5. Imogen
Imogen
Three days, and the man hasn’t so much as breathed in my direction.
Which, for the record, is the best thing that’s happened to me since I signed his unhinged contract.
Ashton Fraser has turned avoiding me into a sport he’s winning.
He runs his calls in his office, sometimes at home, sometimes at work, eats at hours that don’t touch mine, and has somehow rerouted the whole traffic pattern of his enormous home so we never end up breathing the same air.
After the kitchen, after the cake, after the thing in the front of his pajama pants I have filed under never happened, this arrangement and I are getting along beautifully.
The bonus prize is that vanishing from me means vanishing from my sessions too.
No schedule corrections slid across the table.
No pencil bulletins at dawn. No one looming at the edge of the worksheets.
Just me and Luke and three days where the boy keeps opening up a fraction more, settling into a room that finally stays his, instead of one that might get opened up and graded at any second.
So naturally Ashton finds a way to ruin it without being in the room.
The note is on the counter the third morning, his handwriting, all hard corners, no hello. Company dinner tonight, board attending. Your presence is required. You attend as Luke’s tutor. His conduct in the room is your responsibility.
No please. No are you free, by any chance. Just required, the same hard hand as the live-in clause, the rulebook, every other thing in this house that shows up already decided and pressed into the page in ink.
I read it twice. A man who has spent seventy-two hours acting like I’m a stain he can’t get out of the carpet has still found time to pencil my whole evening in for me.
I have no idea what to do with it, so I do what I do with everything in this house I can’t afford to poke at.
I chalk it up to tuition and go dig through my closet for anything that might pass as dinner-with-a-billionaire’s-board instead of grad student who owns three cardigans.
Getting Luke dressed turns out to be the actual assignment.
“I hate all of them,” he tells me, glaring at a closet with way too many little blazers in it. “They’re scratchy, and they make me look like a tiny lawyer.”
“Okay, but here’s the thing.” I pull out a navy one. “Tiny lawyers are super scary. Nobody messes with a tiny lawyer. You just walk in and people give you stuff and say sorry.”
“What things?”
“Snacks. Apologies. Their car keys, purely out of fear.”
I get most of a smile for that. He pushes his arms through the sleeves and goes still while I do the top button, and his voice shrinks to the size it only reaches when there are no numbers to hide behind.
“Will you sit by me?”
“Always,” I tell him, and I mean it harder than I mean almost anything.
“Even if it’s boring?”
“Especially if it’s boring. Boring is my specialty.”
He considers this seriously. “Dad says boring means safe.”
“Your dad’s not wrong about everything,” I say, and button the last one.
Ashton comes to get us himself, which after three days of dodging me around his own apartment seems like a slip.
I hear him in the hall before I see him, and then he’s in the doorway of Luke’s room, and I have the bad luck to glance up mid-button.
The armor’s back, charcoal, knife-pressed, the whole thing, and the problem is that it works.
I’ve been around men in expensive suits my whole life and learned to find them boring on principle.
He is not boring. I get one bad second to take in that the man is offensively good-looking before I remember I’ve sworn off noticing anything about him at all.
“Car’s downstairs,” he says, and then his eyes do the thing. They go down once, over the dress, and back up before I can be sure it happened, quick and covered like he’s been practicing not getting caught.
I bought the dress for eleven dollars at the secondhand place near my apartment, the one that smells like other people’s closets, and I spent twenty minutes this afternoon deciding the small snag at the hem doesn’t show if I don’t point it out.
Under his glance I’m suddenly, vividly aware of every dollar it didn’t cost. I lift my chin anyway, because the alternative is letting him watch me shrink, and I’d rather die.
“Luke picked the navy,” I tell him, steering us both back to the only safe subject in the room.
He looks at Luke. “Good call,” he tells his son.
Luke stands up straighter.
The car is so quiet it has to be expensive, all leather and low light and a partition between us and the driver, and the three of us fold into a back seat with more room than three people need and somehow not enough of it.
Luke takes the middle. I take the window.
Ashton takes the other side, and across the boy’s head the gap between us is exactly as wide as it was back in Luke’s doorway and closing by the block.
He looks out his window and I look out through mine. Luke narrates a documentary fact about octopus hearts to no one, and neither of us is listening. Even though I’m not sitting next to him, I can feel the warmth of him down my whole left side without a single part of us touching.
“You clean up nice,” he says, to the glass, not to me.
“Don’t sound so shocked.”
“I’m not.” A streetlight slides over his jaw. “Shocked isn’t the word.”
I decide not to ask what the word is, because the car is small, the night is long, and I’ve got a six-year-old’s hand in mine reminding me exactly what I’m here to do.
“What’s the word, Dad?” Luke asks.
Ashton keeps his eyes on the window. “Never mind.”
“You brought it up,” Luke says.
“I’m aware.”
Luke looks at me, but I look at the city going past. Neither of us says anything else.
The dinner is in a private room with the lights kept low and the forks kept plural, men in suits shaking Ashton’s hand like each of them is testing the grip for a soft spot.
Ashton pulls the chair out beside Luke before I get to it and sets it back a few inches so I have room. He says nothing and simply returns to his conversation.
“Thank you,” I say when I sit down.
“For what?” He still won’t look at me, and that’s the thing that gets under my skin, not the dodging exactly, but that he can do it from a foot away, that I’m apparently so easy to talk past he can hand me half a compliment and then aim the rest of the conversation out the window.
I sit with the gap between us and the back of his head and decide I will not be the one to fill the silence.
Luke grabs my hand under the table the second I sit and I let him keep it.
The dinner’s going fine, against the odds. The boy is being a tiny lawyer, sitting up straight, fielding the one question an older man tosses him about school with a quick “I don’t go to school right now, I have a tutor,” and then pointing at me like he’s presenting evidence.
“He’s the best student I’ve got,” I say, loud enough to carry, because a kid this nervous needs the win said out loud. “Reads two grades up. Corrects my math when I get sloppy.”
Luke goes pink to the ears and pretends to study his napkin, but he sits a little taller, his shoulders come down an inch, and the leg that was jiggling under the table goes still. Buttering him up in public is cheating, but I do it anyway and It works every time.
“You correct her math?” the older man asks him.
“Only when she carries the wrong number,” Luke says, very serious. The man laughs, and for a second the boy looks like he might actually be having an okay time.
I’m working out which fork to use next when a woman walks in and the table goes quiet.
The man who’d been mid-sentence about the optics just stops, fork halfway up, and nobody hurries to fill the gap.
I don’t know who she is, but I know she wasn’t expected, because not one man here looks glad to see her.
She’s beautiful in a polished, expensive style, hair scared into submission, the smile already cocked before she’s all the way into the room.
She doesn’t wait to be seated. She crosses to the table, picks up an empty flute from a setting that isn’t hers, lifts the champagne out of its bucket, and pours her own glass like she’s been doing it at this table for years. Nobody moves to help her. Nobody dares not to let her.
“This is a closed dinner, Sophia.” Ashton hasn’t gotten up. He doesn’t raise his voice. “Why are you here?”
“It’s a family evening, isn’t it? That’s what the invitation said.” She tops the glass off without looking at him. “I’m his mother, Ashton. There’s no signing that away, no matter how much you’d like to.”
So that’s the ex-wife. Going by the air pressure, the marriage might have ended, but the hostility clearly remained.
Her eyes take a slow lap of the table and stop on me, and the smile hones itself. “And who’s this?”
“Imogen Spencer.” I supply it myself, since the men have all become deeply moved by their plates.
“Spencer.” She tastes the name, sets it down unfinished. “You must be the new live-in help. Ashton does churn through staff.” She picks up a glass, turns it by the stem. “It’s all the governing. People can only be managed for so long before they bolt.”
“Funny, I find the schedules soothing,” I say. “Color-coded. Very calming for the nerves.”
Her eyes sharpen a degree, the first flicker that she’s heard a person and not a job title. Next to me Ashton goes a hair less like carved stone, the corner of his mouth twitching toward something he kills before it can finish.
The loudest thing in the room is the thing that doesn’t happen. She doesn’t look at her son. He’s three feet from her in a navy blazer he chose himself, and she glides straight past him like he’s part of the table dressing. His fingers go cold and small in my hand.
That’s the piece I won’t be forgiving, and I’ve known the woman ninety seconds.
“He’s the best student I’ve got,” I say, loud enough to reach the far end, turning the whole table toward Luke whether it wants to go or not. “Smartest kid in any room he walks into. Ask him anything about the ocean.”
Her gaze ticks to her son briefly, then comes back to me like he was a typo she already fixed. “How nice for him.”
Luke’s hand tightens around mine under the table. I squeeze back once, quick, and don’t look at him, because looking at him right now would be the worst thing I could do.
Ashton’s jaw has gone to granite.
“You’ve made your point,” he says, quiet, not looking up from his glass. “Now make your exit.”
“So inhospitable.” She reaches for a bread roll she has no plan to eat, turns it over, then sets it back down. “I came to see my son. Surely even you can’t bill me for that.”
“You haven’t said a word to him since you walked in.”
She doesn’t answer that. She turns her attention out across the table like he never spoke, and the men hurry to be deep in other conversations.
Under the table, without a glance, Ashton’s hand finds Luke’s shoulder and stays. It’s the only movement in the room that means anything.
I use the cover of it to get Luke up, one hand on his back, steering him toward the hall before anyone thinks to stop us, on the excuse of a bathroom neither of us needs. I think I’ve gotten him clear.
I haven’t. She’s there before we reach the door, and I never hear her cross the room, just her hand landing light on my arm, her voice dropped under the noise so it belongs to me alone.
“A little advice, sweetheart. Woman to woman.” She’s close enough now that her perfume arrives like part of the threat, something she put on to fill a room and not leave it. “Be careful in that house.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
“I’m sure you believe that.” Her fingers close, friendly, terrible. “I believed it too, once.”
I keep my face a polite mask. “I appreciate the concern.”
“No you don’t.” She almost smiles. “But you will because there’s something you ought to understand before you settle in. Fraser men don’t love.”
She tips in the last inch, near enough that I can see every bit of work holding up the smile.
“They collect.”