8. Sloane
Sloane
By eleven-thirty, the executive floor has gone quiet enough that I can hear the hum of the recessed lighting above the conference table.
Most of the staff left hours ago. The assistants disappeared around nine, legal sometime after ten, and Dana finally surrendered to exhaustion twenty minutes ago after promising to monitor media alerts from home.
Which leaves Marcus and me alone with three laptops, two untouched coffees, and a revised appearance schedule spread across the table between us. The silence should feel productive. Instead, it feels aware.
Marcus sits across from me with his sleeves rolled back and his attention fixed on the financial projections open on the screen beside him.
The loosened tie should make him look less severe.
Somehow it has the opposite effect. Like the long day stripped away the polished executive layer and left something refined underneath.
I stop looking at him immediately, or try to.
“We need to cut the morning radio segment,” I say, scanning the latest schedule revision. “It overlaps with the shareholder briefing, and if the market reacts badly to anything said live, we lose the rest of the day managing fallout.”
Marcus doesn’t look up. “Fine.”
“I already know that means you disagree.”
That finally pulls his attention toward me. “You know because you scheduled it.”
“Yes, and now I’m unscheduling it.”
“You liked the host.”
“I did.”
“Then why cut it?”
“Because she asks smart questions.”
A slow understanding moves across his expression. “And smart questions are suddenly a problem?”
“Uncontrolled smart questions are always a problem.”
Marcus leans back slightly in his chair, studying me with that same steady focus that’s been increasingly difficult to ignore over the last three days.
“You say things like that,” he says, “and then wonder why people think you’re intimidating.”
“I’m not wondering.”
That earns the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth before he looks back down at the screen.
The silence that follows feels different somehow, quieter and less guarded, and a moment later, Marcus reaches for the revised appearance notes beside him. He skims the top page before sliding the folder across the table toward me without looking up.
“You swapped the analyst briefing order.”
“Yes.”
“You usually put investor questions before media strategy.”
“Only when the board’s involved.”
Marcus makes a quiet sound of acknowledgment, then reorganizes the stack automatically before setting it beside his laptop in the exact sequence I prefer during live prep sessions. The movement is absent-minded but familiar.
That’s new.
Three days ago, every conversation between us turned into a negotiation for control. Now he anticipates how I organize briefing materials before I explain it, and somewhere along the way, I stopped having to defend every adjustment I make to the strategy.
Worse, he listens. Not performatively. He absorbs information quickly enough that I’ve already started adjusting around it without meaning to. The realization unsettles me in the quiet conference room.
We work well together now. That should feel useful. Instead, it feels dangerous in a way I don’t entirely trust.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the conference room, the city glows against the dark sky in fractured reflections of white and gold. Traffic moves below in slow streams of light while somewhere farther down the hall, an elevator dings softly before disappearing back into silence.
I should focus on the schedule. Instead, my attention drifts to the loosened tie and the sleeves rolled to his forearms. To the way exhaustion has worn the edges off some of his control without fully removing it.
That is the dangerous part. Marcus never actually loses control. Not publicly. Not privately. Not even during the press conference when he kissed me like he forgot there were cameras watching.
It isn’t the kiss I keep thinking about. It’s the moment afterward, the split second where Marcus seemed to forget the cameras completely. My fingers tighten around the pen in my hand before I deliberately loosen them again.
Strategically, the kiss worked. That doesn’t make it any less of a mistake. The internet is still treating it like the beginning of a love story instead of a calculated media pivot, and every hour the narrative holds, the original scandal loses another layer of momentum.
Professionally, it’s working. Personally, I try not to think about it at all. Which would be significantly easier if I didn’t remember exactly how his hand felt against my jaw.
“Something wrong with the projections?”
I look up quickly and realize Marcus is already watching me, his attention fixed on me with far too much focus to feel casual.
“No.”
“You stopped reading three minutes ago.”
“That’s a dramatic exaggeration.”
“Two minutes, then.”
I should redirect the conversation. Instead, I hear myself say, “You’ve become very observant lately.”
The words sound differently than I intended.
Marcus’s gaze doesn’t move from mine. “Maybe you’ve become easier to read.”
“That’s not true.”
“No,” he says evenly. “Probably not.”
The room still around the words, not awkward exactly, but suddenly far too aware.
I look back down at the file in front of me before the silence stretches into something harder to manage. “Tomorrow's afternoon interview needs revised talking points.”
Marcus doesn’t answer immediately. I can feel the intensity of his stare from across the table.
“You change subjects every time something becomes remotely personal.”
I keep my eyes on the schedule. “And yet you keep following me into the next conversation anyway.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“No?”
The low calmness in his voice makes the question more dangerous than if he’d challenged me outright. I should shut this down. Instead, I flip to the next page too quickly, catching the edge of the folder beneath it. The entire stack slides sideways across the polished table.
“Damn it.”
I reach for the papers at the same moment Marcus does. Our hands collide lightly over the scattered schedules. The contact is brief, but it feels like a warning.
I freeze for half a second before pulling my hand back, but Marcus doesn’t move immediately. His fingers remain against the edge of the page near mine, close enough that I can feel warmth radiating from his skin without him actually touching me again.
The air changes quietly enough that most people probably wouldn’t notice it, which somehow makes it worse.
Marcus lifts his eyes to mine slowly, and suddenly I’m aware of everything at once. The empty executive floor, the muted city lights beyond the windows, and the fact that no one else is here to interrupt this if it becomes something neither of us can explain afterward.
Neither of us moves immediately.
Marcus’s hand remains against the edge of the scattered papers, close enough to mine that the space between us feels deliberate now instead of accidental.
The conference room suddenly feels smaller than it did a minute ago, narrowed down to the distance between his body and mine, and the awareness settling heavily into it.
His gaze drops briefly to the folders before returning to my eyes again, slower this time. Intentional enough that my pulse stumbles once in response. I should move, but I don’t.
That realization lands hard enough to make my pulse stumble once, because this is the first time since the press conference that there’s no audience, or cameras, or a strategic reason to stand too close or look too long.
Nothing is requiring this moment except the fact that neither of us has ended it yet.
Marcus’s gaze drops briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes. The movement is small, but I feel it everywhere. My breath catches before I can stop it. His expression shifts almost imperceptibly at the sound. Not triumph or arrogance. Just awareness. That makes it worse.
Marcus straightens slowly, one hand still resting against the edge of the scattered papers while the other braces against the table beside him. Close enough now that if I leaned forward even slightly…
I don't finish the thought. I don't need to.
Because I know exactly what would happen, and the terrifying part is that I'm no longer entirely sure I would stop it.
Marcus knows it too. I see the realization move through him in real time, controlled enough that someone else might miss it. His eyes sharpen slightly, his focus narrowing like he's reevaluating around a variable he never expected.
Me.
The silence stretches between us. Every instinct I have should be screaming at me to step back, say something sharp, reestablish control before this becomes impossible to explain professionally.
Instead, I stay exactly where I am.
And when I don't move, something shifts in his expression. Not withdrawal exactly, but the quiet certainty of someone who has just made up his mind.
“This,” he says quietly, “is where things start getting complicated.”
The words should break the tension, but they don’t. If anything, they make it worse. Because he isn’t saying he doesn’t want this. He’s saying he sees exactly what it could become. And he’s choosing to stop anyway. For one reckless second, I almost hate him for that.
Marcus steps back first.
The movement is controlled, deliberate, infuriatingly composed. One second, he’s close enough that I can still feel the heat of him across the table, and the next, he’s putting distance back between us like he never forgot how.
I stare at him across the conference room, anger rising too fast for me to untangle properly.
Marcus reaches for the scattered papers and slides them neatly back into place before returning to his chair. The calmness of it feels almost offensive.
“You should get some sleep,” he says.
The final insult. Professional concern wrapped neatly around a moment I clearly imagined differently than he did.
I force my expression back under control before he can see any of that on my face. “I’m not tired.”
“That wasn’t a comment on your work ethic.”
“Then what was it?”
Marcus studies me for a moment, and I suddenly realize he looks just as controlled now as he did during the interviews earlier today. Whatever happened a minute ago, he locked it down fast enough that I can’t find the edges of it anymore.
“That was me recognizing we’ve both been working for sixteen hours,” he says evenly.
It isn’t rejection exactly, but it isn’t acknowledgment either. Just careful distance placed back between us with the same control Marcus seems to apply to everything else. Somehow, that feels worse.
I should leave. Instead, I sit back down, and Marcus’s gaze flicks toward me briefly before returning to his laptop.
“You’re staying.”
I open the revised schedule again, even though the words blur slightly for a second before refocusing. “We still have tomorrow’s briefing to finalize.”
A long silence follows that. Not tense or relaxed, but something’s suspended uneasily between both.
Marcus finally nods once and reaches for his coffee again. “Fine.”
The room settles back into quiet after that, but it’s different now. Thinner somehow. Every movement feels sharper against the silence. Every glance lasts half a second too long before one of us looks away again.
I hate that he stepped back. I hate more that I didn’t. Because now I know exactly how dangerous this actually is. Not the fake relationship, or the press, or the headlines.
This.
A quiet conference room after midnight, where Marcus Vale looked at me like he wanted something he had already decided he wasn’t going to take.
And the worst part—the truly humiliating part—is that if he hadn’t stepped away first, I’m no longer certain I would have stopped him.