5. Matteo
— ? —
Matteo
She’s early.
Of course she’s early. I’ve watched Ursula Rothwell operate for thirteen years, and the woman has never once been late to anything, not a gala, not a christening, not the systematic public dismantling of her own marriage.
I hear my assistant greet her in the outer office and I stay at the window with my back to the door, because I need a second.
Just one. I’ve spent over a decade being able to look at this woman only when other people were looking too, safe in a crowd, hidden behind a wine glass and a wife who wasn’t mine and a husband who didn’t deserve either of us.
Now she’s in my office. Alone. And I don’t trust my own face.
“Mr. Salazar. You’re early.” My assistant’s voice, and then the door, and then her.
I turn around and it hits me the way it always hits me, low and stupid, the same lurch I’ve been pretending not to feel since the first time I saw her shut down a room of men twice her size without raising her voice.
She’s in a gray suit that costs more than my first car and means business.
Her hair is up. Her chin is up. She looks like she’s here to sign my surrender.
She also looks like she hasn’t slept, and there’s a bruise of exhaustion under all that armor that makes me want to find Bennett Rothwell and put him through a wall.
“You’re early,” I say, because apparently I’ve decided to lead with my weakest observation.
“I’m always early. It’s a character flaw.”
“I’d call it an advantage.” I gesture at the chair. My voice comes out level, which is a small miracle. “Sit. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? Something stronger?”
“Water is fine.”
She sits. She sets a folder in front of her like a shield, and I clock that, because I read people for a living and I have read this one for all these years, and the shield tells me she’s more nervous than the chin is letting on. I like that I can see it. I hate that I like it.
I’ve built an empire on paying attention.
I paid attention to freight patterns and credit markets and the specific tells men have when they’re about to fold.
And somewhere in there, without my permission, I started noticing her.
The oat milk and two sugars. The way she stands a half step apart from her own husband at every event, like a woman guarding a border.
The way she laughs at bad puns when she forgets to be careful, one hand coming up to her mouth like she’s caught herself doing something illegal.
I know an unforgivable amount about a woman I’ve barely spoken to.
“You said you wanted to discuss an alliance,” she says. “I’ve prepared a proposal.”
“Straight to business. I like that.”
“I don’t see the point in small talk.”
“Neither do I, usually.” I lean back and let myself look at her, because for once I’m allowed.
“But I find myself curious about you, Mrs. Rothwell. A decade of watching you across dinner tables, and I know two things. You have the best posture in any room, and you can make your husband sweat just by existing near him. Everything else, you keep behind glass.”
“That’s not a talent. That’s just existing in his presence.”
I laugh before I can stop it. It’s real, and it surprises me, and her mouth does something at the corner like she’s surprised too, like she didn’t expect to land one.
“Show me what you’ve got,” I say, before I do something undignified like tell her she should do that more often.
She opens the folder and the composed version of her takes over, and God help me, that’s worse.
She lays it out across my desk, the ships, the name, everything her family built and Bennett spent thirteen years calling his own, and she walks me through exactly how she means to take it back and put it in my hands.
She does it with the cold precision of a surgeon describing where she intends to cut.
She has thought about this. She has clearly thought about little else.
And I have never in my life wanted a woman more than I want the one across from me, calm as still water, explaining how she is going to strip her husband of the one thing he loves and gift-wrap it for the man he hates most.
“And what do you get in return?” I ask.
“I want him to watch you take them.” She lifts her eyes to mine, and there it is, the thing behind the glass, sharp and bright and furious.
“I want him to know I arranged it. I want him to spend the rest of his life looking at the ships my own family built and knowing his wife, the one he thought was too cold and too passive to fight back, is the one who handed them to his biggest rival.”
Something in me goes very still and very hot.
“That’s quite a revenge fantasy,” I manage.
“It’s not a fantasy. It’s a business proposal.”
“Is that all it is?”
“What else would it be?”
I don’t answer, because the honest answer is dangerous. Instead I stand and go to the window, where three ships her grandfather designed are cutting through the gray harbor, and I make a decision I’ve been making slowly for years and quickly for the last two weeks.
“I’ve watched you for a long time,” I tell the glass. “Every gala. Every dinner. Every miserable industry event where your husband talked over you and you let him, because letting him was easier than the alternative. I always wondered what was underneath the ice.”
“Ice. According to popular opinion.”
“No.” I turn. I let her see me mean it. “Something your husband was too stupid to look at. And I’m done pretending I never noticed.”
She doesn’t have a comeback for that. For one second the ice queen just looks at me, unguarded, and I would burn my whole company down to keep her looking at me like that.
“I’m not interested in flattery, Mr. Salazar.”
“Matteo. And it’s not flattery, it’s a fact, and I don’t traffic in the first thing. I’m accepting your proposal. Every term. One condition.”
“What condition?”
“You stop calling me Mr. Salazar. We’re going to be allies. Possibly friends. I’d like my name in your mouth.”
I hear the last part a half second after I say it and decide to let it stand.
“Fine. Matteo.” She says it like she’s testing whether it burns. “Do we have a deal?”
“We have a deal.”
I extend my hand. She reaches for it.
And the ceiling starts hissing.
For one insane second I think a rival has finally decided to assassinate me, and then the sprinkler system opens up and dumps cold water over both of us, and I say something in Spanish my grandmother would have smacked me for and lunge for the phone.
“Maintenance. My office. Now.” I slam it down. We stand there dripping, staring at each other, and then Ursula Rothwell does something I have never once seen her do.
She laughs. Head back, real, helpless, the ice cracking clean down the middle, and it is the single best thing I have ever watched happen.
“This is not how I planned this meeting,” I say.
“I should hope not.”
“My assistant is going to kill me. This suit is Brioni.”
“My blouse is Valentino. I think I win.”
Then I make the mistake of actually looking at her, and the laughter dies in my throat.
The water has turned her silk blouse transparent.
She’s soaked to the skin and flushed from laughing and she has no idea, or she does and doesn’t care, and either way I have to turn slightly toward the window and think about freight tonnage to keep my body from embarrassing me.
“Here.” I’m already unbuttoning my own shirt, because it’s the only decent thing to do and because if she stands there like that for another thirty seconds I will forget how to be decent. I hold it out. “Bathroom’s through there. Dry off, put this on. I’ll deal with whatever the hell that was.”
“I can’t take your shirt.”
“You can and you will. I’m not sending you out into Manhattan looking like that.” A beat, and my mouth runs ahead of me again. “Unless you want to. In which case I’ll cancel my afternoon.”
“Very professional.”
“I never claimed to be professional. I claimed to be good at what I do.” I press the shirt into her hands before I can think better of any of it. “Go.”
She goes. And I stand in my flooded office in a wet undershirt, blotting water off her documents with paper towels like a man with a purpose, telling myself I am not counting the seconds until that door opens again.
I’m counting the seconds.
When it opens, I lose the thread of every thought I’ve ever had.
She’s in my shirt. Just my shirt, the hem at her thighs, her legs bare, her hair down and dark and wet down her back.
She’s rolled the sleeves three times and it doesn’t matter, she’s still drowning in it, and the sight of Ursula Rothwell swallowed up in something of mine does something to me so old and so possessive that I have to grip the edge of the desk.
“The skirt was ruined,” she says. “I hung it up to dry.”
I say nothing. I couldn’t if I tried. My eyes go down her bare legs and back up and I know she watches me do it, and her breath changes, just slightly, just enough.
“Our arrangement,” she prompts. “The ships. We hadn’t finished.”
“Right.” My voice has gravel in it. “The ships. You have my answer. Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Whatever you said.” God help me. “Yes.”
She crosses to the desk, and she knows I’m watching every step, and she lets me. When she extends her hand again and says my name, just my name, Matteo, I take it and I don’t let go.
Her hand is small and cold and I want to warm it in both of mine. I want a great many things I am not going to get today. I run my thumb across her knuckles, once, testing, and I feel her breath catch, and it’s the most reckless thing I’ve done in years and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“Ursula.” Her name comes out rougher than I mean it to. “We have a deal.”
“I should go,” she says. She doesn’t move.
“You should.” I don’t move either.
“My skirt needs to dry.”
“It does.”
“This is highly unprofessional.”
“It absolutely is.”
Neither of us lets go. I could stand here until the building falls down.
I have wanted this woman across countless crowded rooms, and now she’s an arm’s length away in my clothes with her pulse jumping in her wrist under my thumb, and letting go of her hand feels like the hardest negotiation I’ve ever lost.
She’s the one who steps back. Her fingers drag across my palm as she pulls away, and I feel it for an hour afterward.
“I’ll send a contract,” she says.
“Keep the shirt.” I don’t decide to say it. It just comes out, and I mean it more than I’ve meant anything all year.
At the elevator she looks back at me, and something has shifted in her face, some door I’ve spent years standing outside of.
“Friday,” she says. “The Vanderbilt Gala. Bennett will be there with her. They’re debuting as a couple.”
“I know. I got an invitation.”
She doesn’t ask me to come with her. Not in so many words. But something in the way she holds my gaze a beat too long before she steps back tells me she’s going to, and that I’ll say yes before she finishes the question.
The doors close on her, and I stand alone in my ruined, dripping office, holding a folder of her water-stained plans, wearing a soaked undershirt, grinning like a man half my age.
Thirteen years I’ve watched her belong to a man who never once saw her.
Friday, she walks in on my arm.
I’m going to ruin Bennett Rothwell. That was always the plan. What’s new, what’s dangerous, what I’m not telling anyone including myself, is that somewhere between the sprinkler and the shirt, ruining Bennett stopped being the point.
She’s the point.
She’s been the point for thirteen years, and I’m done pretending otherwise.