THE WRONG KIND OF PERFECT

Chapter One

The Pitch

Gemma

Gemma Sinclair had exactly four minutes to convince the most intimidating conference room in Chicago that navy blue was a personality, not just a color.

"The current palette says nothing," she said, clicking to the next slide.

Behind her, forty feet of glass looked out over the river, gray and glittering under a sky that couldn't decide if it wanted to rain.

"It says: we are a company. It does not say: we are this company.

Burke Holdings has been in this building for eleven years and the executive floor still looks like a furniture catalog got lost on its way to a hospital. "

A ripple of laughter went around the table.

Not from everyone. The woman at the head of it, silver-haired and sharp-eyed, didn't so much as blink, which Gemma had learned in the first ninety seconds was simply how Eleanor Voss took in information.

But laughter from four of the seven people deciding whether to hire her was a start.

She'd rehearsed this pitch in her bathroom mirror, in the elevator, in the back of a cab with her portfolio sliding off her lap.

She'd rehearsed it so many times that saying it out loud now felt strange, like hearing her own voice on a recording.

But her hands were steady. That was the part that mattered.

Her hands were always steady, even when nothing else was.

"So here's what I'd do instead."

She clicked through the next twelve slides fast, the way she'd learned to with rooms like this.

Rich, grounded materials. Warm brass instead of chrome.

A palette that moved room to room instead of repeating the same gray four hundred times.

Somewhere to actually sit that wasn't a chair engineered for a magazine photo.

Halfway through, the door at the back of the room opened.

She registered him the way you register weather changing, a shift in the air before you look up.

Dark hair, unhurried walk, a gray suit that fit like it had been made for exactly this body and no other.

He slid into a seat near the wall instead of at the table, which struck her as odd.

Everyone else in the room had arrived like they owned a piece of it.

He arrived like he was trying not to be noticed, which, given the way three people at the table straightened when he walked in, was a losing bet.

He caught her looking. Didn't look away first. There was something almost amused in it, like he already knew how this pitch ended and was enjoying watching her get there.

Gemma lost her place in the slide deck for exactly one second. Recovered. Kept talking.

"The floor should feel considered," she said, "the way the people who work on it are considered. Right now it doesn't. I'd like to fix that."

Silence when she finished. The particular silence of people doing math in their heads. Eleanor Voss folded her hands.

"You didn't mention the budget."

"I didn't need to. It's on slide fourteen, and it's lower than what you paid the last firm for something everyone in this room has already told me they hate."

That got a real laugh this time, short and surprised, from the man at the wall.

"We'll be in touch," Eleanor said, which in Gemma's experience could mean anything from you got it to please leave , and there was no way to know which until the email came.

She was gathering her laptop, her heart going harder than her face let on, when the man from the back of the room fell into step beside her at the elevator bank.

"That was good," he said. "The bit about the hospital furniture. Cross winced. He picked out the current furniture."

"I didn't know that."

"I know. That's why it worked."

Up close he was better looking than the doorway version, which felt unfair, like the room had been rationing him.

Dark eyes, a jaw that did a lot of quiet work, the kind of face that probably got away with things.

He had a badge clipped to his belt, the plain kind, not an executive one. T. BURKE , it said. OPERATIONS .

"You're not on the panel," she said. It wasn't quite a question.

"I sit in sometimes. Vendor selection affects my end of things." He said it easily, like a rehearsed line worn smooth from use. "I run point on facilities and project coordination. If Eleanor picks you, you'll be talking to me more than anyone else in that room."

"Lucky me."

"That's what everyone says right before they find out how many change orders I reject."

She laughed before she meant to, a real one, surprised out of her. He had the decency to look pleased about it instead of smug, which she filed away as a point in his favor before she'd decided there was a column to keep score in at all.

The elevator arrived. He held the door with one hand, not stepping in.

"For what it's worth," he said. "Slide fourteen was the best argument in the room. Most people lead with the vision and bury the number like it's something to apologize for."

"Numbers aren't something to apologize for. They're the part that's actually true."

Something shifted in his face, quick and real, gone before she could name it. "Yeah," he said. "They are."

The doors started to close. He stepped back to let them.

"Good luck, Ms. Sinclair."

"Ms. Sinclair" landed strange in her ears, too formal for a conversation that hadn't felt formal at all, and she thought about that the entire ride down.

Thought about it in the cab back to the studio, and later, describing the pitch to Cleo over reheated pad thai, she left out the part about the man in the gray suit entirely, because there wasn't anything to say yet.

Just a name on a badge and a laugh she hadn't meant to give away.