CHAPTER TWO
774 Words
COLE’S POV
She marked four clauses.
I was still thinking about that when Ryan found me in the hospital corridor, hands in his pockets, waiting with the particular expression he wore when he had opinions he hadn't been asked for.
"She signed?" he said.
"She signed."
"And?"
I kept walking. "She negotiated."
Ryan fell into step beside me. He was quiet for exactly three seconds, which for Ryan was restraint. "She negotiated with you."
"She identified three clauses designed to give me exit options and told me they were trapdoors." I pressed the elevator button. "She was right."
"Cole."
"She was right, Ryan. The clauses were trapdoors. I put them there deliberately. She found them in twenty minutes with a ballpoint pen from her scrub pocket."
The elevator opened. We stepped in. Ryan looked at the ceiling the way he did when he was trying to decide whether to say something he knew I wouldn't like.
"Say it," I told him.
"She's not what I expected."
"No," I agreed. "She isn't."
What I didn't say, what I had no intention of saying out loud, was that for approximately forty-five minutes in that consultation room, I had experienced something I hadn't felt in a long time.
The specific alertness of being in a room with someone who was actually paying attention. Layla Reyes had been exhausted. Her eyes were shadowed and her scrubs were wrinkled from a shift that had clearly run long, and she had still read forty pages of dense legal language with more precision than the last two attorneys I'd paid four hundred dollars an hour.
I hadn't planned for that.
My plans, as a rule, were airtight. I identified a problem, designed a solution, and executed without sentiment. I had done that here. Layla Reyes was a logical choice, financially desperate, privately stable, no complications. Ryan had confirmed it. The numbers confirmed it.
What the numbers hadn't told me was that she would look at me across a table at two in the morning and make me feel, briefly and inconveniently, like I was the one being evaluated.
"The money transfers at nine AM," I said.
"Already arranged."
"And the wedding?"
"Friday. Courthouse. Judge Herrera. Fifteen minutes." Ryan paused. "Are your parents coming?"
I pressed the lobby button a second time, though it was already lit. "No."
"They know?"
"They know I'm handling it. That's all they need to know for now."
Ryan nodded slowly. He knew better than to push past certain lines. We had worked together for six years — he was my CFO, my oldest friend, the only person in my life who spoke to me without calculating what I could do for him first. I trusted him completely, which was a short list.
"You told her not to fall in love with you," he said.
I glanced at him. "You were listening."
"The door wasn't fully closed, Cole."
"It was a practical warning."
"It was a strange thing to say to someone you just met."
The elevator reached the lobby. I stepped out into the cool, empty atrium and didn't answer, because Ryan was right and I knew it, and I had no explanation that didn't reveal more than I intended to.
The truth was simpler and more inconvenient than I wanted to examine: I had said it because, sitting across from Layla Reyes, I had felt something tighten in my chest when she looked at me without flinching, and I had needed to put a wall up before the conversation ended.
Practical warning. That was all.
I got into the car. Ryan got in beside me. The city moved past the windows, lit and restless.
"She asked why you chose her," Ryan said after a while. "What did you tell her?"
"The truth."
"Which version?"
I turned to look at him.
He held my gaze steadily. "You told her the professional version. That she was stable, practical, and trustworthy. That's true." He paused. "You didn't tell her the other part."
"There is no other part."
"Cole." His voice was quiet. Careful. "I've known you for six years. I've watched you evaluate a hundred people for a hundred different purposes. You looked at her file for eleven minutes and made the call. You've spent longer choosing office furniture."
The car was quiet.
"Go to sleep, Ryan," I said.
He turned back to the window. But just before the silence settled completely, he said something that I spent the rest of the night trying not to think about.
"I just hope you remember your own warning, because I don't think she's the one who's going to need it."
- Writer
