Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Sutton
The door is closed.
That's the first thing I'm aware of — the quiet click of it behind me, the way it changes the room.
I've been in Logan's office dozens of times in the past month.
It has never felt like this. The difference is the door, and what the door means, and the fact that the floor beyond it has gone quiet for the evening and it's just the two of us on this side of it. I sit across from him and wait.
He looks at me for a moment the way he looks at everything he's about to address — directly, without preamble, having already decided what he's going to say and how.
His hands are folded on the desk. His expression gives away nothing, which is standard.
What isn't standard is the particular quality of the pause before he speaks, a half-beat longer than his usual delivery, as if even Logan Drake needed an extra second to frame this one.
"There's an event in Dallas next month," he says.
"The Drake Foundation philanthropy gala. Black tie. It's a significant room — major donors, foundation board members, people whose goodwill matters to this company in ways that extend well beyond a single evening." He holds my gaze evenly.
"I'll be presenting the foundation's annual infrastructure grant, which puts me at the center of that room for most of the night. Arriving alone sends a message I'm not interested in sending."
I keep my expression neutral. I'm listening.
"I need someone beside me," he continues.
"Someone who can hold a conversation in that environment, who already understands the business context, and who won't need to be managed while I'm managing everything else." A beat.
"I'm asking you to attend as my date."
The word sits in the air between us. He doesn't flinch from it and neither do I, though something in my chest does a thing I don't acknowledge.
"In what capacity, exactly?" I ask.
"What would that require?"
"Public appearances throughout the evening. Conversation with donors and board members.
Presenting as a couple in a way that reads as convincing." His delivery doesn't change — same tone, same steadiness, same Logan.
"Nothing beyond that."
I take a breath that I keep small enough that he won't notice it.
The professional logic is clean. I can see exactly why he's asking — I've been in enough rooms with him now to understand the social architecture of his world, and I understand equally that a man in his position arriving solo to a room full of people watching him carries an implication he'd want to control.
I'm the obvious solution. I know the business.
I've proven I can handle myself. From a purely strategic standpoint this makes complete sense.
From every other standpoint it is considerably more complicated.
I have a boyfriend. I work for this man.
The boyfriend is this man's brother, which is a detail that has been living in the background of my professional life for a month and which has not become less complicated with time.
And now Logan Drake is sitting across his desk from me in a closed office at the end of a quiet evening asking me to spend a night in Dallas on his arm.
He is watching me process this with the patience of someone who has already decided the answer and is waiting for me to arrive at it.
"All right," I say. "I'll do it."
Something in his posture shifts — barely, just a fractional settling, the specific release of tension in a man who doesn't show tension.
"Good. We'll cover the logistics this week. There are two briefings I want you in before we go — the donor list, the foundation board dynamics, the political landscape of the room."
"I'll clear the time."
He nods once. The meeting, if that's what this was, is over. I stand, smooth my skirt, and cross to the door.
I'm halfway through it when I become aware of something I can't name — a charge in the air behind me, the specific feeling of being watched without being able to confirm it.
I don't turn around. I pull the door closed behind me, walk to my desk, and sit down.
My hands are steady. The rest of me is taking a moment to catch up.
Maggie is on the couch with a glass of wine and her laptop when I get home, which is her default state on weeknights, and she takes one look at me when I come through the door and sets the laptop aside.
"What happened?"
I drop my bag on the chair by the entrance, kick off my heels, and go to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of whatever she's opened. I take a sip before I answer, because some things require a moment before they become sentences.
"Logan asked me to go to Dallas with him," I say.
"For a philanthropy gala. As his date."
The silence that follows is very Maggie — not the absence of a reaction, but the brief suspension of one, the moment before she decides how to release it.
"His date," she repeats.
"Fake date. For appearances. He needs someone who knows the business and can hold the room. It's a strategic decision." I sit on the other end of the couch and pull my legs underneath me.
"He was very clear about that."
"I'm sure he was." Maggie's tone is dry in the specific way it gets when she finds something both obvious and slightly absurd. "And you said yes."
"It's a legitimate professional opportunity. The people in that room — foundation board members, major donors — that's a network I couldn't access any other way. And I already know his world well enough to—"
"Sutton." She says my name the way she does when she wants me to stop building the case and start telling the truth.
"I'm not arguing with your logic. Your logic is fine. I'm just noting that your boss — who happens to be your boyfriend's brother — just asked you to pretend to be his girlfriend in another city, and you said yes, and you walked in here looking like that."
"Like what?"
She gives me a look that does all the work a sentence would.
"Like someone who has a lot of feelings they're being very organized about."
I take another sip of wine.
"It's professional. It's temporary. It's one evening."
"Okay," she says simply, which means she's decided not to push, which is almost worse than if she did.
"What?"
"Nothing. I didn't say anything."
"You said okay in that specific way that means you have a lot more to say."
Maggie smiles and picks her laptop back up.
"What does Caleb think about it?"
The question lands and I feel the beat before my answer — brief, barely there, but there.
"I haven't talked to him about the details. I'll mention I have a work trip. He doesn't need the whole breakdown."
Maggie says nothing, which is the loudest response available to her.
"He travels for work constantly," I say.
"He'd understand it."
"I'm sure he would," she agrees mildly, and takes a sip of her wine.
I change the subject because the alternative is sitting inside a question I'm not ready to answer, and Maggie lets me because she's perceptive enough to know that some things land better when they're given room to settle on their own.
But later, in my room, getting ready for bed, the question finds me anyway.
Not the one about Caleb — the simpler one, the one that's been there since I walked out of that office tonight.
I said yes immediately. Before I'd thought it through.
Before I'd weighed the complications against the opportunity.
I said yes the way you say yes to something when part of you has already been waiting for the question.
I don't examine that too closely. I turn off the light and let the city do the rest.
***
The first briefing is on a Tuesday.
Logan has the donor list pulled up on the conference room screen when I arrive — forty-seven names, each with a profile that covers their philanthropic history, their relationship to the Drake Foundation, their professional background, and in several cases a specific note about what they care about most and what they don't respond well to.
It is, I think as I sit down and open my notebook, the most thorough preparation I've ever seen anyone do for a social event.
"We'll go through the tier-one donors first," he says, standing at the head of the table. He doesn't sit for these — he moves, pacing slightly, the way he does when he's working through something that requires all of him.
"These are the relationships that matter most to the foundation's ongoing funding structure. You need to know their names, their connection to the foundation, and at least one specific thing about each of them before we walk into that room."
"Understood." I'm already making notes.
He moves through the list with the precision of someone who has done this type of preparation his entire professional life — specific, efficient, never more information than what's actually useful.
I ask questions when I need to and don't when I don't, and somewhere in the second hour of it I notice that we've shifted from him presenting to the two of us working through the material together, trading observations, cross-referencing what I've absorbed about the business over the past month against the social landscape he's mapping.
He corrects me twice. Both corrections are right.
At one point we both reach for the printed donor profile on the table at the same time — my hand landing a half-second before his, close enough that when he reaches I feel the air move before his fingers stop an inch from mine.
He pulls back. Picks up a different document. Doesn't acknowledge it.
I write something in my notebook that has nothing to do with donor profiles.