead resting against hers. "It wasn't."

Neither of them moved to fix the distance that should have come back between them. For one suspended second, Claire let herself believe this could be simple — that the truth, whatever it was, could wait until morning, that this one unguarded moment could just be allowed to exist without consequence.

The elevator chimed.

Weston went rigid against her, and Claire felt every ounce of warmth drain out of the room a full three seconds before the doors opened.

A woman stepped out — tall, polished, achingly familiar in the way of someone Claire had only ever seen in old photographs she'd looked at exactly once and immediately regretted. Diamonds at her throat. A smile already forming, aimed entirely at Weston, like six years hadn't passed at all.

"Well," the woman said, gaze sliding from Weston to Claire and back again, unhurried, amused. "I leave the country for one merger cycle, and you go and get yourself engaged. You always did move fast when you were trying to prove something, Weston."

Claire looked at Weston. Watched every trace of the man who'd just kissed her disappear behind a wall she hadn't seen him build before now.

"Vivian," he said, and his voice had gone somewhere Claire had never heard it go. "You weren't supposed to be back yet."

"Clearly," Vivian said, stepping further into the

apartment like she already owned it, "neither were you."