Surprise, Billionaire. It's Yours. (Steamy Billionaire Quick Reads #4)

1. Zuri

ZURI

Twenty-two point three million dollars. Eighteen months. One boardroom. Do not think about the bump. Do not think about May.

I pulled the bathroom door open before the thought could finish, my laptop bag already on my shoulder, my face already arranged.

The hallway to the boardroom stretched out clean and corporate in front of me — the kind of space designed to make you feel small unless you refused to let it.

My heels clicked against the polished floor in a rhythm that sounded like certainty.

The lipstick was perfect. Fenty Beauty's "Damn, Daniel," reapplied three times in the last four minutes, cost more than my first car payment, and looked like a woman who had her life under control.

The mirror had shown me something different — a woman whose body was visibly, undeniably pregnant in a fitted black dress a tailor in Buckhead had spent an entire afternoon making work. That woman was staying in the bathroom. This one — the one walking toward the boardroom — was all sharp edges.

In a staging room beside the boardroom, my team was already set up.

Priya, Meridian's engagement lead, had the leave-behind decks printed and tabbed, color-coded the way she knew I liked them even though I'd never once asked her to do it that way — she'd just learned it, the way she learned everything, by watching.

Two analysts from our pool were running the model one more time on a laptop between them like a couple arguing about directions.

"You look terrifying," Priya said, by way of greeting. "In the good way."

"I need it to be the good way for the next ninety minutes. After that I don't care."

"You've got the five lenders locked?"

"Locked and confirmed as of six this morning." I checked my watch. "You have the fallback deck if they push back on the green building numbers?"

"Slide fourteen. If anyone challenges the green-building numbers, the appendix answers them."

That was Priya. Quietly, permanently three steps ahead, the reason I could take a maternity leave in two months without Meridian falling into the harbor.

I squeezed her shoulder on my way past and did not tell her that the reason my hands were faintly unsteady had nothing to do with the twenty-two million dollars.

The contract was forty-eight hours old: twenty-two point three million in consulting fees over eighteen months, my firm's largest client.

If I landed the restructuring clean, Cavanaugh's board could fast-track Nakamura, the acquisition that would turn Meridian from a firm people hired into a firm people fought over.

At 8:12 that morning, a revised agenda had replaced the CFO with L.

Cavanaugh, CEO for the kickoff. The attachment had no photograph.

I had read enough to know he'd founded Cavanaugh Holdings at twenty-eight, then told myself the first initial meant nothing.

There were thousands of men named Liam. Only one had ever learned the exact sound I made when I stopped thinking.

It can be another Liam. Either way, you've built Meridian from nothing. You can be professional.

I smoothed my hand over the bump. Facts were things you worked around, not things you apologized for. I'd chosen black because it said I'm still here, still sharp, still dangerous.

My phone buzzed with a text from my best friend, Tasha: You good?

My ride-or-die, my bullshit translator. She'd cleared her whole morning to be here, which was its own kind of business partnership even if her name wasn't on the LLC.

She was downstairs by the valet stand, waiting to celebrate or catch me if the meeting went sideways.

Priya and the two analysts we'd brought up from the pool were one door away, ready to walk this contract day to day once I stepped back for maternity leave.

I typed back: Flawless. See you in two.

I wasn't lying. The spreadsheets were perfect. The model was so surgically clean it was almost criminal. Cavanaugh Holdings wasn't ready for what I was about to do to their balance sheet.

Seven months ago, at the Atlanta Financial Summit, I'd been someone else.

A woman who met a man with dark eyes and a voice that made your spine remember it was supposed to do things, who gave her his first name and nothing else, and who decided that one night of not thinking was worth whatever came after.

No last names had been my rule, not his — the kind of rule you make when you've already learned what happens when a man's name comes with a bank account attached to your life.

He'd never asked for a way to come back.

So I didn't have to say no. I could just be the woman who decided what happened next.

I turned from Priya and opened the boardroom door.

The conference room was all glass and blond wood, ceilings deliberately high, table deliberately wide, the whole thing built to remind you that your opinion only mattered if you'd made enough money for it to matter.

Twelve seats. Seven taken — CFO, COO, three men whose titles I'd memorized like some women memorized love songs, and one woman near the end of the table, legal pad already covered in her own handwriting instead of waiting for someone else's notes.

Helena, the interim VP of Development, according to her place card.

I filed her away. She was the only person in the room who looked like she'd read the pre-read.

I could smell the expensive coffee, the kind with cardamom in it. I could feel the air conditioning raising the hair on my arms.

And then he stood up.

The floor did not drop out of my life. The floor liquefied. The floor became something I could drown in while standing perfectly still.

Liam Cavanaugh — the L. Cavanaugh from the revised agenda, and the man whose name was on the building.

Dark-brown hair swept back from a strong forehead, silver beginning at both temples.

Brown eyes so deep they looked black from across the table.

Warm ivory skin, a square jaw sharper than I remembered, and a mouth my body recognized before my mind finished saying his name.

The one whose child I was carrying like a secret about to become very, very visible.

My throat tightened. My hand moved to my belly — protective, proprietary — and I forced it back to my side.

He looked at me. I looked at him. And somewhere in that first second — his eyes registering my face, then dropping, then catching on the bump, then coming back up like he was checking whether I was joking — the suspicion I'd controlled all morning became fact.

I hadn't made a deal with a stranger seven months ago.

I'd made a deal with the universe, and the universe had a terrible sense of humor.

The kind of humor that showed up with perfect timing and a suit that probably cost more than my car.

Oh God. Oh God, he knows. He doesn't know, but he will. And then, underneath the professional armor, my grandmother's voice: Girl. Girl, what did you do. What in the world did you do.

His hand was still in the motion of standing.

His mouth was still in the shape of a greeting.

Whatever was happening behind that frozen half-second — and I could only guess at it, could only read it in the stalled hand and the greeting that never finished forming — it looked like a man whose whole day was about to fracture along a fault line he hadn't known was there ten seconds ago.

Not my problem to fix.

My hands were steady when I pulled the chair directly across from him and sat down. "Good morning. I'm Zuri Tate with Meridian Consulting. I'm excited to dig into the Westside project. I've reviewed the preliminary financials, and I have thoughts I think will be valuable for your timeline."

Professional. Cold. Untouchable.

He sat. His chair scraped the floor — a small sound that traveled up my spine like a shock. Everything registered. His hands arranging themselves on the table. His pen, picked up immediately, like a shield.

"Right." His voice was exactly like I remembered, deeper than it had any right to be. "Welcome to Cavanaugh. I'm?—"

"Liam Cavanaugh." I opened my laptop. "I know. The revised agenda arrived this morning."

The one where it says you founded this company at twenty-eight. The one that doesn't mention where you were last May, or what you were doing when you looked at me like that.

I looked at the spreadsheet instead of him. At the beautiful red arrows I'd drawn through their current model, at the places they were losing money like it was water and they were a sieve. Numbers never lied. Numbers never looked at you with dark eyes and made you believe in one-night deals.

"Your current debt structure is eating you alive," I said flatly.

My voice was a scalpel. "You're overextended on the Westside property by at minimum eighteen million dollars, and your timeline doesn't account for soil remediation that will absolutely come up once you go through the environmental assessment.

Which you should do before you break ground, not after — we'll address that on slide six.

And none of that matters if you can't fund Nakamura by Q3, which, at your current leverage, you can't."

The CFO's pen stopped moving. One of the vice presidents took a drink of his coffee like he needed something to do with his hands. Helena leaned forward two inches. Liam didn't move at all. Liam was very, very still.

"There are three restructuring paths I've modeled," I continued, my voice steady as stone.

"The first is aggressive but clean — liquidate the Monroe Street portfolio, reinvest into mixed-use with a longer timeline.

Margin's tighter, cash flow stabilizes in twenty-two months.

The second is leveraged — secondary investor, smaller equity stake, cash-positive in nine. The third is my recommendation."