Not In The Contract
1493 Words
The name hung in the air between us like smoke.
Clara.
My Clara.
Nosy, crisp-eating, throw-a-snack-at-you-when-you-lie Clara, who had helped me pack my boxes and asked if Ethan was attractive and laughed when I said very fine and hugged me at the door of this building on the first day like she was sending me off to war.
Clara, who had known exactly where I was going.
Who had known exactly who I was going to.
Who had given someone my name.
"No," I said.
Not to Marcus. Not to Ethan.
Just to the room. To the idea of it.
"Aria—" Ethan started.
"No." I stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again because sitting felt impossible. "Marcus is wrong. He has to be wrong. Clara wouldn't — she doesn't even know who you are, she doesn't have connections to anyone who would—"
"She knew you were coming here," Ethan said quietly.
"She's my best friend."
"I know."
"She helped me pack."
"I know."
"She threw a crisp at me, Ethan, people who are conspiring against you don't throw crisps at you—"
"Aria." He stood and crossed to where I was standing and put both hands on my face, gently, the way he had that morning, and tilted my face up toward his and looked at me with those dark eyes that had stopped pretending to be unreadable somewhere around day four. "I know," he said. "I know what you're feeling."
"You don't—"
"I trusted Richard Calder for fifteen years," he said.
The room went quiet.
I looked at him.
His hands were warm against my face and his eyes were doing the thing where they said more than his words and I felt the fight go out of me in one long exhale that I wasn't prepared for.
"Okay," I whispered.
"Okay," he said.
He didn't move his hands.
I didn't move either.
We stood in the middle of the penthouse with London grey and vast behind us and his palms against my cheeks and our faces closer than the contract had ever accounted for and I thought about Clara and Richard Calder and drone footage and fires and the fact that I had been chosen, specifically, deliberately, before I ever spilled coffee on a billionaire in a London street.
"Why me?" I said. "If this was planned — if someone gave them my name — why? What do I have to do with any of this?"
Ethan's jaw tightened.
"I don't know yet," he said.
"But you have a theory."
A pause.
"I have the beginning of one," he said carefully.
"Tell me."
He dropped his hands from my face.
I immediately missed them, which I noted and filed away under things I was not going to think about right now.
He moved to the window — staying to the side of it, away from the direct line of sight, a habit Marcus had installed in both of us since last night — and looked out at the city with his hands in his pockets and the particular stillness of a man organising difficult information into a shape he could present.
"My grandfather," he said, "left the company to me. Not my father."
I blinked. "What?"
"When he died, six years ago. The Kingston Group — the shares, the controlling interest, everything — went to me." He paused. "My father receives a significant income from the company. He sits on the board. But he doesn't control it." A pause. "I do."
"And he resents that."
"He's never said so." The corner of his mouth, humourless. "He doesn't need to."
"So Richard Calder — your father's partner—"
"Was working with my father for twenty years before I took control," Ethan said. "There are deals made in that period that I've never been able to fully account for. Money that moved in ways that don't reconcile." He looked at me. "The fire destroyed seven years of physical records."
I stared at him.
"Your father," I said slowly.
"I don't know," he said. But the way he said it meant he was beginning to.
"Ethan. If your own father is behind this—"
"I said I don't know."
His voice was still quiet but the edge in it was new — raw in a way I hadn't heard before, the sound of something that had been pressed flat for a long time pushing back against the pressure.
I crossed the room.
Stopped in front of him.
Looked up at him the way he was always looking down at me, steady and direct.
"Hey," I said.
He looked at me.
"Whatever this is," I said, "we find out together. You and me." I held his gaze. "That's also not in the contract."
Something broke open in his expression.
Just for a second.
Just enough.
His hand came up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and stayed there, his fingers curved around the back of my jaw, and my heart was doing something completely indefensible.
"Aria," he said.
Low. Close. My name in his mouth sounding different than it ever had before, like he'd been saying it wrong until just now and had finally found the right way.
"Ethan," I said back.
He leaned in.
Slowly.
Like he was giving me every opportunity to stop him.
I didn't stop him.
His forehead came to rest against mine and we stood like that, breathing the same air, not quite kissing, suspended in the space just before the point of no return, his thumb moving softly against my jaw, my hands having found the fabric of his shirt without my permission.
"This is a terrible idea," he said.
"Catastrophic," I agreed.
"The contract—"
"I know."
"If this goes wrong—"
"I know."
"Aria—"
"Ethan," I said quietly, "if you're going to kiss me just kiss me."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh.
And then he did.
Softly at first. Careful. The way he did everything — deliberate and considered and then suddenly, as I pressed up onto my toes and closed the last inch between us, not careful at all.
His hand slid from my jaw to the back of my neck and the other found my waist and I gripped his shirt and kissed him back with every feeling I'd been filing away since the first morning I found him barefoot in his kitchen and told myself it didn't mean anything.
It meant something.
It had always meant something.
When we finally broke apart we were both breathing differently and his forehead was back against mine and his eyes were closed for a moment, just a moment, like he needed a second before he let the world back in.
I needed approximately forty.
"That," I said softly, "was definitely not in the contract."
He opened his eyes.
Looked at me.
And smiled.
Not the almost-smile.
Not the corner-of-the-mouth ghost of one.
A real one, full and unguarded and devastating, and I understood in that moment why he kept it so carefully hidden because Ethan Kingston smiling properly was genuinely dangerous to a person's stability.
"No," he said. "It wasn't."
He tucked the strand of hair behind my ear again.
I was approximately three seconds from pulling him back down when my phone rang.
We both froze.
I looked at the screen.
Clara.
The warmth drained out of the room instantly.
Ethan saw my face and his expression shifted — not cold, not distant, something more complicated than either, like a man watching someone he cares about walk toward something painful and knowing he can't stop it.
"You don't have to answer," he said quietly.
"Yes I do."
I picked up.
"Ari." Clara's voice was bright and familiar and completely normal and that normalcy felt like standing on glass. "Are you okay? I saw that photo of you and Kingston everywhere, you looked incredible by the way, the dress was stunning—"
"Clara," I said.
Something in my voice stopped her.
Silence.
"Aria?" Quieter now. "What's wrong?"
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
Ethan was watching me with his hands in his pockets and his jaw set and his eyes steady, and I took one breath and asked the question I needed to ask.
"How did they find me, Clara?"
Dead silence.
Three seconds.
Four.
Five.
"What are you talking about?" she said.
But her voice had changed.
And I'd known Clara for six years.
I knew every version of her voice.
This one, small and careful and just slightly too controlled, was the one she used when she was hiding something.
"Clara." My voice broke on her name. Just slightly. Just enough. "Please don't lie to me."
The silence that followed was the longest of my life.
And then she said four words that confirmed everything and destroyed everything simultaneously.
"Aria, I can explain.
- Writer
