4. Kiara
— ? —
Kiara
The Cole account runs on precision, and precision is the only thing standing between me and the urge to put my heel through Jensen Cole’s lying face.
I’m not a violent woman. I run three floors of events. I keep a hundred moving parts from colliding on any given build, and I’ve made a career out of staying calm while everyone around me comes apart.
But he takes a suite in my hotel, and every system I’ve spent years perfecting develops a hairline crack with his name on it.
So, I do what I do best.
I bury him in competence. His itineraries land before he asks for them. His cars idle at the curb before he reaches the doors. His meetings are staged, catered, and confirmed while his assistants are still opening their laptops.
I give him nothing to complain about and nowhere to reach me. If he wants a war, he’ll get the most gracious one ever waged inside a five-star hotel.
But Jensen is an immaculate asshole. He wants a war. He fights it by refusing to let me disappear.
The itineraries are the front line. He asks for them by hand, printed, delivered to the door of his suite, and I could send a runner. But sending a runner would tell him I can’t stand to share a doorway with him, and I’d rather bleed than hand him that.
So, I go myself.
I take the private elevator up with the folder against my ribs and my professional face fixed in place before the doors open. I knock twice. I wait. I hold the folder out the instant the door swings back, arm straight, the whole transaction built to be over before it begins.
He never lets it be that quick.
He answers in shirtsleeves, collar loose, and he doesn’t look at the folder. He looks at me, slowly, from shoes to face and back, and there’s nothing idle in it. It’s the attention of a man who has decided he’s done pretending he doesn’t want the only thing in front of him.
“Your schedule,” I say.
“Come in.”
“No.”
“Then stay in the hall. I don’t care where you stand.” He still hasn’t taken the folder. “Stay a moment.”
“I have work to do, Mr. Cole.”
“You have people to run it. What you don’t have is one good reason to keep carrying these up here yourself, and yet here you are. Every time.” He leans a shoulder into the doorframe, and it brings his eyes level with mine. “Why is that?”
“Because you request it.”
“I request a great deal. You refuse most of it.” His voice stays quiet, even, and under the evenness, there’s a thing pulled tight. “You don’t refuse this.”
He’s right. We both hear that he’s right, and the air between us goes taut with it.
I press the folder to his chest until his hand comes up to take it. “Enjoy your reading.”
I turn. I make it two steps before I hear the door begin to swing shut, then stop, the flat slap of his palm against the wood. When I look back, he’s holding it open, filling the frame of it, watching me leave with a look I won’t name.
“You can’t freeze me out forever, Kiara.”
“Watch me, Mr. Cole.”
I ride the elevator down and don’t let myself breathe until the doors have shut me in alone.
The war settles into a rhythm after that.
He finds his reasons. A thermostat, a seating chart, a catering line he wants revisited, each request landing on my desk with his name attached, each one another attempt to reach me across the account.
I answer all of them through other people. He keeps asking anyway.
We both know precisely what it’s about, and neither of us will say it out loud. But what I don’t understand is why.
He’s the one who didn’t show up. Yet he’s the one trying to win my attention. God. Make it make sense.
I call Nadia from the stairwell before I can talk myself out of it.
“I need a drink,” I say. “A real one. Somewhere that isn’t this building.”
“That bad.”
“He’s going to put me in an early grave, and I’m going to enjoy filling out the paperwork.”
She laughs, low and warm. “Give me a little while. I’ll get the sitter for Kieran and meet you. The place on Ninth?”
“Where else.”
“Order me the dark one.” A pause. “And Kiara. Breathe. He’s a client. Clients leave.”
I hang up and stand there with my eyes shut and my back against the cool concrete, and for the first time all week, the knot behind my ribs loosens a single inch.
The place on Ninth is dark and loud and nothing like the hotel, which is the entire point of it. I take the stool at the end and order the dark one for Nadia and a heavy bourbon for myself, and I’m halfway down it when she drops onto the seat beside me, coat still on, already talking.
“Start with the felony,” she says. “Work backward from there.”
“He won’t leave me alone.” I turn the glass on the bar. “Every request comes with his name on it. He shows up at my desk. He watches me the way I can’t afford to be watched.”
“And you hate it.”
“I loathe it.”
Nadia sips. “That’s a great deal of feeling for a man who’s nothing to you.”
“He’s a client.”
“You keep saying that. It’s stopped working.”
I don’t have an answer for her I’m willing to say out loud, so I drink instead, and she lets me, because she’s my sister and she knows the shape of my silences.
Theo finds us before I’m through the second one. He runs the corporate accounts two floors below mine, the sort of colleague who makes a long build survive. He drops onto the stool on my other side with a grin.
“Reyes. I didn’t know you left the building of your own free will.”
“Once a year. Against my better judgment.”
“Then I’m honored to witness it.” He tips his head at my glass. “The next one is mine. You look like you’ve earned three.”
Theo is uncomplicated. He asks about the reception and actually listens.
He laughs at the dry thing I say about the florist, and for a little while I’m only a woman in a bar being flirted with by a man who wants nothing from me but the pleasure of it.
My shoulders come down from around my ears.
I laugh at a joke he makes, a real one, and it surprises me how much it costs me nothing.
That’s when Jensen walks in.
I feel it before I see it. The turn of a few heads toward the door.
The drop in the noise. He’s still in his suit from the build, and he crosses the floor without hurrying and without looking anywhere but at me, then at Theo’s hand where it rests on the bar beside mine.
When he reaches us, his face is very calm, which is exactly how I know it isn’t.
“Kiara.”
“Mr. Cole.” I don’t move. “This is a surprise.”
“Is it?” He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at Theo.
Theo, easy as ever, puts out a hand. “Theo. You’re the Cole account everyone is losing their minds over.”
“I know who you are.” Jensen doesn’t take the hand. “You’re the one she sends when she can’t stand to be in a room with me.”
The bar goes still around us.
Theo lowers his hand, glancing at me, reading a room he walked into without a map. On my other side, Nadia has gone quiet, watching Jensen with open suspicion.
Jensen is standing too close to my stool. Close enough that his sleeve nearly brushes my shoulder. Close enough to stake a claim I never gave him.
“A word,” he says to me.
“I’m off the clock.”
“It isn’t about work.”
“Then it’s about nothing, and I’m with my friends.”
His jaw works. His eyes go back to the space between Theo’s stool and mine, and there’s nothing composed left in his face. It’s naked, and it’s furious, and it’s pointed at a man whose entire crime is buying me a drink.
That’s what puts me on my feet. Not for Jensen. For Theo, who didn’t sign up for this, and for Nadia, who has a sitter on the clock and doesn’t need to watch me strangle a client in a bar.
“Outside,” I tell him. “Now.”
I don’t wait to see if he follows.
The air on the street is cold, and I’m glad of it, because it gives my fury somewhere to go that isn’t his face. I round on him the moment the door swings shut.
“How dare you?”
“Kiara.”
“No. You don’t get to say my name in that voice. You don’t get to walk into a bar I picked because you wouldn’t be in it and stand over my stool as if it belongs to you.” My voice climbs with every word. “How dare you interfere in my life?”
“His hand was next to yours.”
“On the bar, Jensen. And if it’d been anywhere else, it would still be none of your business, because you’re a name on a contract. You don’t get a vote on who buys me a drink.”
“I’m not here about who buys your drinks.”
“Then explain what you’re doing here. Because from where I’m standing, you crossed the city to loom over a colleague who was kind to me, and I’d love to know what gives you the right.”
He doesn’t answer. He can’t, or he won’t, and that’s worse than anything he could have said.
“How did you even know I was here?”
His eyes cut away. Once. It’s an answer and no answer at all.
“Unbelievable.” I’m shaking, with cold and with rage and with the traitor thing under both that I won’t name. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to turn up wherever I am. You don’t get to be jealous. You have no claim here. Not on the stool, not on the drink, not on me.”
“I know.”
“Then behave like it.”
“I’m trying.” His voice cracks on the word, actually cracks, and it stops me for half a beat. “I walk in, and there’s another man’s hand a breath from yours, and every reasonable part of me goes dark. I’m not proud of it. I can’t switch it off either. I’ve tried that too.”
His honesty is worse than any defense.
I came out here to take him apart, and there’s nothing to take apart, because he isn’t arguing with me.
So I do the only thing left. I step back.
“Go back to the hotel, Mr. Cole.”
“Kiara.”
“Please. And the next time you feel the need to plant yourself in the middle of my life, remember you don’t have one here. Not with me.”
I leave him on the sidewalk. I go back inside to my sister and my colleague, and I don’t let myself look through the glass to see if he’s still standing there.
I don’t need to look. I can feel him there.
I can always feel him there.
That’s the whole problem.