The Billionaire’s Public Secret (The Santa Rosa Ravens #2)

1. Marcus

Marcus

The problem isn’t the photos. It’s how fast they spread.

By the time I walk into the boardroom, every screen in the room is already glowing with some version of the same image, blown out by camera flash, badly cropped, and captioned worse.

Me with a woman I haven’t seen in six months, stepping out of a private event.

My hand at the small of her back, and her mouth too close to my ear.

Someone tied to a decision the market is already watching.

Another shot of us laughing. Another of her leaning in across the backseat of a town car.

None of it is definitive. All of it engineered to suggest something we can’t afford to let take shape.

Which means the optics are already doing exactly what optics do best. Distorting reality into something more useful.

I keep walking.

No one speaks as I cross the room, but the silence feels less like restraint and more like anticipation.

Everyone here knows I hate being dragged into messes I didn’t create.

They also know that once something becomes public, I don’t waste time being angry about it.

Anger doesn’t fix anything. It just burns time you don’t get back.

At the head of the table, Graham looks up from his phone, expression unreadable.

Declan is leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, not even pretending he hasn’t already read every headline.

Adrian stands near the far wall with that stillness he falls into when he’s thinking three moves ahead of everyone else in the room.

Near my chair, my assistant Evan is already organizing the overnight briefing packets and filtering the flood of incoming alerts into something usable.

And at the opposite end of the table, Sloane Parker is already on her feet. Somehow, she’s always in motion before anyone else realizes the room has shifted.

The screens behind her cycle through coverage from financial sites, gossip accounts, and entertainment blogs that have no business using the word insider as often as they do.

One lower-third banner is already calling it a “leadership scandal” with the kind of confidence only people outside the room ever seem to possess.

Sloane doesn’t look at me right away. She’s halfway through instructing two members of her team, voice even, posture straight, one hand braced on the polished edge of the conference table while the other scrolls through a tablet.

She doesn’t need to. The room already adjusts around her.

“Pull everything that’s been posted in the last fifteen minutes and separate it by source,” she says. “I want outlets with actual reach first. If the second-tier blogs are echoing language from the same primary leak, I want that flagged before we loop external counsel in.”

Dana, her assistant, nods and moves. Another follows without being told twice.

Efficient. Direct. Controlled in a way that would matter less if she didn’t wear authority like she invented the concept herself.

I set my phone on the table and stop beside my chair. “How widespread?”

Her gaze lifts to mine, cool and level, like she’s been expecting me to interrupt but planned for it anyway.

Sloane always looks composed. Not soft. Not polished in the ornamental sense.

Deliberate. Clean lines, sharp eyes, not a strand of chestnut hair out of place.

The kind of woman who can walk into chaos and somehow make everyone else feel underdressed for it.

“Widespread enough that pretending it’ll burn out on its own would be a mistake,” she says.

No greeting, or preamble. Honestly, I wouldn’t have trusted either from her anyway.

I glance at the nearest screen again. “That wasn’t the question.”

“No,” she says. “It was the useful answer.”

Declan lets out a low sound that might be a laugh if he weren’t smart enough to cut it off.

I take my seat. “How widespread?”

“One business site picked it up first. The gossip accounts made it spread, and by this morning, people were already connecting your personal judgment to the company.” She taps her tablet once and turns it slightly so the table can see a line graph already trending in the wrong direction.

“Crossridge opened the morning down nearly four percent in the first hour. It’s recovered slightly, but not enough. ”

Graham’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly.

I don’t react. “Source?”

“Still tracing it.”

“Then start there.”

“I already am.”

Her tone doesn’t rise. It never needs to. Sloane can put more challenge into a flat sentence than most people manage with raised voices and slammed hands.

I lean back in my chair, not because I’m relaxed but because I know exactly what everyone in this room is watching for. “Good. Then while you trace it, we keep oxygen away from it.”

Sloane’s expression doesn’t change. “By saying nothing.”

“By refusing to validate it.”

Her eyes narrow a fraction. “Those aren’t the same thing.”

“They are when the story collapses without confirmation.”

“They’re not when silence reads like strategic avoidance.”

No drama. No spectacle. Just immediate opposition, clean and direct, as if she walked into the room already standing on the other side of the line.

I fold my hands once on the table. “A reactive statement turns a gossip cycle into a corporate one.”

“And no statement lets everyone else define it for us.”

“We don’t need to dignify manufactured nonsense.”

“We don’t get to call it nonsense after it’s already cost us market value.”

The room goes very still. Not because she’s wrong, but because she said it to me.

I feel Graham’s attention shift between us. Declan doesn’t even bother pretending he’s looking anywhere else now. Adrian remains motionless near the wall, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Adrian, it’s that silence from him never means absence.

I keep my voice level. “The market corrects.”

“Reputation damage doesn’t.”

My gaze stays on hers.

There’s history inside this dynamic, even if nobody at this table knows the full shape of it.

Not romantic history. Nothing that simple.

Just friction. More than once over the last two years, Sloane and I have landed on opposite sides of a strategy call and turned the room into collateral damage without ever technically crossing a professional line.

She believes credibility is a finite resource.

I believe panic is contagious. Usually, those ideas can coexist.

Today, apparently, they can’t.

“Then we contain the narrative,” I say.

“We don’t have a narrative yet.”

“We create one.”

Her mouth hardens slightly. “That’s exactly the problem.”

A phone buzzes two seats down. Another follows. Screens light up around the table almost in sequence, a quiet chain reaction of incoming alerts. I don’t need to check mine to know what that means.

Someone new picked it up.

Graham exhales once through his nose. “Say it.”

Sloane turns her tablet toward him. “Daylight Sentinel just ran it.”

Not because Daylight Sentinel is the biggest outlet in the country. It’s because it isn’t trash; just legitimate enough to make everyone else feel justified repeating it.

The headline is worse than the others.

CROSSRIDGE COO TIED TO GROWING CONTROVERSY AS INVESTOR QUESTIONS RISE

Investor questions. Plural.

No evidence. No names. Just an insinuation packaged in business language for people who like their gossip wearing a blazer.

Declan swears under his breath.

Graham’s eyes shift to me. “Were any of the investors at that event?”

“No.”

“Any clients?”

“Not relevant.”

Sloane cuts in before Graham can answer. “That depends on what’s in the next wave.”

I look at her. “Then we stop the next wave.”

“With what?” she asks. “Wishful thinking?”

“With discipline.”

“With facts.”

The words land on top of each other, close enough to overlap, and for one second, neither of us says anything after that.

Then Graham pushes back from the table slightly. “I need options, not philosophy.”

“I can give you both,” Sloane says immediately.

I don’t miss the way she stands straighter when she addresses him, not deferential but precise.

She’s good at this. Better than good. She doesn’t scramble.

Doesn’t over-explain. Doesn’t dress uncertainty up as confidence just to make people feel better.

It’s one of the reasons I pushed to keep her when Crossridge brought PR in-house, even though she still seems to think I opposed the move.

Maybe because I didn’t exactly make it easy.

She taps her screen again, and the next set of notes appears behind her.

“Option one: we issue a brief holding statement. No denial of specific conduct, just a clean acknowledgment that unverified images are circulating and that Crossridge doesn’t comment on executives’ personal lives unless there’s a material business concern.

That gives us breathing room while we identify the source and assess exposure. ”

“That tells every outlet watching there’s something worth asking about,” I say.

“It tells them we’re not hiding from the existence of the story.”

“It makes the story bigger.”

Sloane doesn’t react to that immediately. One hand settles against the conference table instead, fingers flattening briefly against the polished surface before she looks back at me.

“It makes us look less afraid of it.”

I lean back slightly in my chair, studying her for a second longer than necessary. “I’m not interested in appearances.”

Something unreadable shifts behind her eyes at that answer.

“That’s easy to say when the story isn’t about whether your judgment can destabilize investor confidence.”

Sloane looks at me before she says, “That would be more convincing if this weren’t currently an optics problem.”

Declan looks down, probably to hide the fact that he almost smiled.

I ignore him. “You’re assuming this gets solved through performance.”

“Silence and inaction are not the same thing.”

“Then I’d love to hear the difference.”