Chapter 19
"You should make a change here," Cassidy says, pointing to item three on Diane's computer screen.
The woman sighs, exasperated. They've been at it since eight in the morning on a gorgeous sunny Saturday—December has granted them a brief reprieve—locked inside Diane's home office after Cassidy showed up at seven thirty with a Denny's coffee that tasted like burnt oil and that Diane, naturally, threw straight in the trash.
At noon they took a break to eat and kept talking through the proposal they're both working on.
Then they went back to their computers, and that's how the afternoon has gone.
"Reworking the pillar the whole proposal stands on isn't exactly the smartest move," she answers, her voice flat and cold—the exact same tone she uses in a meeting when someone says something completely stupid.
"It surprises me that a woman who's run a department for sixteen years would build her entire proposal around a variable that depends solely and exclusively on the client," Cassidy says, sitting up and stretching her back, enjoying the faint crack her spine gives.
"If Alltreck's sales team drops the ball, every result you're promising here goes straight to hell.
They won't say it was their fault—they'll point at you for selling them smoke and mirrors. "
Diane clenches her jaw, and in moments like these she feels like that damn Frances Hartwell is right and her methods have grown stale.
But the feeling isn't quite as agonizing when the person correcting her is the blonde sitting beside her—even if Cassidy can be just as prickly as she is.
She doesn't back down, doesn't tell her she's right, but the moment Cassidy returns to her own workstation, Diane frowns and quietly edits item three.
The hours pass, and the only sounds are the clicking of their keyboards, the occasional scrape of a chair, and the soft murmur Cassidy makes under her breath—something Diane has long since gotten used to.
"I'm starving." Cassidy has been gnawing on the cap of a pen for the past half hour. "You have nothing edible in your fridge."
Diane looks up, and she hates herself for what her body does when she sees her.
Cassidy is sitting with one leg folded under her, her hair swept up in a loose, messy knot with strands falling across her face.
Her eyes are bright—today that green looks calm—and there's that infuriating smile that tugs at her lips whenever she catches Diane looking at her in that way Diane can't hide. It drives her crazy.
"Order whatever you want," she answers, and fixes her gaze back on her laptop screen, the safer place to retreat to. "If you like pasta, call Gioia—best carbonara in the whole city."
Cassidy's eyes light up and she gets to her feet, leaving the office.
She walks to the living room, drops onto the couch, and makes the call.
While she waits for the man on the other end to take her order, she lets her eyes wander over the furniture around her.
The house is beautiful—not just from the outside, but inside too, with that clean, warm-toned décor that runs completely counter to Diane's personality.
When she hangs up, she drifts toward one of the bookshelves, which is packed with books.
She runs her fingers along their spines and reads the titles.
The mix surprises her—not that she expected to find happily-ever-after romance novels, but she hadn't imagined Diane would have a whole university's worth of encyclopedias in her home.
Every single one is about business, sales, strategy, and finance.
There are several on management and languages.
"If anything catches your eye, you're welcome to borrow it," Diane says, appearing in the living room with her phone in hand, head tilted down, fingers sliding across the screen.
She doesn't look at Cassidy as she settles into an armchair and keeps answering a message from Clara, who's been pestering her all day to make sure she hasn't killed the girl and buried her in the backyard.
Diane rolls her eyes at her friend's dramatics and fires back a short, pointed reply, reminding her she's still angry about Clara giving the blonde her home address without permission. Naturally, Clara ignores her.
"You've got a great collection here," Cassidy says, sitting across from her. She rests her elbow on the arm of the couch and lets her face drop into her hand as she watches her.
Diane glances at the bookshelf, and memories flood her mind before she can stop them.
"I didn't go to college," Diane admits, not entirely sure what the hell Cassidy does to her to make her mouth open like that.
"Everything I know I learned from books I couldn't afford at first and had to request from the public library.
When things got better, I tracked down every last one of them. "
Cassidy shifts her gaze back to the bookshelf, because she doesn't want her face to show the surprise—or the disbelief—she knows must be written all over it right now.
"You can say whatever you're thinking," Diane says, and for a moment she's somewhere else, her fingers tracing the links of her bracelet. "I won't take offense."
"Didn't you want to go?" Cassidy asks, still not looking at her. "Don't answer if you don't want to."
Diane lets out a strange sound—something between a laugh and something that never quite becomes one, a sound only she understands—because at this point, not answering Cassidy Collins is practically impossible.
"At first it was because I couldn't. I hadn't even finished high school when I left home," she says, and that last part carries a bitterness to it, because "left" might not be entirely the right word.
"I had to fend for myself for a while, so I couldn't afford the luxury of studying and applying for scholarships at the same time if I wanted to eat. "
Cassidy thinks about her own life, and while it wasn't exactly easy, she had a lot of opportunities that Diane clearly didn't.
"I'd love to know your story," Cassidy says, aware she might be stepping onto shaky ground. "I can tell you mine, and we'll be even somehow."
Diane raises one perfectly arched eyebrow and tilts her head.
"The past doesn't matter."
"It's what defines us," Cassidy answers quickly. "And if you don't want to talk about it, I get it—but I'm dying to know where you came from and how you became the Diane Carter you show the world, the one who isn't really you."
The blonde winks at her, because suddenly the Cobra has made her entrance.
Chin lifted, expression sharp, a hard line carved along her jaw—but even if Diane wants to tell her she's wrong, that what people see is exactly what she is, she can't, because she knows better than anyone that it's a lie.
The armor fused to her body, the one she built stone by stone over decades because that past—the past Cassidy is so curious about—forced her to.
The silence stretches, but it's not Cassidy who breaks it. It's the other woman, her voice wavering somewhere between steadiness and something like grief.
"I was born in Rockford Bay, a small town in northern Idaho," she says, shifting uncomfortably in her armchair.
Cassidy is about to tell her she doesn't have to say anything, but Diane keeps going.
"A handful of families, all conservative, plenty of money and way too much hypocrisy.
I have two siblings—Chase, the oldest, and Riley, the youngest. I haven't spoken to either of them in years. "
The blonde says nothing, barely blinks, afraid that if she does, Diane will shut down and she won't get to hear any more.
"I had a suitor—August Rackfort," the woman says, shaking her head.
"I wasn't interested in him. I was sixteen, and at that age I wasn't exactly focused on that kind of thing.
But my parents pushed it because 'good families know each other early, Diane.
'" She does a flat, unflattering impression of her father's voice, dredged up from some dark corner of memory.
"August came over two afternoons a week and we'd sit on the front porch.
We had nothing in common, so most of the time we just sat there in silence. "
Diane brings back the memory of that overweight boy who always smelled like mint, who would stand for a few minutes before carefully lowering himself into the chair beside her. He never said anything, never looked at her—just sat there until his father came to collect him.
"One day my mother started talking about a wedding, about the joining of families and how important it was to pay for etiquette and domestic skills classes.
I didn't pay it any attention because I couldn't believe she meant me," she says, pressing both hands to her thighs, searching for some kind of stability she doesn't feel.
"Until the Rackfort family showed up several nights later to have dinner at the house—and, of course, to ask for my hand.
Which, without me having any idea what was happening, had already been accepted. "
"Jesus," Cassidy whispers. She'd thought arranged marriages were a thing of another century.
"Yeah, Jesus," Diane says, nodding slowly. "I was so stunned I didn't say a word. But once they left, I told my mother I didn't want to marry that boy."
"I can imagine her reaction," Cassidy ventures, but she knows immediately she's said the wrong thing when the woman across from her goes rigid.
"No, you can't. Because you don't know the kind of hunger for money my parents always had," she says, her cold voice dropping the temperature of the room by several degrees.
"We were always broke—there's no pretty way to describe what our finances looked like.
So the grand plan of my family was to marry their children off to wealthy families, to keep up a status we absolutely did not have. "