The Silent Stake

Chapter 5 - A Reasonable Proposal

"The board vote changes things," he said, closing the door behind him. "Ninety days isn't enough time to trace this properly and protect the shareholder if they're worth protecting. Kane's already leaking to the financial press that we're stonewalling. By next week, every major outlet will be running some version of Ashford Group Hiding Something."

"I'm aware." Wren didn't look up from the filing chain she'd been untangling, mostly because looking up meant looking at him, and she'd found over the past six days that doing so for too long made it considerably harder to keep her thoughts running in straight, professional lines. "I need more time than ninety days gives me, and Kane knows it. That's the entire point of the deadline."

"I have an idea. I don't love it, and I suspect you won't either, but I think it buys us the time we actually need." He pulled out the chair across from her, sitting with the deliberate care of a man about to propose something he'd already talked himself out of twice. "Kane's leverage right now isn't just the mystery shareholder. It's the narrative that Ashford Group is unstable — leadership under siege, no clear allies, easy to pick apart in the press. If I can change that narrative fast enough, it buys the investigation real breathing room."

"Change it how?"

"A personal announcement. Something that reads as stability to the board and the market both." He held her gaze, and she watched something almost like reluctance cross his face before he said it plainly. "An engagement. Not real — I'm not asking you to actually marry me, Ms. Hale, only to let the board and the press believe it for as long as it takes us to finish this properly. It removes the narrative of a CEO isolated and vulnerable. It also, not incidentally, puts you close enough to the investigation daily that Kane can't easily maneuver around you without maneuvering around me."

Wren set her pen down slowly, running through the calculation with the same cold precision she applied to every filing chain she'd ever untangled — except this one had a variable she couldn't fully account for, a warmth under her ribs that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with a man she'd been quietly protecting from a distance for ten years, now sitting three feet away asking her to pretend to love him in public.

"You understand this puts a target directly on me," she said carefully. "If Kane's people start digging into who Wren Hale actually is—"

"They'll find a well-regarded independent investigator with a clean record, which is precisely why I trust you to survive that scrutiny better than most people I could have proposed this to." His mouth curved, something almost rueful in it. "I know it's an enormous thing to ask. I wouldn't ask it if I saw another way to buy us the time this investigation actually needs."

She should say no. Every careful, patient instinct that had kept Larkspur Holdings hidden for a decade was telling her, clearly and loudly, that proximity was the one thing she couldn't afford right now.

"All right," she heard herself say instead. "A fake engagement. Strict rules, clear boundaries, and it ends the moment this investigation does."

"Strict rules," Julian agreed, something in his shoulders loosening with visible relief. "Thank you, Ms. Hale. I mean that."

Neither of them, she thought later, walking out of that conference room with a ring size she'd have to fabricate an answer for by the following morning, had accounted for what four months of Hourglass messages might do to a plan built entirely on the assumption that they were strangers to each other in every way that mattered.