Married To The Cold Mr. Kingston

6AM

I didn't sleep well.

Not because the bed was uncomfortable — it was, objectively, the most comfortable bed I had ever been horizontal in, the kind of mattress that made you understand why wealthy people always looked so well rested — but because my brain refused to stop running.

I lay in the dark staring at a ceiling that was higher than any ceiling I'd lived under before and listened to the silence and thought about the contract on the coffee table and the signed copy in my email and the number in my bank account that I'd checked four times before bed just to confirm it was real.

It was real.

Half the payment, transferred cleanly and without ceremony, the way Ethan Kingston apparently did everything.

I should have felt relieved. I did feel relieved, somewhere underneath the anxiety. But mostly I felt like a person who had jumped off a very high ledge and hadn't quite finished falling yet.

At half past five I gave up entirely on sleep.

I found a oversized hoodie in my unpacked bag, pulled it on over my pyjamas, and padded out into the apartment in my socks.

The living room was dark and silver, London glittering through the enormous windows like a scattered handful of lights. I stood at the glass for a moment and looked out at the city doing what cities do at 5:30am — quietly, privately, before the performance of daytime began.

I liked London best like this. Before it remembered to be loud.

I found the kitchen, found the coffee machine — which was complicated and silver and looked like it belonged in a spaceship — and stood in front of it for an embarrassing amount of time before I located the instructions Sophie had apparently anticipated I'd need and left in the drawer beside it.

The coffee, when I finally produced it, was extraordinary.

I wrapped both hands around the mug and drifted toward the bookshelves on the far wall because books are the one thing that tell you more about a person than anything they'd willingly share.

They were organised. Obviously. But not by colour or size the way people organise books for photographs — by subject. History. Architecture. Economics. Philosophy. A full shelf of fiction, mostly classics, spines worn in a way that meant they'd actually been read.

I pulled out a copy of Jane Eyre that looked like it had been read approximately eleven times and turned it over in my hands.

"That one's been there since I was nineteen."

I spun around so fast I nearly dropped the mug.

Ethan was standing in the doorway of his study.

He was already dressed — dark trousers, a grey shirt not yet fully buttoned, no jacket — with the slightly unfinished look of someone caught between night and morning. His hair was less ordered than yesterday. His feet were bare, which for some reason was the most startling thing about him.

It made him look almost human.

"I didn't hear you," I said, pressing a hand briefly to my chest.

"I've been up since five." He nodded toward the book in my hands. "My mother left it when she came to visit years ago. She claimed she'd come back for it."

"Did she?"

Something moved across his face. Brief and gone. "No."

He crossed the living room toward the kitchen with the quiet unhurried movement I was already beginning to recognise as distinctly his — like he'd calculated the most efficient path between two points and simply followed it.

"The machine gave you trouble," he said, glancing at the open instruction drawer.

"The machine is aggressively complicated for something that makes coffee."

"It's Italian."

"That explains everything."

He looked at me over his shoulder.

I couldn't tell if he almost smiled or if I imagined it.

He made his own coffee in about forty-five seconds without consulting any instructions, which I found deeply irritating, and then leaned against the counter and looked out at the city the same way I had ten minutes ago.

I hesitated.

Every instinct said to take my coffee and my borrowed book back to my room and leave him to his morning because those were the rules — private lives, own schedules, no unnecessary overlap.

But it was 5:45am and the city was still dark and there was something about this particular quiet that made the rules feel very far away.

I sat on the sofa.

He stayed at the counter.

We didn't talk for a while and it wasn't uncomfortable exactly — it was the kind of silence that two people fall into when they're both too tired for pretence and too awake for sleep, which is its own strange category of honest.

"You read at six in the morning?" he asked eventually, without looking away from the window.

"I wasn't sleeping anyway." I turned Jane Eyre over in my hands again. "Do you always start work at five?"

"Usually four-thirty."

I stared at him. "That's not a schedule. That's a punishment."

This time I was certain — the corner of his mouth moved. Barely. For less than a second.

"There's more to do than there are hours," he said simply.

"There's always more to do than there are hours. Normal people stop anyway."

He looked at me then, properly, with those dark unreadable eyes. "Is that what you do? Stop?"

"I try to." I pulled my feet up onto the sofa, which felt immediately like a violation of some unspoken penthouse rule, but he didn't say anything. "My mum used to say that rest isn't a reward for finishing. It's part of the work." I paused. "She was very wise and I am very bad at listening to her."

"Where is she now?" he asked.

"Leeds." I smiled despite myself. "Retired. Terrorising her garden and calling me every Sunday to ask if I'm eating properly."

"Are you?"

"Define properly."

Another almost-smile. They were very small, these almost-smiles, but I was beginning to collect them the way you collect small, unlikely things you find on the ground — not sure why, just certain they're worth keeping.

"What about yours?" I asked. Then immediately second-guessed it. "Sorry — you don't have to—"

"My mother lives in Edinburgh," he said, with the measured tone of someone reading from a file. "My father is in London. They divorced when I was twelve. It was—" He stopped. Considered. "Mutual, eventually. Not at the time."

It was more than I expected.

I got the sense it was more than he usually gave.

"And your father arranged this marriage," I said carefully. "The one we're— the one that's the reason I'm here."

His jaw tightened almost invisibly. "He arranged it two years ago. I've been— managing the situation since then."

"Managing meaning ignoring?"

"Managing meaning buying time." He looked back at the window. "Helena Voss is the daughter of our primary European partner. The merger has been on the table for years. My father sees the marriage as a solution to several problems simultaneously."

"And you see it as?"

"A transaction I didn't agree to." His voice was even. Quiet. "I don't object to Helena personally. She's—" He paused again, choosing words carefully. "She's exactly what my father would choose. Polished. Strategic. Appropriate."

"But?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"I don't want a transaction," he said finally. So quietly that I almost missed it under the silence of the apartment.

I looked at him.

He was still facing the window, London silver and dark behind him, and for just a moment the composure slipped — not dramatically, not in any way he'd probably acknowledge — but enough. Enough to see something real underneath. Something that had been carrying weight for a long time and was very good at not showing it.

Then he straightened.

Set his mug down.

"I have calls at seven," he said, and just like that the composure was back, every piece of it, slotted into place as efficiently as everything else he did. "Help yourself to whatever you need in the kitchen. Sophie will contact you this morning about the schedule for next week."

He moved toward his study.

"Ethan."

He stopped. Turned slightly.

I wasn't sure why I'd said it. I hadn't planned to. But the almost-smiles and the worn copy of Jane Eyre and I don't want a transaction were sitting in my chest in a way I hadn't anticipated and I needed to say something that was true.

"Thank you," I said. "For this morning. For—" I gestured vaguely at the room, the coffee, the conversation. "You didn't have to."

He looked at me for a moment.

"You were already awake," he said.

Then he went into his study and closed the door.

I sat in the quiet living room with my coffee and my borrowed book and listened to London waking up below and thought about a man who started work at four-thirty and kept a book his mother never came back for and said I don't want a transaction like it cost him something to admit it.

The cold Mr. Kingston, the headlines called him.

I was beginning to think the headlines had only seen the parts he wanted them to.

End of Chapter 4