6. Cillian
CILLIAN
The rules last a week.
I know they’re done on the eighth morning when Valentina comes into the kitchen in a green silk robe and I snap to attention.
Valentina has many robes and I know for a fact that she wears nothing except for lacy underwear underneath.
My dick twitches as she reaches past me to the coffee machine.
Yeah. So much for that.
“You made it wrong again,” she says, not looking at me, already assessing the machine like it’s personally disappointed her.
I raise a brow. “I made coffee.”
“You made hot brown water.” She takes the mug directly out of my hand, pours half of it down the sink, and turns back to the machine. “You’ve been doing it wrong for however long you’ve been making coffee, which I’m guessing is your whole life, and at some point someone should have told you.”
Now she’s criticizing the way I make coffee? “No one’s ever complained before.”
She glances back at me over her shoulder, a dark brow raised. “No one who mattered,” she says pleasantly and turns back to the machine.
I seize my cup and lean against the opposite counter, drinking what’s left of my apparently very bad coffee and watch her.
The robe.
The hair.
The way she stands when she’s focused on something—weight on one hip, chin slightly forward, like she’s about to argue with it.
I last about forty minutes after she goes back to the bedroom before I follow her, which is forty minutes longer than I managed yesterday.
Progress.
But that’s the problem.
I proposed the rules with the same logic I use on operational problems—identify the variable, contain it, and prevent escalation.
What I apparently failed to account for is that the variable is Valentina Santoro, who doesn’t stay where she’s supposed to.
It’s not just that she’s the most responsive woman I’ve been with—though she is—and I think about it constantly.
She keeps having layers I don’t expect.
The reading glasses she wears at her desk.
The way she argues with herself out loud in whichever language matches her current level of irritation.
The specific Italian she uses when she’s given up on patience.
The way she laughs when she didn’t want to then looks annoyed at herself for it. I’ve been accumulating details about Valentina Santoro for our entire marriage and I can’t stop.
But then again, I don’t particularly want to.
She comes back out of the bedroom twenty minutes later fully dressed, hair perfect and composure immaculate, like nothing happened.
“You have calls until noon,” I tell her.
She glares at me. “I know when I have calls.”
I shrug. “Just saying.”
“Don’t,” she says, picking up her now cold cup of coffee, “manage my schedule. You did it on Friday and I’m still annoyed about it.”
“The gallery thing was—”
“Moved for your thing, yes, I know, I was there.” She gives me the look over her mug. “I’m not one of your people, Cillian. I don’t work for you.”
It takes everything in me to not roll my eyes. “I’m aware.”
“Are you?” She tilts her head. “Because the last two Fridays suggest otherwise.”
Is she ever going to give up on that? “It was once.”
“It was twice. I have a calendar, and it doesn’t lie.” She dumps her coffee in the sink, takes her phone, and goes to her desk. That is apparently the end of that conversation. I stand in the kitchen for a moment. I am, clearly, not as in control of this situation as I told myself I would be.
I get a call from Connor at seven forty-five. “My office. Nine o’clock,” he says, and hangs up.
No greeting, no context.
Just the time and the expectation.
The call is already over before I can say anything except yes.
Which I didn’t even say and apparently didn’t need to.
Valentina looks up from her computer. “Connor?”
“Yes.”
She watches me put my phone back in my pocket. “He calls you the way you call a car service,” she observes.
I stiffen at that comparison. “That’s not—”
“You should try not answering sometime. See what happens.”
“I know what happens,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Do you?” She goes back to her screen. “Because it looks like you don’t know, and that’s why you always answer.”
I open my mouth then close it.
She’s reading her laptop, seemingly moved on from the conversation.
Or at least wants me to think she has.
I put on my jacket and leave before I say something I’ll spend the drive over thinking about.
I spend the drive over thinking about it anyway.
Connor’s office is on the forty-second floor of a building in midtown that has never once felt welcoming to me in twenty plus years of walking into it.
The lobby is covered in marble, the kind of space designed to communicate that whatever you’ve come for the building has seen more important things.
I’ve been coming here since I was fourteen, since Connor started bringing me along to understand how the business worked, and it has never felt like anything except what it is: a place where Connor Brennan does his business and you are part of the business.
He’s at his desk when I come in and he doesn’t look up. But then again, he never looks up right away.
It’s not oversight.
Connor doesn’t do oversight.
It’s the calibration thing he does, measuring how a person handles being made to wait.
I know this. I sit and I wait, because I have been sitting and waiting in this chair for twenty plus years and I am very good at it.
Eventually, he caps his pen and looks at me with those pale eyes that have never had warmth in them but have always had intelligence.
I’m a bit startled when I realize just how old Connor looks.
There’s a heaviness to him that wasn’t there nearly a year ago and I know the estrangement with Emma has a lot to do with it.
But he still takes up a room the way he always has, still carries himself like a man who has never once been uncertain about his place in it.
“Marchetti’s people are talking,” he says. “Word getting back to me is that the alliance is looking like paper. That you and the Santoro girl are living separate lives in the same apartment and calling it a marriage.”
“We’re adjusting,” I respond, a bit irritated that Valentina is known as “the Santoro girl.” “It takes time.”
“Time is not available.” He puts his pen down.
A decision has been made before I arrived, and this is why I’ve been summoned.
“I’m hosting a family dinner this Friday.
You’ll bring your wife. You’ll make it convincing.
People need to leave that table with no questions about whether this alliance is real.
” He picks the pen back up, which means the meeting is over. “Brief her properly beforehand.”
A lick of irritation courses through me. I stamp it down. “Understood,” I say.
“And Cillian.” He says it without looking up, but I’m immediately on edge. “Make sure she understands how this works. I don’t need complications.”
I look at the top of his head and the hand already moving the pen. “I’ll handle it,” I tell him, which I have been saying my entire adult life, before I leave.
In the elevator I lean against the back wall.
Connor’s words make sure she understands how this works runs through my head and I think about Valentina standing in our kitchen telling me I’ve been making coffee wrong my whole life and looking at me like it’s the most obvious thing anyone has ever said, and something almost like a laugh moves through my chest.
Connor genuinely has no idea.
I’m also not looking forward to telling her we have a dinner on Friday.
She’s still at her desk when I get home, those damned glasses on, pen tapping her lip.
She’s frowning at her screen but looks up when I come in.
“How was the summons?” she asks.
I fight the scowl. “It was a meeting.”
“Yeah, okay.” She sounds unconvinced. “He calls you in with less than two hours’ notice and no context and you drive across town to wait in his lobby, and you call it a meeting?” She takes her glasses off. “What did he want?”
I tell her. Connor’s concerns about optics, the dinner Friday, what he needs from us.
She’s quiet for a moment, which with Valentina is not a good sign.
“No,” she says.
I sigh. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“Then why are you surprised that I’m saying it?
” She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “I didn’t agree to this.
I agreed to the marriage, which was not my idea.
I agreed to appear as your wife at appropriate functions.
” She sits up, dark eyes flashing. “I didn’t agree to perform for Connor Brennan on demand because he’s worried about optics. ”
Why does everything have to be a fucking argument? “It’s not just Connor’s optics.”
“Then whose optics is it?”
“Our families’. The alliance. It matters for both—”
“I know what it matters for,” she says sharply.
“I grew up in this world too. I understand exactly what happens if the alliance looks unstable. What I’m asking you is whether you came home and delivered his instructions because you thought it was necessary or because he told you to and you do what he tells you. ”
I look at her, unclear of what she’s getting at.
“Because there’s a difference,” she continues, “and I’d like to know which one this is.”
The way she’s looking at me is as if I’m being x-rayed by her.
She’s sitting in her chair with her reading glasses in one hand and her chin slightly up, watching me with her dark eyes.
“Both,” I say, because she’ll know if I lie.
She looks at me for a moment. “At least that’s honest,” she grumbles. It’s clear she’s thinking about something and from the scowl on her lips, she’s come to a conclusion she’s not thrilled about. “Fine. I’ll go.”
I can’t help the surprise I feel. It’s that easy? “Just like that?”
She throws me a withering glare. “Don’t push it.
” She puts her glasses back on. “I said I’ll go.
I’ll be charming, the alliance will look real, and everyone will go home satisfied.
” She holds up a finger to me. “But I’m wearing what I want and I’m talking about what I want and nobody manages me.
” She’s already looking back at her screen. “And you owe me for this.”