Chapter Two
The Ledger
Tristan
Tristan Burke watched her walk into the elevator and told himself, with the particular firmness of a man lying to himself for the second time in one day, that this was purely professional interest.
The truth was messier. The truth was that he'd sat in on eleven vendor pitches in the last two years, watched eleven confident, competent people try to sell Eleanor Voss on carpet samples and ergonomic chairs, and none of them had made him forget, even for four minutes, that he was supposed to be taking notes.
He rode the elevator up instead of down, back to the fourteenth floor, back to the office that said OPERATIONS on the door and nothing else. No name plate. That had been his own request, eighteen months ago, back when the arrangement had still felt temporary.
Toby was waiting in the doorway, arms crossed, wearing the expression of a man who already knew something and was deciding how much fun to have before he shared it.
"You went to the pitch."
"I go to the pitches."
"You go to the pitches when Gideon asks you to go to the pitches.
Gideon did not ask you to go to this one.
" Toby followed him into the office and shut the door, which meant this was about to become a conversation Tristan didn't want to have with the door open.
"You went because Daisy mentioned the shortlist this morning and you asked for the portfolio PDFs before she'd finished the sentence. "
"I like to be informed."
"You like the redhead in the portfolio photos."
Tristan sat down behind the desk and pulled a folder toward him that had nothing to do with any of this. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sinclair Design Studio. Small firm, good reviews, portfolio like someone who actually thinks about how people live in a room instead of how a room photographs.
" Toby dropped into the chair across the desk, entirely too comfortable for someone who'd just accused his boss, his best friend, and his single most complicated legal client of harboring a crush during a quiet takeover of his own inheritance.
"I read the file. You read the file. We are both aware that the person attached to the file is objectively attractive, and we are both aware that you have not looked this interested in anything since the Cho acquisition. "
"The Cho acquisition was a hundred and forty million dollars."
"Exactly my point."
Tristan didn't answer that, because there wasn't a good answer, and Toby knew it, which was the entire reason he was smiling like that.
Eighteen months. That was how long Tristan Burke had been running Burke Holdings from behind a door that said nothing at all, while two floors up, a board that didn't know his real title kept discussing "the Burke succession question" like it was a hypothetical instead of a man they walked past every day in the break room.
His father's will was very specific about this, in the particular way his father had been specific about everything, right up until the stroke that took him before he'd finished explaining any of it in person.
Prove you can build something real without the name attached to it.
Eighteen months of proving. Six more to go, according to the letter of the trust, and one clause buried in paragraph nine that Toby had flagged with three different colors of sticky note the day they'd first read it together.
The appointed heir must be married by the conclusion of the probationary period, to demonstrate the stability and judgment requisite for stewardship of the Burke legacy.
His father had added that clause four months after Tristan's engagement fell apart in a hotel lobby, in front of caterers, over a conversation about prenups that had made it very clear exactly what Vivienne had been marrying.
Tristan had never asked his father directly if the clause was a punishment or a lifeline.
He suspected his father hadn't known the difference either, by the end.
"You have five and a half months," Toby said, reading the thought off his face with the ease of a decade's friendship. "Married, Tristan. Real, or convincing enough that Gideon Cross can't find a crack in it. Otherwise the board votes it to committee, and you know exactly what that means."
"It means Gideon gets his interim chair."
"It means Gideon gets his interim chair, and everything your father built ends up run by a man who thinks quarterly earnings are a personality trait.
" Toby stood, straightened his jacket, paused at the door.
"I'm not telling you to marry the designer.
I'm telling you that you looked at her file for eleven minutes and didn't blink, and I've known you since we were twenty-two, and I've never once seen you do that over a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar acquisition. "
He left before Tristan could tell him to get out, which was, Tristan reflected, the entire design of the exit.
Alone, he pulled the portfolio back toward him.
Slide fourteen. The budget she hadn't apologized for.
He thought about the way she'd said numbers aren't something to apologize for, they're the part that's actually true , and how long it had been since anyone had said something true to him without checking first what it would cost them.
Five and a half months. A board that wanted him gone, a will that wanted him married, and a woman two floors down who had no idea that the man in the doorway with no name on his badge was the entire reason the deal she'd just pitched existed at all.
He picked up his phone and texted Daisy: Send me the vendor contract when it's ready. I want to review it personally.
Then he sat for a long moment, looking at nothing, and did not examine too closely why that felt like the first genuinely good decision he'd made in eighteen months.