Chapter Seven #2
"You kissed her in public," Levi says. "You have time for this."
"She kissed me."
Both my brothers go silent for half a beat.
Then Levi says, "Sure."
Colston nods solemnly. "Compelling legal defense. We don't believe you."
"She already moved in," I say before I can stop myself.
That gets a real reaction.
Levi whistles low. "Holy shit. That's fast."
"It was necessary. The engagement had to look real, immediately."
"Right," Colston says. "And the hand on her ass was part of the rollout strategy."
Levi laughs so hard he has to grab the pull-up bar for support. Colston crosses his arms and shakes his head, muffling back a chuckle.
I let them have it. They talk around me for a few minutes—about the Hawkeyes' upcoming series, about a Foundation gala Everly is planning. Normal Kauffman noise. The kind that should be comforting.
It isn't.
Because underneath all of it, my brain is still running its own parallel conversation. The feel of her thighs on either side of mine. The way she tasted. The sound of her breathing when she pulled back and looked at me like she'd surprised herself more than she'd surprised me.
"I'm heading up," I say, pushing off the wall.
"Hey," Levi calls after me. I stop and glance over my shoulder. His expression shifts—still amused, but with something quieter underneath. "Sienna texted me too. She said she's surprised you didn't warn her first."
My jaw locks.
"She was seeing someone else. She didn't need a heads-up."
Levi shrugs. "That doesn't mean she wasn't still betting on you."
I don't answer. Because the truth is, Sienna always understood exactly what I was offering—no messy details, no meeting the family, no Christmas vacations in Aspen.
Just two people married to their careers, looking to pass the time with someone every once in a while.
At least, that's what I thought we were doing.
I leave before my brothers can say anything else.
By the time I reach my office, Jeremy is already there with breakfast and a tablet.
He glances up as I drop my bag. "Morning, sir."
"What's first?"
He hands me the tablet. "Emergency board meeting at eight. Hawkeyes legal at nine. Call with Vancouver's GM at ten. Planning session with PR at eleven." He hesitates—the particular hesitation that means Everly is involved. "And Miss Kauffman moved your tux fitting to this afternoon."
I close my eyes briefly. "She thinks she has to handle my own tux fitting?"
He doesn’t stop to process the question. This is my sister so of course she took over the planning of everything.
"She also asked me to remind you that wedding vendors begin initial coordination tomorrow."
I may have only met Everly and my brothers five years ago, but you'd think she's been my pain-in-the-ass little sister all my life, calibrating new ways to get a rise out of me like it's an Olympic sport she's training for.
"I'm aware."
He shifts his weight slightly. "There's one more thing."
"That phrase has never once improved my day."
He slides his tablet under one arm. "Ms. Brighton is here."
I look up.
"Sienna?"
He nods. His expression is carefully neutral—Jeremy neutral, which is its own art form. The man could announce a building fire with the same composure he uses to deliver my coffee.
I don't have time for this. Which means, naturally, it's happening anyway. We still work together—the acquisitions that her firm finds for me are essential to my operations. She moved on first. She has no reason to find fault with me getting engaged to Aria.
Except she will.
"Send her in."
Jeremy opens the door and vanishes before the room can become collateral damage.
Sienna steps in wearing a gray suit sharp enough to classify as a weapon. Her ponytail is sleek. Her expression is composed. Her eyes are not.
She shuts the door behind her.
"So it’s true… you’re getting married?" she asks.
No greeting. No smile.
"Yes."
"That's all?"
I lean back in my chair. "What would you like? A press packet?"
Her laugh is short and humorless. "A heads-up would've been nice."
"Should I remind you that you're seeing someone else?"
She folds her arms. "That isn't the point."
"Then what is the point, Sienna? Because we both have a lot of work to do and I'd like to get back to mine."
She looks at me for a long moment. A crack in the composure—there and gone—the same eyes that I used to think I understood, back when I believed that two people who didn't need anything from each other was the same as two people who had everything.
"I didn't expect this," she says.
Neither did I.
"I didn't ask for your expectations."
"No." Her gaze hardens. "You never do."
Silence settles between us. Familiar and old and not nearly as comfortable as it used to be.
"I know we were casual," she says finally. "I know that. But casual for four years starts to feel like maybe there's a chance the man in question will eventually wake up and realize the obvious."
"The obvious," I repeat.
"That we fit."
On paper, maybe. Two people too busy for intimacy. Two people content with distance. Two people polished enough to make detachment look elegant.
But cold matched with cold doesn't make warmth.
It makes frostbite.
"We didn't fit," I say. "We functioned."
A flicker of hurt crosses her face before she smooths it away.
Sienna has always been good at that—the quick recovery, the composed mask sliding back into place.
I used to admire it. Now I recognize it for what it is.
It's the same thing I do. The same armor.
The same refusal to be seen in a moment of weakness.
The difference is that Aria doesn't do that. Aria's face shows everything like she never learned that vulnerability was supposed to be a liability.
"One day you swear you'll never get married, the next… you’re engaged to your assistant. You really are impossible to get a read on," Sienna says softly.
"I never tried to hide that."
"No. You didn't."
She made sense in all the ways that should have mattered. She was intelligent, self-contained, and never asked me for more than I was willing to give. The occasional gala. A night together when it suited us both. And not once in four years did she make me want to lose control.
Not once did I sit in a board meeting half-listening because I was too busy thinking about the last thing she said to me. Not once did I notice the way she held a pen, or the shape of her mouth around a laugh, or whether she took her coffee with sugar.
Aria is different.
I've spent the last six months noticing things about her without meaning to—how she presses the cap of her pen to her lip when she's thinking, how she talks with her hands when she’s nervous or excited, the way she…
And once I started noticing, it didn't stop there.
It became too easy to imagine crossing lines I had no business crossing. Walking out to her desk. Hauling her over my knee for that almond milk stunt. Stripping her down and laying her across the desk to find out exactly how loudly she'd moan my name if I put my mouth between her thighs.
That would have created an entirely different category of problem. The kind HR gets involved in. The kind that forced me to put distance between us before I did something neither of us could take back.
And now she's about to be my wife.
Sienna was always the logical option.
Aria is the one I can't think logically about.
She's also the one who agreed to the only arrangement I would have accepted—terms, structure, an expiration date. One year. Then we part ways.
Whereas Sienna just admitted what I already suspected. She was hoping I'd come to my senses. And if that's what she wants, she deserves to find it with someone who will considered a future with her.
I have never once considered spanking Sienna in the middle of a workday.
I've considered it with Aria approximately four hundred times since the almond milk incident.
Sienna heads for the door, then pauses with her hand on the handle. "I hope she knows what she's getting into."
So do I.
"She does."
Sienna glances back. "Does she? You're not nearly as hard to fall in love with as your brothers pretend."
Just before she turns, I call out, "Sienna. About our working relationship —"
"Don't worry, Tin Man," she says, using my brothers' nickname for me.
The fact that she knows it tells me exactly how much she was paying attention during the years I assumed she wasn't. "You're still my biggest client, and I'm just as ambitious now as I was before I walked into this office. Business as usual."
"Business as usual," I echo.
She leaves. The door clicks shut.
I stare at it for three full seconds. Then I stand, reach for my jacket, and head for the boardroom.
Christian meets me outside the executive conference room with a leather folder and the expression of a man who slept even less than I did.
"You look terrible," he says.
"Good morning to you too."
He hands me the folder. "Updated trust addendum. Read it on the way in if you'd like more reasons to hate our father."
"I already have enough."
Christian's mouth twitches. It doesn't reach humor. "They're taking this seriously. Yesterday's contract meeting was clean, but the board doesn't know about that. All they know is what the cameras showed them."
"I know."
"Do you?" He stops walking. I stop too. "You announced an engagement by making out with your former employee on the steps of an arena in front of cameras. That is either romantic or catastrophic." He gives me a pointed look. "You don't exactly have a history of being romantic."
"She signed the contract. We're aligned."
"Are you?"
I don't answer.
He studies me for half a second longer than is comfortable, then opens the boardroom door.
One long table stretches out. Three directors sit on the opposite side as us. Three expressions that say they smell fraud and are disappointed it isn't easier to prove.