Her Sultry Billionaire (Tycoons of Pleasure Valley #3)

1. Lark

LARK

The gallery door was propped open with a chipped ceramic bust I’d rescued from a flea market two summers ago for eleven dollars and one promise.

I would never let him be ordinary.

Walter. I’d named him Walter because he looked like a Walter—stern, disapproving, and slightly confused about how he’d ended up on the floor holding a door open with his forehead.

The AC was losing its fight against July. Warm air drifted through the doorway and settled over everything like a second skin—thick and sweet and heavy with whatever was blooming in the window boxes across the street.

I didn’t mind. The heat made the gallery feel alive. Like the art was breathing.

I was on the floor.

I sat cross-legged, shoes kicked off somewhere near the front counter and a mixed-media panel propped against my thighs. Noemi Sato had dropped it off that morning with a note that directed me to do whatever felt right with placement.

So I was doing what felt right. There was a spot near the west wall where the sun slipped in between four and five like it had an appointment. If I hung the piece there, the copper would glow.

Not shine. Glow.

There was a difference.

I tilted the panel another inch. The wire caught and threw a thin line of gold across my wrist.

There. That little bell-sound inside me. People called it instinct. My grandmother had called it listening to the thread. I’d never been able to explain that to anyone without sounding like the sort of woman who named doorstops and believed lost earrings meant something.

Unfortunately, that was exactly the sort of woman I was.

I felt someone in the room before I heard them. A shift in the air. Weight on the hardwood. The type of silence that meant another person was breathing in my space and trying to decide whether to interrupt.

“The copper threads run through the entire back layer,” I said without turning around. “She embedded them before the resin set, so they’re structural. They’re not decoration—they’re holding the piece together. You can’t see that from the front, but you can feel it if you know to look.”

Nothing.

I kept talking, because silence had never been a good enough reason for me to stop.

“This is the only one she did with copper. Everything else in the series is steel. She told me copper felt too warm for the rest of the collection, but this one demanded it.” I tilted the panel again, watched the light move.

“I think she’s wrong. I think they all demanded it.

She was just brave enough to listen once. ”

“You’re sitting on the floor.”

The voice was low and direct—and close. He’d moved farther into the gallery without making a sound.

I looked up. He stood six feet away with his hands in his pockets.

For a second, I forgot the panel in my lap. Forgot the hardwood under my bare feet. Forgot that Walter was watching from the doorway with all the moral support of a judgmental ghost.

The man was all clean lines and controlled heat.

Dark hair, short. Sharp jaw. Tan skin. Clean-shaven except for the faintest shadow along his chin.

Fitted gray T-shirt, dark pants, expensive watch.

Ink edged past his left sleeve at the bicep and reappeared in glimpses at his collar—ornate, deliberate, the kind of work that hinted at more underneath.

Curated. Every line placed with intention. Just like the art in my gallery.

My stomach did a little flip-flop. “Yes, I’m sitting on the floor.”

“With your shoes off.”

“Walter doesn’t enforce a dress code.” I tipped my chin toward the ceramic bust at the door. “He’s more of a figurehead.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Not quite. More like his face had almost betrayed him and he’d caught it just in time.

That was worse, somehow.

He looked at the panel in my lap. Then at the wall where I’d been aiming the light. Then back at me, tracing the line from the copper wire to the sun angle to the blank spot on the west wall.

“You’re mapping where to hang it based on how the afternoon light interacts with the metalwork.”

My heart did a slow, ridiculous roll.

“Most people don’t see that,” I said.

“Most people don’t sit on the floor to figure it out.”

He moved past me toward the west wall. He looked at the pieces already hung there—a textured oil-and-fabric collage by Marcus Beale, a welded iron-and-glass sculpture on a floating shelf—and I could see him reading the arrangement. Not just looking. Reading.

I’d spent three days getting that wall right. He understood it in fifteen seconds.

“The Beale should move six inches left,” he said. “You’ve got the visual weight balanced, but the texture gradient doesn’t land until you give the iron piece more breathing room.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. He was right, which was irritating. He was also gorgeous.

He turned back to me and something shifted in his expression—a crack in the composure. Like he’d just told a woman sitting barefoot on the floor how to arrange her own gallery and had only then heard himself do it.

“I have a habit of doing that,” he said.

“Rearranging rooms that don’t belong to you?”

“Seeing how things should be and saying it out loud before I’ve been invited to.”

I should have been annoyed. This was my gallery. My wall, my arrangement, my eye. A man in expensive clothes walking in and telling me to move the Beale was exactly the kind of thing that should have made my spine straighten.

Instead, I looked at the west wall and saw what he saw. The six inches. The breathing room. The version that was better than what I’d done.

Some people barged into a room and took up space. He’d walked in and found the hidden current.

“I’m Lark,” I said.

His eyes came back to mine, and the room seemed to narrow around that one small point of contact. “Kit.”

Just Kit. As if a name like that didn’t feel like a match being struck.

He bought the Noemi Sato copper piece. Didn’t negotiate. Didn’t ask if I could hold it while he considered. He simply looked at it, looked at the patch of late-afternoon light where it belonged, and said, “I’ll take it.”

I wrote up the sale barefoot behind the counter while he stood on the other side with his hands back in his pockets, watching me the way he’d watched the walls. Like I was an arrangement he was trying to read.

His hand came close to mine when he took the pen. Not touching, but almost. My nervous system noticed anyway.

“I’ll have it wrapped and ready by Thursday,” I said, and was proud of how normal my voice sounded.

“I’ll come back Thursday.”

It should not have sounded like a promise.

He left. No business card, no lingering. Just the door, and Walter, and the warm air settling back into the space he’d vacated.

I stood behind the counter for a long time after he was gone. The receipt was still in my hand. I looked down at it.

Kit Ashford.

The name sat there in my own handwriting. It meant nothing to me for approximately four seconds. Then it meant everything.

I pulled out my phone. Typed it in.

Kitson Ashford. CEO of Lumaire. One of the men that locals had nicknamed the Pleasure Valley playboys.

Every image on my screen was polished, composed, precise—and unmistakably the man who’d just stood on the other side of my counter with his hands in his pockets telling me to move the Beale six inches left.

I looked at Walter. Walter looked at me.

The universe had sent Kitson Ashford into my gallery on the one afternoon I was sitting barefoot on the floor talking to a ceramic bust named Walter.

He’d told me to move the Beale six inches left and he’d been right.

He’d bought a piece with copper wire that glowed in the late-afternoon light, and he’d understood why it mattered without being told.

I closed up the gallery at six, walked the four blocks to Pixel Lofts, and took the stairs to the rooftop. Saylor was already up there, setting out a sleeve of plastic cups and a bottle of rosé.

“You look like something happened,” she said.

“The universe sent me someone.”

She handed me a cup. “Tell me everything.”

The air on the rooftop was warm and still, the kind of evening that pressed against your skin and stayed there. Sultry. That was the word. The kind of night that didn’t let you cool down, didn’t let you shake whatever had settled into your chest.

I told Saylor about the man in the gallery who understood light and copper and the weight of a wall. I told her the universe had brought him in on the exact right afternoon.

I did not tell her about the almost-touch when he took the pen.

I did not tell her that for one second—just one—I’d wanted to say I’m glad you came in instead of waiting for the universe to explain why he had.

That would have meant I chose it.