All Chapters of LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

Aria's POVEight months.Eight months of walking through these glass doors every morning telling myself the same lie. That today would be different. That today I would stop feeling what I had been feeling since the very first morning Daniel Cole walked past my desk without looking at me and somehow still managed to take up every single thought I had for the rest of that day.I was still telling myself that lie.I set my bag down at my desk and smoothed my skirt before pulling up the morning schedule. The 34th floor of Cole Enterprises was already alive with the quiet focused energy that I had grown to love. Keyboards clicking. Phones humming. The smell of fresh coffee threading through the cool conditioned air. I loved this place. I loved this job. I was also painfully aware that loving this job and loving the man who owned this building were two very different things and I had somehow managed to confuse them completely.I opened his calendar.Board debrief. Singapore call. Meridian

Aria's POVThe break room at noon was always the loudest part of the day.Laughter spilling over lunch containers. Conversations overlapping. The smell of heated food mixing with fresh coffee and the particular energy of people who had been holding their professional faces in place since morning and were finally allowed to exhale. I usually loved this part of the day. The few minutes where the 34th floor stopped being a machine and remembered it was made of human beings.Today I walked into that noise and felt nothing but the dull familiar ache that had been sitting in my chest since morning.I had thought about what happened at my desk all day. The way I had stood in front of Daniel Cole and forgotten every word in the English language. The way he had looked at me in that moment with those dark focused eyes that missed absolutely nothing and I had felt completely and terrifyingly exposed. Like every feeling I had spent eight months carefully folding and hiding behind professionalism

Daniel's POVShe had been gone for exactly four minutes when I stopped pretending to read the Meridian file.I pushed it aside and stood and walked to the window the way I always did when something needed thinking through that my desk could not contain. The city stretched below me in its usual indifferent vastness. Glass buildings catching afternoon light. Traffic moving in patterns that made sense from up here even when they felt like chaos from the middle of them. I had stood at this window a hundred times and found the view clarifying.Today it gave me nothing.Because the thing I was thinking about had nothing to do with the city or the contracts or the forty seven unread emails sitting in my inbox demanding the kind of focused attention that I was completely incapable of giving right now.I was thinking about Aria Blackwood walking out of my office.The way she had stood there and asked me quietly if everything was okay with a voice that carried something underneath the professio

Aria's POVThe break room at noon was the one place on the 34th floor where the building's carefully maintained professionalism loosened slightly around the edges. Conversations got louder. Shoulders dropped. People remembered they were human beings and not just extensions of their job titles for approximately forty five minutes before everything tightened back up again.I usually loved this part of the day.Today I carried my lunch to the corner table by the window and sat down with the specific intention of eating quietly and thinking about absolutely nothing and giving my overworked mind the kind of rest it had been refusing since yesterday morning when Daniel Cole set a cup of coffee on my desk and said same as yours like it was a simple unremarkable thing.It was not a simple unremarkable thing.I had thought about it through the rest of yesterday. Through the drive home. Through the ceiling staring that had replaced actual sleep. Through this morning's commute and the elevator r