10. Dominic
Dominic
The week tries its best to kill me.
One of Cruz Financial’s oldest clients—a fund manager with more money than impulse control—decides Tuesday is the day to blow up his own acquisition, and I spend three straight days talking eleven very rich, very frightened men off eleven separate ledges.
Fourteen-hour days. Conference calls at dawn.
A flight to New York and back that I mostly don’t remember.
I run rooms, I run numbers, I run interference, because that’s what I do. I handle things.
But every night, no matter what time I crawl out from under the wreckage, I call Jenna.
And every night—this is the part I keep turning over like a coin—she answers.
Not quickly. Never before the fourth ring, because God forbid I get the impression she was holding the phone.
But she answers, and we talk. About nothing.
The client. Her day. A podcast she pretends she doesn’t listen to.
Whether wasabi peas constitute a food group.
Around midnight her voice loses its corners, and by half past she’s saying things she’d never let out around witnesses—that she misses the ramen place near the hotel, that the city feels loud since Tokyo, that she sleeps better when I’m talking.
Wednesday she fell asleep on the line mid-sentence, and I stayed on for ten minutes, listening to her breathe, feeling like the richest man on the planet.
Progress. Careful, fragile, four-rings-of-plausible-deniability progress.
I gave her space this week because the client crisis forced me to, and some idiotic part of me decided the universe was helping.
Let her come to me at her own speed. Let her learn nobody’s laughing, and I’m not going anywhere.
Then, on Friday afternoon, she comes to me.
My assistant’s voice comes through the intercom half a syllable ahead of the door. “Mr. Cruz, Ms. Pemberton from Mercer—”
Jenna walks into my office like she’s repossessing it. Charcoal dress, hair scraped back into the sleek knot that means armor, chin jutted out. Beautiful. Terrifying. Mine—though we’re not saying that word yet.
She stops on the far side of my desk and sets a folder down on the leather blotter.
“I had my lawyer draw this up,” she says. “It’s all there. Everything’s in order. You just need to sign.”
I look at the folder. Plain manila. Unmarked. And what was absolute joy a few seconds ago is a shriveled-up pit in my stomach.
“No,” I say.
“You haven’t even looked at it.”
“I don’t need to.” I already know what’s inside, and if I open it in front of her, my face will do something I can’t afford. “Your answer is no.”
Her eyes narrow. “No?”
“No.” I lean back in my chair. “Need I remind you, this was your idea.”
“And need I remind you,” she says, with the icy precision she uses on men twice my ego, “that I told you to undo it. In writing.”
“You left a Post-it, Jen. Two words on a Post-it is not instruction. It’s barely a mood.”
“It was perfectly clear—”
I press the button on the underside of my desk. The lock on the office door engages with a soft, expensive click.
She spins toward the sound, then back to me. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Exactly what you want me to do.” I get up, come around the desk, unhurried, watching her hold her ground because retreating would mean admitting I affect her.
Even now, her chin stays up while her breath goes shallow.
“I’ve obviously given you too much space this week.
This little legal offensive—walking into my office with paperwork instead of admitting you miss seeing me—is proving it. ”
“It’s not an offensive, it’s a legal remedy. And I do not miss—”
My hands come up and cup her face, both sides, thumbs resting along that lethal jaw, and the rest of her sentence dies somewhere in the four inches between us. Her hazel eyes go wide, then dark, and her pulse jumps under my fingertips like it’s filing an objection her body has already overruled.
“It’s OK, sweetheart,” I whisper. “I won’t make the same mistake again.”
Then I kiss her.
She makes a small, furious sound against my mouth—a whimper wearing a disguise—and for one full second she holds out, rigid, hands flat against my chest like she might push.
She doesn’t push. She melts, the way she always melts, all that beautiful architecture going soft at once, until she’s up on tiptoe, crashing into me like we didn’t just negotiate this down to rubble days ago.
All of her intensity, her rigor, her resistance—it’s focused on the way she bites my lower lip and pulls, the way her hands fist in my jacket because she can’t find enough of me to hold on to.
“God, I hate you,” she says.
“I know,” I answer, because I do. And I love it, love that she has to say it, love that it lashes out from between her teeth, love the way she forgets herself in the next second and moans into my mouth.
She shoves once at my chest. Then her fist closes in my jacket and she pulls me back.
The skin at her neck is flushed, and when I run my thumb down her jaw and wrap my fingers around her throat, she presses into me with a shudder.
“Fuck you,” she whispers.
I keep kissing her, knowing exactly what I am to her right now—the thing she can’t resist and can’t forgive herself for wanting. I intend to remain both until she figures out they were never in conflict.
I end the kiss slow, drawing it out until her eyes take a beat too long to open.
“Feel better?” I murmur.
She blinks, comes back online, and I watch the fury reboot in real time. Before it can reach operational capacity, I turn her gently by the shoulders, walk her two steps toward the door, and give her ass a soft, affectionate pat.
“Go back downstairs to Mercer, sweetheart. I’ll come get you when it’s time to go home.”
She rounds on me. “What? No. I just gave you the legal paperwork that—”
I press one finger to her lips.
She keeps talking anyway. It comes out as a string of muffled, garbled consonants against my fingertip, delivered with full conviction, and it might be the single most adorable thing I’ve witnessed in my thirty-eight years on this earth.
I keep my face grave. If I laugh, she will actually kill me, and my signature is worth nothing if I’m dead.
“I’ll pick you up at six,” I say. “We’ll have dinner together like any normal couple. And you will not freak out.”
I drop the finger. She stares at me, vibrating with everything she wants to say, cheeks flushed, mouth wrecked, folder abandoned on my desk behind me like a hostage she’s forgotten she brought.
“You are,” she manages at last, “the most impossible man I have ever met.”
“Six o’clock,” I say, and unlock the door.
She leaves with her spine straight and her dignity mostly reassembled, heels detonating down the corridor toward the elevator, and I stand in my doorway watching her go, laughing quietly to myself the way a man does when the woman he loves has just declared a war she has no chance of winning.
“Now there’s a woman on a mission,” my assistant, Roz, says from her desk.
“She nearly took my head off.”
“That’s how you know it’s real,” Roz says, her lipstick a shade of pink not seen in nature.
She appraises me with the fond disbelief of a surrogate mother who never understood why I insisted on going without a tie.
“She likes you.” Roz leans in as if she’s about to share vital market intelligence.
“She may even love you, if she’s willing to hand-deliver legal paperwork with that amount of energy. Most people prefer email.”
“I’ll make a note.”
“Mm.” She goes back to her monitor for exactly two keystrokes, then swivels her chair toward me, and I brace, because Roz swiveling is Roz with something to say.
She’s been running this floor since the day I signed the lease—back when Cruz Financial was four desks and a coffee maker with a death rattle—and somewhere between then and now she appointed herself to a position I never posted and couldn’t eliminate if I tried.
“You know,” she says, “my granddaughter looks at ice cream the way that woman just looked at you. Furious about wanting it.”
“Which granddaughter? You have five.”
“Six. Danny’s wife had the baby in March—you sent a blanket.” She waves this off like the math is beneath us both. “The point stands.”
“The point being?”
She takes off her reading glasses and lets them drop to the chain around her neck, which is how I know we’ve moved from commentary to testimony.
“I see you, honey. In all the years I’ve sat at this desk, I’ve watched you charm ministers and terrify traders and talk a room full of grown men out of a panic like you were reading them a bedtime story.
And every one of them got the performance.
” She tips her head toward my office door.
“That one gets the boy who eats lunch standing up and answers calls from his brother even when he’s too busy to talk—and then thinks I don’t notice. ”
I open my mouth. Close it again. There is no defense, and we both know it. Roz doesn’t deal in allegations she can’t prove.
“It’s nice,” she says, gentler now. “That’s all I’m saying.
It’s nice to see you want something for yourself for a change, instead of managing everything for everybody else.
” She points one coral fingernail at me, grandmother-stern.
“So don’t handle her, Dominic. Whatever you did in there, whatever you’re planning for six o’clock—don’t handle her like she’s a nervous client. Women can tell.”
“Is there anything else,” I say, “or is the performance review over?”
“Wear a tie,” she says, swiveling back to her screen. “And you’ll be taking her flowers. I’ve already ordered them. Peonies. You’re welcome.”
“I love you, Roz.”
“How could you not? Go do your work. And, Dominic?” She doesn’t look up from her keyboard, but her voice does the thing it does at Christmas, when she hugs me at the elevator and tells me to eat something. “Whoever taught that girl to walk like the floor might give out under her—prove them wrong.”
I stand there a second longer than I need to.
Then I go back into my office and close the door, and the warmth goes out of me like a tide.
The folder is still sitting on the blotter where she left it. Squared. Patient. Ticking.
I sit down and open it and read the first page slowly.
Then again, slower, the way I read hostile term sheets—looking for the trap door, the out, the clause that means it isn’t what it says it is.
It’s clean. Of course it’s clean. She’d have accepted nothing less.
Every neat, numbered paragraph is Jenna telling me, in the only language she trusts, that Tokyo can be reversed.
Filed under mistake. Made never to have happened.
But she can’t undo the truth.
I press my lips together, square the pages against the blotter the way she squared the folder, and pick up my phone. He answers on the second ring, deposition-tired.
“Dominic. What’s up?”
“David,” I say. “We need to talk.”