Chapter Fourteen — Adrian
Three days.
Three days of watching her pull back. One inch at a time. So gradual I might have missed it, if I hadn't been watching for exactly this.
The coffee she brings herself now, instead of waiting for mine. The extra foot of space in the elevator. The way she answers questions fully, completely, and gives me nothing extra. That's its own kind of sentence.
She hasn't said anything. She doesn't have to.
I made a decision in the dark three nights ago. She's been making hers ever since.
Harlan Briggs arrives at eight that Tuesday evening. The news is good enough to deliver in person. Bad enough that he didn't want to put it in writing.
He's been my fixer for eleven years. Fifty-three years old. Former military, though he's never said which branch.
He doesn't drink coffee. He doesn't make small talk. Once, after a brutal acquisition, he told me I had the instincts of a surgeon and the bedside manner of a bill collector. I took it as a compliment.
He sits across from me now with a tablet and a face that gives nothing away. That's how I know the forty-eight hours I've been counting on isn't forty-eight hours.
"The man who sold her out is stalling," he says. "Wants more money to go on record. We're negotiating."
"Where are we?"
"Forty-eight hours. Maybe seventy-two."
I look at him.
"I know," he says. "I'm working it."
"The documents—"
"Are ready. The contact's signature is the last piece. Without it, Vane's lawyers can argue the supplier correspondence was obtained improperly and get the whole thing thrown." He sets the tablet down. "Forty-eight hours, Adrian. Seventy-two at the outside. Then you can burn him to the ground."
Forty-eight hours. Maybe seventy-two.
Three days of this. Three more to go.
"Is she safe?" I ask.
Briggs looks at me with the expression he uses when I've asked a question he finds professionally beneath me. "Vane's focused on the merger. She's not his priority right now."
"She's always his priority. That's the problem."
He picks up the tablet. "Forty-eight hours." He stands. "Try not to do anything that makes this harder."
He leaves. That's the thing about Briggs. He always leaves before you can argue with him. It's a tactic I've always admired and currently resent.
Somewhere below me, she is working alone in the dark, like she always has. I am up here. The only thing I can do is wait.
I put on my jacket, and I take the elevator down to fourteen. I see her through the glass before she sees me.
She's at the long drafting table. The one she claimed on her second day. Just put her things on it and never moved them.
The studio is lit the way it gets after hours. Overhead lights cut to half. The work lamp on. A pool of amber around her hands and the fabric. The rest of the room in shadow.
She's pinning something. A bodice, from the look of it. Ivory silk over the dress form.
Her hands move in the quick, certain rhythm of someone who's done this ten thousand times and still gives it everything. Hair up. Pencil behind her ear. Chalk on her left forearm. She's so absorbed she hasn't heard the elevator.
I stand at the glass for longer than I should.
Nothing about her fits the way I measure things. She doesn't reach for competence. It's already there. Bone-deep. Unself-conscious. The kind that doesn't need a room watching to exist.
I've been in rooms with powerful people my entire adult life. I've never once seen someone work like this. Like the doing of it is the whole point. The result almost beside it.
I watch her step back from the form. Tilt her head. Find whatever she's looking for. Step in again. Three times. Each time she comes back with something different in her hands. A pin, a fold, the flat of her palm smoothing a seam.
She's working out a problem. I can see it in her shoulders. The small release when the answer comes, before she moves to the next one.
Three days of her pulling back. Three days of controlled distancing. Full, complete answers that give me nothing extra.
And here, alone in her studio not yet nine, she's exactly herself. Unselfconscious. Absorbed. Unreachable in a way that has nothing to do with me and never has.
This is what she was before I arrived in her life. This is what she'll be after.
I've been building things my whole life. Companies. Contracts. Systems designed to outlast the people who made them.
I've never once built something I didn't believe I could control. I don't know what to do with a thing that was never mine to control. I don't know what to do with her.
She looks up. Her eyes find me through the glass. A beat. Then she goes back to the bodice.
I push open the door.
"Working late," I say.
"Deadline moved." She doesn't look up. "The Lyon assessment went to Sterling this morning. He had notes."
"He always has notes."
"Mm." She pins the left side seam. Pins the right. Steps back. Tilts her head. Looks at it the way she looks at things she hasn't decided about yet. "It was good work. His notes were wrong."
"Tell him that."
"I did." She picks up her shears. "He didn't love it."
Something in my chest loosens fractionally, the way it does when she's like this. Dry, precise, the armor on but not locked.
Cool but present. I know the difference now. I have memorized the difference the way I've memorized everything about her. Against my better judgment. With complete inevitability.
I move to the secondary drafting table. I don't crowd her. I pick up the fabric sample she's left there, cream wool, exceptionally fine, and turn it in my hands.
"What's this for?" I ask.
"The spring commission. If it goes through." She doesn't look up. "Put it down."
I put it down.
The room is quiet except for her shears, the small percussive sound of her working, the hum of the climate control.
The studio smells like chalk and silk and the faint ghost of her perfume.
I have stood in rooms worth ten times this square footage and felt less present in them. She knows I'm still here. She's choosing not to address it.
I let her choose.
"The bodice is wrong," I say, after a while.
She stops. Looks at me. Then looks at the form.
"The left shoulder," I say. "It's pulling."
She sets the shears down. Crosses to the form. Looks at it for three seconds. Turns it two degrees. Looks again. Her jaw tightens in the way it does when she doesn't want to admit I'm right.
"It's pulling," she confirms. She starts unpinning the shoulder seam.
I watch her hands. That's all it takes. I cannot be in a room with her without watching her hands. I cannot watch her hands without wanting to cross the room. I cannot cross the room without —
"Adrian."
My name in her mouth. Quiet. Not a question.
I look up and she's not looking at the bodice anymore.
She's looking at me. The amber in her eyes doing that thing it does when she's decided something and hasn't said it yet.
The work lamp throws her shadow long across the hardwood floor behind her, the ivory silk of the half-pinned bodice catching the warm light on the dress form.
"What are you doing down here?" she says.
I could answer that a dozen ways. Every version of the truth requires giving her something I can't give her yet. Every version of a lie would take longer to say.
"I don't know," I say instead. Which is the most honest thing I've said in three days.
She crosses the room. It's not tender. Her hands find my collar first, not my face and she pulls me down to her mouth hard enough that I feel her teeth.
The kiss is not an invitation. It's an accusation.
Three days of watching me close doors in her face.
Three days of careful, distant, courteous nothing. She is done being careful back.
"You don't get to do that," she says against my mouth. "You don't get to disappear and then look at me like that."
"Sienna—"
"Don't." She bites my lower lip, hard enough to sting, hard enough that I taste copper. "Don't talk. Just—"
Her hands are already at my belt, working it loose with the same furious precision she brings to everything.
I feel the difference in her fingers. The anger running hot and fast, and underneath it, something shaking that has nothing to do with fury at all.
She needs this to hurt a little. Some part of her wants to leave a mark on me the way I've apparently been leaving one on her without saying a word.
I back her into the work table, moving it slightly, and she gasps. The sound goes straight through me. I get my hands under her thighs and lift her onto the edge of the table, her legs wrapping around my waist immediately, pulling me into her. No patience left in either of us for slow.
I shove her skirt higher, past her hips, until there's nothing between my hands and her skin.
I get her blouse open. Two buttons go skittering across the hardwood and neither of us cares.
She's bare underneath it. The sight of her like this, flushed, furious, wanting me anyway, undoes the last of my control entirely.
"You scared me," she says. Her voice cracks on it. "Three days. I didn't know if you were — I didn't know what you were doing, or why, and you just—"
That's the part she didn't mean to hand me. Not the anger. I could survive the anger. It's the fear underneath it, close enough to the surface that I feel it in how she's holding on. Like letting go might prove I was never really there.
"I know." I pull her hips flush against mine. Feel her moan into my mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let me show you I'm still here."
I drag my mouth down her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her breast. She arches into it, fingers gripping my shoulders.
Her hands find my belt again, more urgent, fumbling at the buckle until I cover her hands with mine and finish it myself.
I shove my pants down just enough. She's already reaching for me, guiding me to her.
I feel how ready she is. How warm. The slickness of her pussy against my fingers when I check, sliding through her folds, circling her clit once, twice, and she makes a sound at the first slow drag. A moan she doesn't bother to muffle.
When I finally push inside her, fully, in one long thrust, we both gasp. She throws her head back. Her whole body clenches around my dick, tight and hot and unbearably good. The sound she makes breaks something open in my chest.
"Look at me," I say. "Sienna. Look at me."
She does. Her eyes are black, the amber completely swallowed. What's in them isn't soft. It's furious, frightened, wanting me anyway. All three at once.
I move inside her. She meets every thrust like she's daring me to stop.
My hands are bruising her hips and I can't make myself loosen the grip.
She's raking her nails down my back, gasping my name like it's an argument she's still winning.
The desk shakes against the floor. Neither of us cares who hears.
"Don't you dare go quiet on me again," she gasps. "Don't you dare—"
"I won't." It's a lie I'm telling both of us. I say it anyway. Right now, with her tight wet pussy wrapped around my cock, her nails in my skin, her breath breaking apart against my throat, I believe it completely.
She comes apart loud this time. Nothing held back, no distance left between us.
Her whole body locks around mine, her voice breaking on my name, her hands fisting in my hair like she's afraid I'll disappear the second she lets go.
The last of my control goes a moment later.
My forehead drops to her shoulder. Both of us shaking.
Neither of us moves. Not yet. Her heartbeat slamming against my chest. Mine matching it.
Afterward, the study is very quiet. She's still on the desk, blouse open, hair down, the pencil somewhere on the floor.
She's not looking at me — not the way she wasn't looking at me three days ago, the careful not-looking of a woman keeping her distance.
This is different. This is a woman who said too much and knows it and hasn't decided yet what to do with that.
I reach over and fix one button on her blouse. Just one. She lets me.
"Sienna."
"Don't." Not cold. Her voice is rough at the edges, which is worse. "Just — give me a minute."
I give her the minute. She slides off the desk, picks up her shears from the floor, holds them looking into the middle distance.
"I still don't know what's going on with you," she says finally. "That didn't fix that."
"No," I say. "It didn't."
She looks at me then. Really looks. Whatever she finds, she doesn't say it.
"I should finish the shoulder seam," she says instead. "The deadline is Thursday."
She goes back to the dress form. I watch her hands move with the same certain rhythm, her face composed, her spine straight.
The pencil is on the floor somewhere. She doesn't look for it.
I put on my jacket.
"Goodnight," I say.
"Goodnight." She doesn't look up.
I take the elevator back to forty-four.
In the penthouse, I pour a glass of Macallan. Take one sip. Call Briggs.
"Forty-eight hours," he says, before I speak. "I know. I'm working it."
"Work faster."
A pause, "You went down there."
"I needed to check on the Lyon assessment."
"Mm." The sound of a man not saying what he's thinking. Briggs is excellent at this. "Go to sleep, Adrian."
"I'll sleep when—"
"You'll sleep now, or you'll be useless in the morning, and useless is the one thing you cannot afford to be this week." A pause, "Forty-eight hours."
He hangs up.
I sit in the study and think about what it costs a person to hold something at arm's length for exactly one day too long.
My phone lights up on the desk.
SIENNA ROSSI — 11:47 PM
I look at it for a long time. Watch her name on the screen until it stops.
If I answer, she'll hear it in my voice. Everything I'm not saying yet.
She'll ask me again what's going on. I still won't be able to tell her. This time she won't let me get away with "I can't."
Forty-eight hours. I need forty-eight hours and then I can answer every call she makes for the rest of her life.
I don't call back.