7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
~DARCY~
The plan is to survive.
It's Friday afternoon, and I've made it exactly five business days without combusting, which feels like a significant achievement given the circumstances.
Manhattan spring has fully committed now—seventy-four degrees, humid enough that my silk blouse is sticking to my back by three P.M.
The Shaw Group's fortieth-floor air conditioning feels like a religious experience as I sit at the reception desk doing what I've done every day this week.
Answering phones. Assisting with the management of Declan's calendar (through Victoria, never directly).
Oh, and pretending that I did not spend an entire night screaming his name in a Tulum hotel room two weeks ago.
I'm almost pulling it off.
Forty-seven percent successfully, which is better than Monday's twelve percent but worse than I need to be if I'm going to survive the next sixty to ninety days.
Because that's how long the annulment takes.
Sixty to ninety days.
Mexican legal system, international documentation, the works.
Declan's lawyer sent the paperwork through on Tuesday. I signed it Wednesday. It's filed, processed, officially in motion.
All I have to do is keep my head down, do my job, and avoid my accidental husband until the Mexican government decides we never happened.
Simple.
Except for the moments I cannot engineer away.
Like Monday morning when I got in the elevator on the ground floor and Declan got in on the third and we rode twenty-seven floors in silence so charged it had actual mass.
Thirty-one seconds. I counted. Thirty-one seconds of him standing three feet away smelling like fresh soap and woodsmoke and sex, and me staring at the elevator buttons.
The doors opened on forty, and I could barely get my legs to move.
"Miss Madison," he said.
"Mr. Shaw," I said.
We haven't spoken since.
Or Tuesday afternoon when I went to the break room for coffee and he was already there, and we did this terrible dance where I tried to leave and he tried to stay and we both ended up at the coffee machine at the same time reaching for the same carafe.
Our hands touched for maybe half a second.
He pulled back like he'd been burned, and I poured my coffee and left without adding cream.
A tragedy. Because I friggin' hate black coffee with a fiery passion.
Things got even worse Wednesday morning when Victoria asked me to drop a file in Conference Room B and I walked in to find Declan at the whiteboard mid-presentation to three people I didn't recognize, and I froze in the doorway like a deer in headlights while he turned from the board and his sea-green eyes met mine—burning and angry.
Didn't help that neither of us looked away fast enough.
"Miss Madison," he said, recovering first. "The file?"
"Right. Yes. File." I crossed the room, handed it to Victoria, and walked out.
I could feel him watching me the entire time. I secretly wished that his hot gaze had literally set me on fire so that I had an excuse not to return to work.
Fortunately, Thursday was better.
As in I barely saw him at all.
Perfect. Exactly what I needed.
Except I spent the entire day hyper-aware of his absence, which is somehow worse than his presence, my mind playing, reversing, and rewinding the many hours we spent in bed in Tulum.
Hours of him learning my body with a thoroughness I’m pretty sure was witchcraft.
The second time—maybe twenty minutes after the first—he'd gone down on me again just because he "wanted to hear those sounds," and I'd come so hard my vision blurred.
The third time—a shower at two A.M.—I'd thought we were just washing off and he'd pressed me against the tile wall, lifted one of my legs over his hip, and slid inside me with his hot mouth on mine swallowing every sound I made.
The fourth time—the one I can't stop thinking about— we'd both been half-asleep and I'd felt him hard against me and rolled over to kiss him and somehow ended up on top, riding him slow while his huge hands roamed my body, touching, teasing—finding places that made Narnia appear behind my eyelids.
"That's it," he'd murmured, hands on my hips guiding my rhythm. "Just like that, gorgeous. Take what you need."
And I had.
I'd taken everything.
I'd come apart on top of him while he watched with those intense green eyes, and then he'd flipped us over and finished inside me with my name on his lips and his forehead pressed to mine.
God, that last time…
That's the one I can't stop thinking about.
It was a good thing that I’d snuck a peek at the clock on the nightstand.
Because that's the exact moment I reached Heaven itself, the exact moment I realized I was in deep, deep trouble.
That's when I knew I needed to leave before I did something monumentally stupid.
Like fall for my best friend's best man at her wedding. Like lose myself in a darkly dangerous, powerful man twice my age who I'd known for less than seventy-two hours.
So I'd waited, bided my time, until he fell asleep—his breathing deep and even, his arm heavy across my waist.
And then I'd performed the most pathetic extraction in the history of one-night stands.
Slipping out from under his arm with all the grace of a drunk giraffe, I'd located my underwear on the floor, shoved my bra on backward, slipped into my wrinkly maid of honor dress and scribbled that God-awful note, my hand shaking slightly.
Because I'd wanted to write so much more.
I'd wanted to write "Thank you."
I'd wanted to write "That was incredible."
Instead, I'd written the bare minimum and left it on the nightstand next to his phone.
Then I'd walked back to my room trying very hard not to think about the fact that I could still feel him between my thighs and taste him on my lips and smell him on my skin.
I'd gotten back to my room at five-thirteen A.M., taken a shower, packed, and checked out by seven A.M.
I was in New York before noon. Prior to that, I spent the entire flight trying to convince myself that leaving was the right choice.
And after that Monday meeting with Declan? I'm damn sure that it was.
Because as CEO of Shaw Entertainment Group, the man can’t separate himself from me fast enough.
Apparently, being connected to the new receptionist is ten levels beneath his larger-than-life persona.
The prick.
And now it's Friday, three forty-seven P.M., and the only thing I want to do is finish the week without any more incidents—and with half of my dignity—when my phone buzzes.
A text from Bria.
brIA: Girl. CALL ME. It's been a WEEK.
I wince.
Bria has texted twenty-seven times since Tulum. Twenty-seven. I counted those too.
Each one is progressively more insistent, demanding a "full debrief" about what happened after I texted her that I wasn't feeling well and went to bed early.
Bria is suspicious.
Bria is always suspicious.
Bria has a sixth sense for when I'm hiding something, and right now I’m hiding the fact that the rehearsal bit Declan and I did at Jessica’s wedding was actually a real marriage.
That I accidentally really married our mutual best friend's new brother-in-law and then had the best sex of my life with him.
She knows I left Miami under bad circumstances, and she knows I changed my name and cut ties with my family.
What she doesn't know—what nobody here knows—is my father's name, or what it means. That's the whole architecture of Darcy Madison.
Built specifically so that nobody ever has to know.
I still don’t know what the rest of the wedding party believes about that "little slip-up" at the altar. I'm sure they think it was inconsequential.
If only they knew…
I text back.
ME: Working. Can't talk. Will call this weekend.
Her response is immediate.
brIA: You’ve been saying this for days.
ME: I mean it this time.
brIA: You're a terrible liar.
I am. I am the world’s worst liar.
My phone buzzes again. Not Bria this time.
Jessica.
A voice memo. The third one this week.
I don't listen to it. I can't listen to it.
Because Jessica is back from her honeymoon in a Tulum villa that Declan apparently owns (information I learned on Tuesday and have been trying very hard not to think about), and she's in that post-wedding bliss phase where she wants to dissect every moment with her best friend.
Except I can't dissect any moments without either lying or confessing that I married—and subsequently boned—her brother-in-law all night long.
And that's only half of it.
The other half is something I've never told Jessica either.
Not in four years of friendship.
Not once.
She knows I'm estranged from my family. She knows I left Florida and didn't look back.
But like Bria, she doesn't know is my father's name. Who he is. What he does.
If she knew that, she never would have invited me to Tulum.
Because Jessica is smart.
Because she loves her new husband.
And because if she ever truly sniffed out the stench of my rotten criminal family, I wouldn’t blame her if she never let me within ten feet of her new one.
Which is exactly why I can't tell her.
So I've been doing what I do best—avoiding the problem and hoping it goes away.
"Darcy?"
I look up.
Wyeth Shaw is standing at the reception desk with a folder and the expression of someone who has a task that needs doing.
A year older than Declan, Wyeth is the voice of reason of the Shaw clan, running the operations side of Shaw Entertainment Group with a particular brand of precision that makes me think he was an engineer in a past life.
He's also been my direct supervisor this week, which has been both gratifying and terrifying.
Gratifying because he treats me like I'm capable of real responsibility.
Terrifying because the better I perform, the more I stand to lose when everything inevitably unravels.
Which I've accepted as a "when" and not an "if."
"Yes?" I say, putting my phone face-down on the desk.
"I need you to take these files to Conference Room A and set up for the four P.M. meeting. Water, glasses, notepads. The projector's already connected but test it anyway."
"On it."
He hands me the folder. "And Darcy?"
"Yeah?"
"You're doing good work this week. Just wanted to say that."
Something warm blooms in my chest despite everything. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. Next week we're rolling out the Tulum hospitality campaign and you're going to earn that salary."
He walks away, and I sit there for a moment holding the folder and trying not to think about the fact that I'm good at this job.
In fact, I’m really damn good at this job.
I'm good at anticipating needs, managing logistics, keeping twenty moving pieces organized in my head at once. Wyeth noticed. Victoria noticed. Even Beatrice—the receptionist I'm covering for while she's on medical leave—sent me an email yesterday saying she'd heard I was doing "excellent work."
And in sixty to ninety days, when the annulment goes through and someone inevitably finds out I was briefly married to the CEO, all of this goes away.
I grab the files and head to Conference Room A.
Conference Room A is the big one — all glass walls, a table that seats twenty. It’s the room on the fortieth floor where important decisions get made.
I set up efficiently—water pitcher, glasses at each seat, notepads, pens. Test the projector. It works. I adjust the blinds so there's no glare on the screen.
I'm reviewing the setup one final time when the door opens behind me.
I don't have to turn around to know who it is.
I can feel it. The air pressure changes whenever Declan Shaw enters a room.
"Miss Madison," he says.
I turn to find him standing in the doorway — jacket off, dark tie loosened, the top button of his shirt undone, a hint of hard muscled, Tulum-tanned skin. He’s holding a laptop, aqua-green eyes bearing down steadily at me.
"Mr. Shaw," I manage. "The room's ready for your four P.M."
"I can see that. Thank you."
Several seconds tick by as we stand there, alone in a conference room with glass walls that mean anyone on the floor can see us but can't hear us.
Suddenly I’m very aware this is the first time we've been alone since Monday's rules discussion, minus the thirty-one seconds on the elevator.
My palms are so sweaty I’m surprised the extra notebooks and pens don’t swim to the floor.
“Well, I should leave you to it,” I say.
“No need to rush out, Darcy.”
My skin heats under my blouse. “I thought it was Miss Madison in the office.”
His jaw tightens. “My apologies…Miss Madison. Settling in alright?”
"Fine."
"Wyeth mentioned you're doing excellent work."
"I'm doing my job."
"You're doing more than that." He sets the laptop down on the table. "Victoria said you reorganized the entire filing system in three days and found six months of missing documentation."
"It wasn't organized correctly."
"It was organized the way it had been organized for two years."
"Then it was organized incorrectly for two years."
His mouth twitches — nearly a smile. “Agreed.”
A beat of silence falls, and I resist the urge to shift on my feet.
"Is there anything else you might need, Mr. Shaw?"
He inhales, that already large chest of his expanding. “I wanted to tell you the lawyer confirmed the timeline. Sixty days minimum. Possibly ninety depending on processing."
"I know. I got the email."
“Good.” He runs a hand through his hair; for the first time I notice he looks tired. Not exhausted, but definitely running on less sleep than usual. "I also wanted to say I appreciate your professionalism this week.”
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. It's fucking awkward as hell, and you’re doing a great job of handling it.”
“Thank you. I—I appreciate that. Just trying to keep up with you.”
He laughs, a deep rumbling sound that makes goosebumps break out on my skin. “Trust me — you’re passing me with flying colors in that regard.”
I blink. “I’m sorry?”
"Tuesday. Coffee machine. You didn't even add cream."
My heart drop-kicks into my stomach. “You noticed that?"
"I notice everything about you." He takes a step toward me, and I swear my knees nearly buckle.
That is, until the door opens behind him.
We both turn, and immediately I notice Victoria standing there with three other people from the operations team.
Her gaze bounces between us, questions practically written in the line of her knitted brows. She checks a slim watch on her wrist.
“My…apologies. Are we early?" she asks.
"No," Declan says, straightening immediately. "Right on time. Miss Madison was just finishing setup."
"It looks great," Victoria says, eyes regarding me carefully.
"I'll get out of your way," I say, moving toward the door, realizing I have to pass Declan to get there.
Our shoulders pass within inches of each other. They don’t touch.
Just like the coffee carafe on Tuesday.
Just like the elevator wall on Monday.
I make it to the hallway, considering whether to reach out to a doctor to get these wobbly knees looked at.