Damaged Billionaire Protector (Damaged Billionaire Music Mayhem Series)

1. Headlines and Havoc

Headlines and Havoc

RACHEL

The veil is crooked.

I see it from twenty feet away and cross the backstage floor without breaking my conversation with the lighting director.

Amara's eyes go wide as I approach. First runway, nineteen years old, hands that won't stop shaking.

I give her the look I give every model before a show.

The one that says you are exactly where you're supposed to be.

"Hold still." I straighten the clip at her temple and smooth the silk flat with two fingers. "You're the entire reason I designed this look. The whole collection builds to you."

She exhales. Her shoulders drop three inches.

I move on.

This is my favorite part of any show. The held breath right before.

The crackle of something becoming real. Forty-seven people have been working toward this moment for eight months, and right now, backstage at the Palais de Tokyo with forty minutes until the lights go up, every single one of them is running on espresso and adrenaline and belief.

I know all their names.

Théo on lighting. Céline on hair. The two sisters from Lyon who hand-stitched every bead on the finale gown. Pierre, my head seamstress, who has fixed more last-minute disasters than I can count and who is currently somewhere in the back doing something calm and necessary.

I stop at the craft table. The pastry box I brought from the Boulangerie on Rue de Rivoli this morning is already half-empty.

Good.

I grab a croissant, take one bite, and put it down. Too nervous to eat. Not too nervous to notice that the new assistant, Guillaume, fresh out of design school and terrified of everything, hasn't touched his coffee. I refill it from the carafe and set it back in front of him without comment.

He blinks at me like I've performed a miracle.

I check my reflection in the long mirror by the entrance.

Quick. Professional. The dress is midnight burgundy silk, cut specifically for my body.

Full bust, rounded hips, fabric that moves with me instead of fighting every step.

I've got curves and I design for them. Always have.

The industry spent years telling me I was designing for the wrong body.

The industry was wrong.

I look exactly the way I intended to look. I move on.

Thirty-eight minutes until showtime.

My phone buzzes. Linh's name on the screen.

I answer. "Tell me something good."

"I can't." Linh's voice has a specific texture when things are bad. Clipped. Too fast. She has that texture right now. "Rachel. The press gallery just picked up a story. It's moving fast. You need to come out front."

"The show starts in…"

"Now, Rachel."

The press gallery is chaos.

Not the good kind. Not the pre-show electricity I've been feeding off for the past hour. This is a different animal entirely. The sharp, ugly energy of people who smell blood.

Cameras everywhere. Reporters I recognize from Le Monde and WWD and three outlets I can't name, all pressed against the velvet rope, all shouting variations of the same question.

Ms. Nguyen, your response to the allegations.

Rachel, Senator Moreau.

Can you confirm the collaboration.

I stop walking. "What collaboration?"

Linh appears at my elbow and shoves her phone in my face.

The headline is already trending. Rising Fashionista Rachel Nguyen: Secret Partnership with Corrupt Senator Moreau? A photo beneath it. Me, at a charity gala six weeks ago, laughing at something someone said. Senator Moreau three feet away, caught in the same frame by a telephoto lens.

I was at that gala for twenty minutes. I raised forty thousand euros for textile workers' rights. I didn't even know Moreau was there.

"This is insane." I look at Linh. "I've never spoken to the man in my life."

"I know." She's already typing. "But the story's moving. And there's a video."

"What video?"

She doesn't answer. Which means the video is bad.

My pulse kicks hard in my throat. I think about Amara backstage, shoulders finally down, believing in herself. I think about forty-seven people who need this show to go on. I think about my parents in Hanoi, watching everything I do from ten thousand kilometers away.

"Fix it," I say.

"I'm trying." Linh hesitates. One beat too long. "Rachel. I already called someone."

Something cold moves through my chest. "Who?"

She says the name quietly, like it should brace me. "Connor Grey."

I know the name. Everyone in this industry knows the name.

A designer nearby, Margaux from the Aumont atelier, turns at the sound of it. Her face does something complicated. "Connor Grey?" Low. Almost reverent. "He doesn't manage crises. He dismantles the people who caused them."

I open my mouth. Close it.

"He's already here," Linh says.

And then he walks in.

He doesn't rush. That's the first thing I notice.

Every other person in this gallery is moving at crisis speed. Phones out, voices sharp, bodies angled toward the nearest exit strategy. This man walks like the room is already his and he's simply allowing the rest of us to occupy it.

He could be one of my models. That's the first thought that hits me, and I resent it immediately.

Tall. Six-one maybe, broad through the shoulders in a deep ocean-blue suit tailored to that body and no other.

A tan that comes from actually being somewhere — the south of France, maybe, or a yacht, or wherever billionaires go when the rest of the world isn't watching.

Dark hair cut by someone who charges by the millimeter, tapered clean at the sides and effortlessly perfect on top.

A jaw that belongs on a magazine cover and knows it.

And then he turns and I see his eyes.

Gray. Pale, sharp gray, the color of a sky two minutes before a storm. Scanning the room the way security consultants and chess players scan rooms. Cataloging threats. Calculating angles. Deciding outcomes before anyone else has processed the problem.

His gaze lands on me.

Something moves through it. Gone before I can name it.

Almost.

He crosses to me in eight steps. Doesn't offer his hand. Just looks at me with those ice-pale eyes and says, "Rachel Nguyen."

Not a question. A file being confirmed.

"Connor Grey." I match his tone exactly. "My publicist hired you without my knowledge."

"Your publicist was correct." He's already turning, scanning the press line. "You have a window. Twenty minutes before the secondary outlets pick this up and we lose control of the story entirely."

"The story is false. So let's prove it. Pull the server records, subpoena the photo metadata, trace whoever planted the paper trail. We don't manage this story. We destroy it."

He looks at me then. Really looks. Like he's recalibrating something.

"Proving it takes weeks. Controlling the story takes hours." His voice is unhurried. Certain.

"Right now the only thing that matters is what the public believes tonight."

My back teeth press together. "So we just let the lie stand?"

"We let the lie lose oxygen while we build the case to bury it. There's a difference." He holds my gaze. "I'm going to need your full cooperation. Every statement goes through me. Every interview request, every social post, every comment to anyone holding a microphone goes through me first."

"That's not happening."

"Ms. Nguyen"

"Rachel." I take one step toward him. Close enough to see the faint tension around his mouth, the only crack in the composure.

"I am not a narrative. I am not a crisis.

I am a person whose show starts in thirty-four minutes and who has done absolutely nothing wrong.

Control the story all you want. But we are going to prove this is a lie. That's not negotiable."

Silence.

Three full seconds of it.

Then something shifts in his expression. Not a smile. Something more dangerous than a smile.

"Someone broke into the press server an hour ago and planted the photo and the alleged paper trail," he says. "The Senator's office is already denying involvement, which tells me they're scared. This wasn't random. Someone built this specifically to go live during your show."

The bottom drops out of my stomach.

"Who?" I ask.

"I'm working on it."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It's not." He glances at his watch.

"Thirty-three minutes. Two options. We cancel the show, you go dark, and I contain the story from the outside.

Or you walk out there, hold the press line for ninety seconds with my words, not yours, and then you go back in and put on the best show Paris has seen this season. "

I stare at him.

"Option two," I say.

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Gone before it lands. "Don't improvise. Don't answer follow-ups. I'll be six feet to your left."

He turns away. Already on his phone, already issuing orders to someone I can't see, already running the next three moves in a game I didn't know I was playing.

I hate him on sight.

We hold the press line for ninety seconds. Connor's words, delivered in my voice, landing clean and controlled. I don't improvise. I feel him six feet to my left, still as stone, watching every reporter's face while I speak.

Then I go back inside and I put on the show.

It's the best show I've ever done.

Forty-seven people who needed it to be real made it real. Amara closes the finale, veil perfect, chin up, and the applause when she hits the end of the runway is the loudest sound in the room.

I'm standing in the wings watching it when Linh appears beside me.

"The story's still moving," she says quietly.

"I know."

"Connor's team killed three secondary pickups in the last hour. He's good, Rachel. Like, unsettlingly good."

I watch Amara bow. Watch the room rise to its feet.

"He's going to want a full debrief," Linh says. "Strategy session. He's talking about controlling every move we make for the next seventy-two hours."

"Of course he is."

We stand there a moment. The applause goes on.

"Are you okay?" Linh asks.

The question lands somewhere I'm not ready to examine. The honest answer is no. Someone targeted me tonight. Someone built this trap months in advance and set it off with precision, and I don't know why or who or how far it goes.

I don't say that.

"I will be," I say.

An hour later, I'm in the back of a car with Connor Grey, and he's laying out a plan that sounds like a military operation.

Legal maneuvers. Press strategy. Narrative architecture. His phrase, which I hate, because it's exactly the right phrase and I don't want him to be right about anything.

I make myself listen. I do. For about forty seconds. Then all I hear is the teacher from Charlie Brown. Wah wah wah wah wah. Very authoritative. Very billionaire. Completely insufferable.

But God help me, I can't stop watching the way his lips move when he talks.

The city slides past the window in streaks of gold and lamplight.

Paris at midnight does things to a person.

Loosens something. Makes the edges of the world go soft in a way that has no business happening when your career is on fire and the man responsible for saving it is sitting eighteen inches away smelling like cedar and dark musk and something underneath both that I can't name.

I notice that. I wish I hadn't.

He's still talking. Timelines, leverage points, something about a press embargo. His voice is low and unhurried, built for rooms that go quiet when he enters them. I catch myself watching the way his hands move when he makes a point. Controlled. Precise. Like everything else about him.

For one unguarded second my mind goes somewhere it has absolutely no business going. His hands. The line of his jaw in the dark. His mouth, tipped slightly toward mine.

I kill it before it finishes forming.

Professional. He is a professional. I am a professional. This is a professional situation, in a car in Paris at midnight. And that is all it is.

He glances up from his phone and catches me looking.

That thing moves through his eyes again. That almost.

Neither of us says anything.

I look out the window.

This man is going to save me.

And I'm going to hate every second of it.

I glance over to find him already watching me.

Not the road. Not his phone. Not the city sliding past the glass.

Me.

He doesn't look away.