4. Reed
Reed
“Ground rules,” I say, before she’s fully through the door.
Mia sets her bag down on the marble floor of the entryway, looks up at the ceiling, takes in the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city spread out forty floors below, and says, “How many bedrooms does this place have?”
“Four. Now, let’s talk about ground rules.”
“Four.” She turns a slow circle, ignoring what I’m trying to say. “Four bedrooms. Just you?”
“Me and my daughter.” I watch her stop turning. “I have full custody.”
She faces me, surprise crossing her face. “You have a daughter.”
“Harper. She’s six.” I move to the kitchen island where I’ve left the printed document. “She’s in her room. I doubt you’ll see her before morning. Ground rules.”
Mia stares at me for another beat, then crosses her arms. She’s still in what she wore to the bakery this morning. There’s some flour she missed on her collarbone. She looks like she belongs somewhere with exposed brick, good coffee, and absolutely nowhere near my penthouse.
“Fine,” she says. “Rules.”
I slide the document across the island. “Public affection is limited to what’s on page one. Hand contact, arm contact, the occasional appropriate display when cameras are present. Nothing that requires either of us to commit to more than we can convincingly sustain.”
She picks it up, reads the first line, and looks up at me. “You wrote a rulebook for holding hands.” She drops it on the island. “Have you ever been in an actual relationship?”
“I wrote parameters. Page two covers public appearances. You’ll need a wardrobe update. Celeste has a stylist on standby.”
“I have clothes.”
“You have flour on your collarbone right now.”
She glances down, spots it, wipes it off with the back of her hand. “I own more than an apron, you know.”
“You have clothes appropriate for a bakery. The Walsh shareholder dinner is not a bakery.” I turn to page two and push it back toward her. “The stylist is non-negotiable.”
“I should’ve paid closer attention to the damn contract before signing it,” she mutters under her breath. She reads page two, her jaw set at an angle that warns me to brace for her objections. “Speech points. You want me to study for a fake relationship like it’s a job interview?”
“About us. The cover story needs to be consistent.”
She tilts her head. “So the story is you had me thrown out in front of a room full of people and I fell head over heels for it?”
“The story is that last night was a miscommunication between my security team and your delivery agency. We’d met six months ago at a charity event, where you’ve been installing a mural in the east corridor.
We’ve been together privately for four weeks.
Last night the cameras caught us before we were ready to go public.
The footage works in our favor because the public wants a reconciliation arc. ”
“Six months ago I was covered in buttercream in Lower East Side. I wasn’t anywhere near a charity gala.”
“You don’t need to have actually been there. You need to say you were there convincingly.”
She stares at me. “You want me to lie.”
“I want you to perform. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.” She flips to page three. Reads it. “No personal questions in public. No discussing Harper with press. No unscheduled appearances.” She closes the document. “What about my boundaries?”
“Your boundaries are covered under—”
“No, those are your rules with a ‘we’ slapped on them.” She pushes the document back across the island. “I want to talk about Harper. Your actual kid, not a bullet point in your rulebook.”
I go still. “What about her?”
“I’m not going to pretend to care about a little girl who doesn’t know this is fake. If she’s around me, I’m real with her. Genuinely warm, not switched on for the cameras.” She holds my gaze. “So either you keep her away from me completely, or you let me actually be decent to her. Pick one.”
I look at her for a long moment. She doesn’t flinch.
“Agreed,” I say.
She blinks. She expected a fight on that one. I can tell by the way she shifts her weight, the slight move of her shoulders. She came loaded for a different argument.
“The wardrobe,” she says, recovering. “I’ll do the stylist once, but if they try to dress me like someone’s trophy wife, I’m saying no.”
“Define trophy wife.”
“Anything that makes me look like I’m trying to be someone I’m not.”
“That’s the entire point of this arrangement.”
“No, the point is making people believe we’re together. I can do that as myself. I can’t do it dressed up as whoever your last girlfriend was.”
I look at her across the island. She’s got her chin up again, same as on the gala steps, same as at the bakery this morning. She finds her position, plants herself in it, and she doesn’t move until she decides to.
It’s profoundly inconvenient.
“One veto,” I say. “One outfit, no questions asked.”
“Two.”
“One and a half.”
She stares at me. “You can’t give half a veto.”
“I just did.”
She picks up the document again and flips through the rest of it. She has opinions about every single page. Six weeks of this and I have nobody to blame but myself.
“Page five,” she says. “No contact with press without prior approval from your PR team.”
“Standard.”
“I have a business. My business has a social media presence. I post about my work.”
“Clear it with Celeste first.”
“She’s going to approve my cake posts?”
“She’s going to make sure your cake posts don’t accidentally contradict our cover story or create a liability.” I cross my arms. “It takes ten minutes.”
“It feels like an invasion.”
“Most of this is going to feel like an invasion. That’s proximity.” I take the document back, flip to the last page, and set it in front of her with a pen. “Sign at the bottom.”
She stares at the page. Then she picks up the pen and signs without reading the last page, which is either trust or defiance, and with her I genuinely cannot tell which.
She drops the pen. “Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Great.” She picks up her bag. “Where am I sleeping?”
“Second door on the left.”
She heads down the hallway without another word. She doesn’t look back once.
I stand at the island until I hear the guest room door close. Then I pick up the signed supplement, put it in the folder, and walk to my bedroom at the end of the hall. I close the door behind me, loosen my tie, and drop into the chair by the window.
Two minutes of staring at nothing.
I go over the conversation, the supplement, the six weeks ahead of me, and I tell myself the heat under my skin is frustration. The situation. The pressure.
Then I stop, because I’m alone and there’s no point lying to myself in an empty room.
It’s her. That’s what it is. Her mouth, her chin, her opinions about every single page of a document I spent two hours writing myself.
She argued with me for forty minutes and won half of it, and the whole time her mouth was right there, that same mouth that told me to fuck off and still didn’t apologize for any of it.
My cock has been making its opinions known since page two of the ground rules and it is done waiting for me to acknowledge it.
I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed at the situation, the six weeks, the fact that the one woman I’ve reacted to in eight months is currently thirty feet down my hallway under a contract I wrote.
I’m annoyed because it bothers me, my cock pressing against my pants and bothering me like I’m twenty-two years old.
I’m not taking a cold shower again. I refuse to let her rearrange my entire evening routine. But I need to deal with this or I’m not sleeping, and not sleeping before a board week is not an option.
I get up. Get the tissues from the nightstand. Get the lube from the drawer. Sit on the edge of the bed and tell myself this is practical, this is maintenance, this has nothing to do with the woman in the guest room.
I open my phone. Pull up the browser. I want something mindless, something functional, something completely unrelated to any living person in this apartment.
The browser opens to the last page I had open.
A news article. One of the overnight pieces, the ones Celeste showed me last night. There’s a photo embedded halfway down, pulled from the paparazzo’s shot, Mia on the front steps of the Deleon with her hands on her hips and her chin up and that annoying look on her face that I can’t stand.
I should close it, but I don’t.
My thumb hovers over the screen and I think about her across the island tonight with her chin up, her eyes on mine, and not a single apology anywhere in her body.
I think about that mouth.
My hand closes around my cock before I’ve made a conscious decision, but at that point the decision is made.
I’m already half-hard and getting harder, and I stop trying to redirect myself and just let it happen because fighting it clearly isn’t working. I get the lube, get my hand where it needs to be, and I keep my eyes on the screen.
That grin. That goddamn grin.
I think about her mouth and what it would feel like wrapped around me, warm and smart-assed even then, because that’s who she is.
She’d probably have opinions about it. The thought alone makes my cock jump in my hand and I tighten my grip and work it slow, dragging it out, the way I haven’t bothered to in longer than I want to admit.
Eight months of nothing and now this. Her, specifically. Flour on her collarbone and fire in her eyes and the way she shoved the document back across the island at me like I was the unreasonable one.
I stroke harder. The lube is warm now, my grip tight, and I’m breathing through my nose, staring at her face on the screen, and thinking about what it would feel like to pull that auburn hair back and see if she’d still be so mouthy with my cock down her throat.
She would be. That’s the problem. She absolutely would be.
My hips are moving without my permission, fucking up into my fist, chasing it, the tension coiling at the base of my spine.
I’m close and I know I’m close. I keep my eyes on the screen, on her mouth, on the brown eyes that haven’t looked impressed by a single thing I’ve done since the moment she walked into my gala.
I come into the tissue with my jaw clenched, my fist tight, and the phone on the bed next to me.
I come harder than I’ve managed alone since I was in college, which is a fact I’m going to take to my grave.
I sit there for a moment with my eyes closed, the back of my neck hot, and my heartbeat somewhere in the vicinity of unprofessional.
I clean myself up and throw the tissues in the bin. I close the browser, sit back on the edge of the bed, and stare at the floor.
“Fuck my life,” I say, to no one.
Three knocks at the door. Small knuckles. I know the sound.
I’m up in four seconds, confirm the tissues are indeed in the bin, pants sorted, shirt straightened. I check the mirror once, look completely normal, which is the single most useful thing my face has ever done for me.
I open the door.
Harper is standing in the hallway in her unicorn pajamas, one sock half off, her stuffed rabbit hanging from her left hand. She looks up at me with the innocent eyes of a small child.
“Daddy,” she says, “is the lady in the guest room going to be my new mommy?”