All Chapters of Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

The hush after the deal was salvaged wasn't like either of those. It wasn't the hollow, aching silence of last week, nor the tense, pre-tension silence that had accumulated before the shattered glass. This was a shared, spent, and deeply disturbed quiet. The crisis adrenaline had worn off, and what was left was the unvarnished, troubled beach of whatever was between them.The Aetherium documents, a mountain of financial and legal agreement constructed on the foundation of the negotiated ethics of Jonah, were finally done. It was past midnight. The war room had long since drained of its occupants, analysts and lawyers walking out with weary smiles and silent congratulations, shooting curious, sidelong glances at the two men who remained behind.They were in Clarkson's study, the smaller, more intimate room off to the side of the big office. The door to the big office was still closed, the width of broken glass a silent specter on the other side. In this one, there was only the warm glo

The coolness wasn't cold; it was new weather. For two days, Jonah walked through a glass world. Clarkson's frosty professionalism was an unblemished, unbreachable surface. All discussion was an echo of protocol, all gaze cast downward in case there was some hint of the man himself. Jonah was an abstraction. A variable in an equation. The "Strategic Counsel Department."He complied. He submitted the report on Aetherium's oversight committee at the end of the day. It was true, airtight, and drained of all the passion he'd fought for in Iceland. He attended the meetings. He replied when queried. He became a specter in the machine, a loyal, unerring cog.And every hour, the cold crept inside his body, icing the agony into something harder, sharper, and deadlier.The breaking point had not occurred in a shouted confrontation, but in a memo.It arrived in his inbox on the morning of the third day. The subject line: Protocol for External Communications.It had arrived from Clarkson's office,

The hammer blow arrived on a Tuesday morning. Davidson was riding in the back of the town car, thumbing through market reports on his tablet, to the office. His phone, on Do Not Disturb, flashed with an insistent, sequential series of calls—Melissa first, then his mother, then his college roommate he hadn't seen or heard from in a year.A chill fear, over and above the usual low-grade tension of his job, crept up his spine. Not the same. Not professional.He didn't have time to call Melissa again before a text from Alan Price illuminated the screen, cutting through the silence mode. No message, only a link to a gossip site he'd never heard of.He clicked it.The page took forever to load. And there it was.The photograph was fuzzy, clearly snapped from far away with a telephoto lens, but unmistakable. It was from a "business trip" to Moscow. They were at the Ritz-Carlton bar terrace, the gleaming Moscow cityscape a bokeh blur in the distance.The backdrop was harmless enough. They wer

The jealousy was a strange sensation, a malady to which Joe Brian had believed himself proof. He had lived a lifetime building defenses against need, against dependence, against the very kind of openness that jealousy represented. He owned human beings, their time, their skills, their allegiance. He did not need them. To need someone was a failure, and failures were something he could ill afford.It began, as these things always begin, with laughter.He strolled onto the trading floor of his hedge fund, a rare venture to remind the ravenous young wolves who paid them. The mood was its usual din of clanging telephones, shouted orders, and the constant hum of money shoveled around the globe. His eyes, as always, searched for Davidson. He was his anchor, his North Star in the midst of chaos, the sole individual whose presence he required in order to sense a semblance of order.He saw him. But Davidson wasn't crunched over his desk, pounding away. He was standing near the coffee machine,

The entry to his brother had opened a door that Joe Brian had closed up tight for forty years. Behind the door was not only the recollection of Daniel, but the ghost of the man he once was—the man who had been able to trust, to be open, to love without it being an act.And the ghost brought with it the shadows of regret.They descended upon him during the quiet hours. In his enormous, empty bed, the silence was no longer soothing; it was accusatory. The image of Davidson laughing with the analyst had stirred something primitive and repressed. It was not jealousy; it was a paralyzing reverberation.He saw Daniel in all places. In the faraway, reflective look Davidson occasionally wore before finally arriving at a hard-won solution. In his occasional, emotionally made moral positions that could not be distilled to pure reason. In the manner he had, against all probability, gained the trust of Joe that he felt had been lost with Daniel.The parallels were unmissable, and they stunned him