37. Jenna
Jenna
Dominic offers the peony with the smallest bow, and the streetlight comes on above us at that exact moment like the city is on his payroll, which, frankly, has never been ruled out.
“The girls have limos. There’s a whole convoy system. It’s been organized.”
“I’m aware. I reviewed the logistics.” He opens the door, and the interior is burled wood and cream leather and a small silver bud vase, empty, waiting, bolted to the pillar like the car was built knowing the flower was coming.
“The convoy is for the party, sweetheart. This is for the belle of the ball.”
I should say something dry. I have a full inventory of dry things.
Instead, I get into a seventy-year-old car holding a peony, and the door closes with a sound like a vault approving of you, and for a split second, my mind rewinds the clock and I’m a senior in high school again, and this time everything goes so perfectly right—but I push that thought away, because that was then and this is now. And I only want to focus on the now.
“You look absolutely stunning, Pemberton,” he says softly, mouth curving as he slides in beside me, the car swallowing us both in rich, silent space.
“And you look entirely too pleased with yourself,” I say, though my voice lacks its usual bite. I slide the single white peony into the silver bud vase. It fits perfectly, which only confirms my suspicion that Dominic Cruz leaves absolutely nothing to chance.
I let my gaze drag over his tuxedo. The midnight fabric is a dangerous, exact match to my silk. “I suppose you’re going to tell me this coordinated wardrobe was a happy accident?”
“I don’t believe in accidents, Jenna.” He shifts closer, the leather groaning softly under his weight. The heat radiating off him is palpable, and when his knee brushes mine, a sharp, unauthorized spark shoots straight up my thigh. “I believe in meticulous planning and flawless execution.”
“You either took my dress to a tailor or you colluded with Willa.”
“I will never reveal the source of my swatches.”
A laugh escapes me, short and breathless. “You’re incorrigible.”
“I’m a man who knows how to properly complement his wife,” he murmurs, his dark eyes dropping to my mouth. The atmosphere in the car suddenly feels impossibly dense, charged with the same electric current that has been humming between us for weeks.
It should terrify me. I’m used to managing Dominic, predicting his arrogant plays and batting away his flirtations like so many gnats. But this quiet, devastatingly intentional version of him is entirely unmanageable.
I love him.
The thought is still new enough to catch me off guard, but it no longer sends me searching for an exit. Every time I let myself acknowledge it without trying to qualify or contain it, the truth settles a little more comfortably inside me.
Fortunately, the Phantom glides to a graceful halt outside The Grand Chicago Hotel before I have to analyze it fully. Through the tinted glass, a gauntlet of flashing bulbs and velvet ropes awaits. The red carpet spills up the grand steps like a velvet tongue.
The driver opens my door, but it’s Dominic whose hand finds mine, his grip warm and impossibly steady as he helps me step out into the crisp Chicago night. The dull roar of the crowd and the staccato burst of camera flashes wash over us instantly.
“Jenna! Ms. Pemberton, over here!”
I brace myself, instinctively leaning toward Dominic’s solid frame, ready for us to run this press gauntlet as a unified, heavily coordinated front. But instead of wrapping his arm around my waist to claim his real estate, Dominic smoothly drops my hand.
I look at him, startled.
He takes a deliberate step backward, physically removing himself from the photographers’ frame. He offers a devastating, entirely private smile. “Go,” he murmurs, his voice a low, grounding rumble beneath the noise. “This is your night, sweetheart. Let them see exactly what you’ve built.”
He blends into the periphery with the event staff and the shadows, leaving me standing in the center of the blinding lights.
I square my bare shoulders in the midnight silk, lifting my chin as the cameras fire rapidly.
The anxiety that usually accompanies this kind of exposure vanishes, replaced by a dizzying, effervescent joy that bubbles up straight from my chest. I am the center of the universe, standing on my own accomplishments, and for the first time in my life, I don’t just tolerate the limelight. I let it hold me.
I walk the length of the carpet with a measured, deliberate glide.
I offer the press a genuine smile, letting the midnight silk pool and flash around my legs with every step.
For twenty yards, it’s just me and the blinding validation of a decade of relentless work.
I don’t flinch. I don’t look for an exit strategy.
I simply exist in the glow of my own making.
But as I near the entrance of The Grand Chicago Hotel, the shouting fades into white noise.
Dominic is waiting for me exactly where the velvet ropes end.
He stands near the heavy brass doors, his posture relaxed, watching my solo procession with a look of such absolute, unwavering pride it makes my breath hitch.
He looks like a man who has just won a war without firing a single shot.
“Mr. Cruz!” a photographer near the entrance shouts as I slip my hand into Dominic’s. “Just one with the lady of the hour!”
Dominic arches a dark eyebrow, silently deferring to my jurisdiction. I give him a single nod.
He slips into position beside me, his large hand settling on the curve of my lower back—a searing point of contact against my skin—and instead of smiling at the camera, he turns his head to look down at me just as the flash fires.
It’s exactly one frame. One perfect, undeniable shot of a man captivated by his wife.
“Enough press for one night,” he murmurs, his thumb stroking my spine and sending a shiver straight to my core. “Ready to hold court, Pemberton?”
“Always,” I reply, leaning into his heat as we step through the heavy brass doors.
The Azure Room is up a private elevator behind a door with no sign, and it is exactly as blue as advertised and twice as quiet.
Thirty people, maybe forty, in light the color of the inside of a glacier.
I recognize a Fed governor, two people from magazine covers, the GC of a company I once spent a year auditing, and a string quartet playing something French with no ambition to be noticed.
Every conversation in the room is worth eavesdropping on.
Nobody is performing loudly enough to be heard from three feet away.
It is, and I say this with reverence, the best-behaved room I have ever entered.
“Jenna Pemberton.” Willa James detaches from a knot of donors and comes to us with both hands out, blonde-haired and bright-eyed and precisely as warm as her handwriting.
She takes my hands like we’ve done this a hundred times.
“The woman herself. I’ve been telling people you were coming all week—half of them wanted introductions and the other half wanted to know if the Nakamura paper was really as clean as advertised.
” She leans in, conspiratorial. “I told them cleaner.”
“Mrs. James—”
“Willa. I insist.” She tucks my arm through hers with the gentle tyranny of a woman who has run this city’s better rooms for many years, and steers me into it.
To Dominic she says, over her shoulder, “I’m stealing your wife.
Go do your rounds, Mr. Cruz. Landon’s at the bar pretending the boat isn’t new. ”
“It’s always new,” Dominic says, and lets me go with a wink and a smile.
I surrender quietly to the abduction, letting Willa weave us through the glittering crowd with the effortless grace of a monarch surveying her court.
Up close, Willa smells of expensive gardenias and money, but there’s a sharp, calculating intelligence in her steel-gray eyes that immediately puts me at ease.
I understand calculation. It’s my native tongue.
“He looks well,” Willa murmurs, keeping her voice pitched perfectly for our ears only as we bypass a cluster of tech executives. “Dominic. I haven’t seen him look quite so . . . thoroughly dismantled before. It suits him.”
“He’s been practicing his dismantled look,” I say smoothly, though a treacherous flush warms my neck. “I believe it’s part of a broader corporate strategy.”
Willa lets out a low, musical laugh. “Oh, I like you, Jenna. I knew I would. The foundation board has been talking about the structure you negotiated for the Nakamura acquisition, but I was far more interested in the woman who made it work.” She stops near a towering ice sculpture that seems to be weeping champagne and turns to face me fully.
“You don’t hide behind the men in the room.
In our circles, that’s a rare and dangerous trait. ”
“I find hiding to be highly inefficient,” I reply, my spine straightening instinctively.
“Exactly.” Willa taps one manicured finger against her chin. “Which is why I want you in the conversation about James Tech’s Children’s Health Initiative. Frankly, we need someone who isn’t afraid to use a scalpel.”
My breath catches. This isn’t merely a polite social introduction. She’s treating me like someone whose judgment belongs in the room.
“I brought my scalpel in my clutch,” I tell her, absolutely deadpan.
Willa’s smile turns predatory and brilliant. “Perfect. Let me introduce you to the governor.”
What follows is forty-five minutes I will be reconstructing in the shower for years.
The GC I once audited tells me Xavier Field showed her my redline memo, and it’s now “taught, informally” at her firm.
She asks for coffee next month. A man who runs a sovereign fund’s Chicago outpost asks two questions about supply-chain contingencies that tell me he’s actually read the filings, then introduces me to a woman as “the reason NeuraTech is finally rolling out,” and I point out that I simply ensured the pipeline couldn’t stall again, but he wouldn’t hear it.
Somebody’s champagne is always at my elbow.
Nobody asks me whose assistant I am. Nobody asks me who I’m wearing except a fashion writer who genuinely wants to know, and when I say I honestly can’t pronounce it, she laughs like I’m charming. Me. Charming. Unsupervised.
I catch Dominic across the room exactly twice. Once he’s making Landon James laugh with his whole chest. Once he’s just watching me over the rim of a glass with an expression I can only describe as devoted, and both times something under my sternum goes warm and unsupervised too.
It’s perfect. That’s the thing. It’s all perfect, and I’m in it, unarmored, hair down, drinking the champagne, being seen on purpose in a professional setting for things that I built with my own brain.
Which is when Willa, circling back with two fresh glasses, leans in close and pokes a finger directly through my bubble.
“I’ll confess something, since it’s you.
” She hands me a glass, eyes twinkling over the rim of her own.
“I nearly sent that invitation in May. I’ve been hearing your name for a while—Thomas Canning quotes your papers like scripture, it’s adorable—but you know how my list is.
Forty seats. I dithered.” She squeezes my arm, delighted with herself.
“But you have some wonderfully supportive friends, Jenna.”
My smile stays on my face, but a thud falls from my chest to my stomach. “I do?” I mean it as a statement, but it comes out as a question.
“You do. The brains behind NeuraTech herself—Dr. Audrey Greene—wrote to me about you. Two pages, with citations, it read like a grant proposal—and Layla Carmichael called Landon’s office to make sure we had your gown measurements right.
I adore being lobbied by people who love someone.
It’s the only lobbying that works on me.
” She beams at me, warm as an oven, handing me what she believes with her whole generous heart is a gift.
“You have remarkable friends, Jenna. They wanted this room to see you so badly they practically stormed it. And I understand why. You are quite magnificent.”
The quartet keeps playing. The glacier light stays blue. My face does what twenty years of training built it to do, which is smile, warmly, correctly, while somewhere below the waterline a hull plate quietly gives.
I didn’t earn it.
They arranged it.
“How incredibly kind of them,” I say. My voice is a perfectly calibrated instrument. It doesn’t shake. It doesn’t betray the sudden, violent vacuum opening up in my chest.
“Isn’t it?” Willa sighs, entirely oblivious to the structural collapse happening three feet away. “I’ll let you mingle, darling. We’ll introduce you to the board chair later.”
She glides away, leaving me standing alone with a glass of champagne that suddenly tastes like battery acid.
They arranged it.
My gaze drifts across the Azure Room, instinctively seeking the architect of my current life.
Dominic is leaning against the bar, listening to Landon James.
As if feeling the weight of my stare, he turns.
He catches my eye, and his smile is soft, intimate, packed with that same devastating pride from the red carpet.
He fucking knew.