No Feelings

CHAPTER THREE: Coffee and Cameras

The coffee shop Kane's team selected was called The Roasted Anchor, a converted dockworker's warehouse three blocks from the harbor with exposed brick, Edison bulbs, and exactly the kind of curated-rustic charm that photographed well without looking like it had been chosen specifically because it photographed well — which, of course, it had. Kess arrived first, per the plan, and took a table by the window with a clear sightline to the door, because that was where the photographer Kane had "coincidentally" tipped off would want his angle.

She'd changed her outfit four times that morning before settling on jeans and an oversized cream sweater, casual enough to read as authentic, put-together enough that no one would accuse the Wolves' marketing department of letting their star enforcer's new girlfriend show up looking careless. She hated that she'd thought about it that hard. She hated more that some small, traitorous part of her brain had wondered, while standing in front of her closet, what Ronan Vashti would think of the sweater, before she'd caught herself and shoved the thought down so hard it left a bruise.

This is a job, she reminded herself, wrapping both hands around a latte she didn't actually want. A transaction. Six weeks.

The bell over the door chimed at 10:02, exactly two minutes late, which she suspected was deliberate — arriving on someone else's schedule instead of dead on time read as more natural. Ronan Vashti ducked slightly under the doorframe, which he genuinely needed to do, and the entire coffee shop seemed to register his presence the way a room registers a sudden drop in air pressure — conversations quieting, a barista behind the counter visibly forgetting how to operate an espresso machine she'd presumably used a thousand times.

He wore a dark green Henley that looked deliberately, insultingly good on him, and Kess hated the way her pulse ticked up half a beat when his eyes found hers across the room.

"Sorry I'm late," he said, sliding into the chair across from her. "Practice ran long."

"It's fine," Kess said, and then, because she could see over his shoulder a man in a puffer jacket who had suddenly become very interested in his phone camera near the pastry case, added, in a voice calibrated to be overheard, "I ordered you a black coffee. I remembered you don't do sugar."

It was a lie, invented on the spot, but it was exactly the kind of detail that would read, in a blurry paparazzi photo, as intimate. Ronan's eyebrows lifted a fraction, and he leaned into it without missing a beat.

"You remembered right," he said, wrapping both hands around the mug, and took a sip like it mattered to him. "Good memory."

"I have an excellent memory," Kess said dryly. "It's mostly full of sponsor contract clauses and your penalty minute statistics, but sure, let's call it a skill."

Something that might have been a real laugh escaped him, low and surprised, like it had gotten past his guard before he'd decided whether to allow it, and for a moment, sitting across from him in the golden morning light, Kess forgot, entirely and terrifyingly, that this was supposed to be a performance.

She caught herself immediately. Straightened. Reached for her latte like it was a shield.

"We should talk logistics," she said, lowering her voice, angling her body slightly so the conversation would read as private to anyone watching, which was the point, and also happened to feel disorientingly like actual intimacy. "Kane wants organic-looking content twice a week minimum until the gala. Coffee, a walk somewhere scenic, maybe a grocery store run if we can make it look candid."

"A grocery store run," Ronan repeated, deadpan. "You want me photographed comparing avocados."

"I want you photographed doing anything that reads as a normal human being with a life outside the penalty box. Right now the narrative is 'unpredictable enforcer, possible liability.' We need 'grounded, thoughtful, surprisingly domestic.' Avocados help."

"Fantastic. I'll workshop my avocado face."

"Do you have an avocado face?"

"I'm about to develop one under professional pressure."

A real laugh, sharp and surprised, escaped her before she could stop it, and the sound seemed to catch him off guard too, something warm flickering across his face before he tucked it away again.

This is a job, she thought, for the third time in ten minutes, and this time the reminder felt thinner than it had that morning.

"There's something else," Ronan said, quieter now, leaning forward, his voice dropping below the range that would carry to the man in the puffer jacket. "About the report. I want you to know I haven't forgotten what I promised. I've been thinking about how to get it to you without putting either of us at risk before the trade closes."

The reminder landed like cold water down her spine, snapping her fully back into reality. "I appreciate that," she said, carefully neutral. "But let's stick to the surface stuff for now. Somewhere in here is exactly the kind of person who'd love to overhear us discussing a confidential facilities report."

Ronan's jaw tightened, an acknowledgment. "Fair point."

"How's your sister," Kess asked instead, pivoting toward safer territory, and immediately regretted the question when something shuttered behind his eyes.

"Why do you ask about her?"

"Because if we're building a public relationship, people are going to expect me to know things about your life. If a reporter asks me something and I have nothing, it reads as fake."

The wariness eased, slightly. "Nadia. She's twenty-one, studying architecture at Ashcombe State. She's—" he paused, something softening in his voice, "—the best person I know. Smarter than me, better than me, doesn't deserve half of what our family history's dragged into her life just by being related to it."

"What family history?"

He was quiet a moment, turning the coffee mug slowly between his hands. "My father played for the Wolves. Twenty years ago. Captain, franchise legend. And then he got caught up in a gambling scandal that ended his career in disgrace when I was twelve. My mother left when I was fourteen. I raised Nadia mostly myself from sixteen on, working two jobs around junior hockey practice, because somebody had to."

Kess sat very still, absorbing this, something in her chest cracking slightly at the flat, matter-of-fact way he delivered it.

"I didn't know any of that," she said quietly.

"Most people don't. I've spent my whole career making sure of it." His pale eyes flicked up. "The league doesn't forgive a name that's already been dragged through scandal once. The only way to survive with my last name was to be so good on the ice and so silent off it that nobody had a single thing to write about me except my penalty minutes. Which worked. Right up until it started costing me the trade I need."

"So the softness you're supposedly incapable of," Kess said slowly, "is actually just—"

"Buried," Ronan finished. "Deliberately. Because the last time a Vashti let this city see who he really was, it ended with a twelve-year-old kid learning that softness gets photographed and printed and used against you."

The man in the puffer jacket near the pastry case had given up on subtlety and was now openly filming, and Kess was suddenly, viscerally aware that this entire conversation was, on the surface, indistinguishable from performance. That was exactly what Kane's team wanted. The horrifying part was that some of it might actually have been real, and she had no idea, sitting there with her heart doing something unwelcome, how she was supposed to tell the difference.

"We should probably kiss," Ronan said abruptly.

Kess nearly choked on her latte. "Excuse me?"

"For the camera. If it's going to read as a relationship instead of friendly coffee."

"Absolutely not."

"It doesn't have to be — a cheek kiss. Something that reads as tender without being—"

"I heard you the first time." Her pulse was hammering. "Fine. Cheek. Once. And then we're done here for the day."

He nodded, came around to her side of the table, and crouched slightly to bring himself down to her eye level — a small, deliberate courtesy that undid something in her chest. His hand came up, gentle, impossibly gentle for a man built like a wall, and cupped the side of her face, and his lips brushed her cheek, close enough to the corner of her mouth that anyone watching through a long lens would read it as something far more intimate.

His lips were warm. He smelled like cedar and clean laundry, and the moment lasted no more than two seconds, and Kess felt it travel through her entire body like she'd been struck by lightning.

"Sorry," Ronan murmured, close enough to her ear that only she could hear it. "Was that too much?"

"It was fine," Kess managed, her voice strange, thin. "For the camera."

"Right," he said, straightening up, putting distance between them with what looked like real effort. "For the camera."

Neither of them looked entirely convinced by the words.

She replayed it for the rest of the day, in increasingly furious loops, trying to reduce the whole encounter to its professional parts. It had been strategy. She was still telling herself this at six-thirty that evening when Priya dropped a printed tabloid page onto her desk with a triumphant flourish.

"It's already up. Ashcombe Enforcer Spotted Getting Cozy With Mystery Brunette." She tapped the photo. "Kess. Professionally, this is a home run. Personally, though—" Priya's eyes narrowed. "You look like you got hit by a truck."

"I'm fine."

"You have the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have the face. The one where you're pretending everything's under control and your whole body is screaming that it isn't." Priya sat on the edge of her desk. "What happened."

"He kissed my cheek. For the photo. It's fine. It was strategic."

"Uh huh." Priya studied the photo, then studied Kess. "I have known you for six years. I have never, not once, seen you look the way you're looking right now over something you're calling 'strategic.'"

"It's a rule," Kess said, more to herself than to Priya. "We agreed. No feelings."

"Sure. It's a job. Where he touches your face like you're something precious and you sit there for the rest of the day looking struck by lightning. Very no-feelings." Priya held up both hands, backing off, a small knowing smile not fully disappearing. "Six weeks is a long time, Kess. Rules are easy to make across a conference table. They get a lot harder to keep once someone's hand is on your face and his mouth is that close to yours."

The text came in at 11:47 that night.

Ronan Vashti: You still awake?

Kess: Yes. Why?

Ronan Vashti: Couldn't sleep either. Wanted to say — today was good. The coffee thing. Not just the photo. The actual conversation.

Kess: It was fine. Good for the campaign.

Ronan Vashti: That's not what I meant and I think you know that.

She sat up in bed, heart doing something complicated.

Ronan Vashti: I'm not trying to break it. I just wanted you to know the coffee was good. The real parts. Not the part where I have to hold up my end of a blackmail deal I'm not proud of. The part where you laughed at the avocado thing.

Kess: Go to sleep, Vashti. We have a grocery store photo op at 9am.

Ronan Vashti: Fair. Goodnight, Kess. For what it's worth — you have a good laugh. You should let people hear it more.

She set the phone face-down on the nightstand and stared at the dark ceiling for a long time before sleep finally dragged her under.

The grocery store the next morning was, predictably, a disaster in the best possible way for the campaign. Ronan pushed a cart through the produce section with an expression of such genuine bewilderment at the avocado display that Kess couldn't stop laughing.

"I don't understand the ripeness system," he said, holding one up like it had personally offended him.

"You squeeze it. Gently."

"I feel like squeezing produce in public is how you end up on a watch list."

She was laughing too hard to notice, at first, the way he'd reached over and corrected her grip on a cantaloupe she'd been inexpertly thumping, his hand briefly closing over hers, warm and rough with calluses, guiding the motion with a patience that had nothing to do with cameras.

"You're good at this," she said, gesturing at the whole absurd tableau. "Making it look effortless."

Something shifted in his expression, careful, weighing whether to say the thing behind his eyes. "Maybe," he said finally, quiet enough it wasn't meant for the photographer, "it doesn't feel like work."

Kess turned back to the melons, cheeks burning, and spent the rest of the morning very deliberately not looking at him, which turned out to be its own kind of impossible.

By the time they reached checkout, the photographer had gotten what he needed and disappeared, and Ronan insisted on paying for both their groceries with a stubbornness that made her roll her eyes and let him.

"This has been surprisingly not terrible," Kess said, walking out into the crisp November morning.

"High praise from you too, apparently."

"Don't get used to it."

His laugh, when it came, was real and warmer than anything she'd expected — and Kess drove home with her heart doing something dangerous, some small traitorous voice whispering that maybe this deal was going to cost her something far more expensive than she'd bargained for.

She didn't have time to process the thought before her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number, and her stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Unknown Number: Cute photos with Vashti. Almost believable. Shame about what happened to Malachi Reyes — wonder how the public would feel if they knew the REAL story behind that hit. Watch yourself, sweetheart. Some secrets don't stay buried forever.

Kess stood frozen on the sidewalk, grocery bags forgotten at her feet, staring at the message with a cold, spreading dread that had nothing to do with cameras or performances, and everything to do with the sudden, terrifying realization that someone else already knew — and they weren't waiting for the trade deadline to use it.