In Love With My Ex's Cousin

CHAPTER SIX

Luca

Luca Moretti did not linger over decisions.

He made them, then moved.

That was why the apartment still being empty six weeks after the purchase irritated him. He had bought 18 Riverside Drive because the penthouse had started to feel temporary. It had never been intended as a permanent home. It was convenient, secure, close to the office, and easy to leave. Lately that had begun to look less like efficiency and more like a habit he had stopped questioning.

The new property was a practical correction. More space. Better light. A building that did not feel like an extension of work.

Then he had requested Elena Rossi.

He had told himself that was practical too.

Her firm had a reputation for residential work that did not look staged. She had a portfolio that suggested she understood restraint. Most designers who came through Moretti Holdings wanted to impress the name. He did not need to be impressed. He needed rooms that functioned and did not announce themselves.

He stood at the window of his office after dark, jacket off, sleeves rolled once. A glass of water sat untouched on the desk behind him. The city was a clean grid of light. Orderly. Predictable. The river cut through it in a dark line he could follow all the way toward the east bank if he wanted to.

He did not.

The meeting the previous afternoon had been straightforward. She had arrived on time, walked the rooms, taken measurements, asked how he used space, and left with a notebook and a timeline. No performance. No attempt to fill the silence. She had called him Mr. Moretti until he told her not to, and even then she had not warmed the conversation to make it easier.

That much he had expected.

What he had not planned for was how quickly the name on the project file would travel.

His phone lit up.

Luca answered.

“You’re still in the office,” Adrian said.

“So are you.”

“That’s different. I like people. You like walls.” A pause. “Did she take the project?”

“Yes.”

“And Matteo knows?”

“No.”

Adrian was quiet for a second. “You requested his ex-girlfriend by name.”

“I requested a designer,” Luca said. “She’s good at the work. That’s the reason.”

“It can be the reason and still be a problem.”

“I’m aware of the family complications.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“When there’s something that requires it.”

Adrian exhaled. “Matteo won’t see it that way. You know how he is when he thinks something has been kept from him.”

“There is nothing to keep. It’s a residential redesign.”

“Then it should be easy to mention.”

Luca looked at the dark water beyond the glass. “I don’t report my contractors to our cousin.”

“No,” Adrian said. “You just don’t usually hire the last woman he failed to tell the truth to.”

The line sat there, clean and unwelcome.

“It won’t become messy,” Luca said.

“That’s what people say before it does. I’m not telling you to cancel the project. I’m telling you not to pretend the history isn’t attached to it.”

“I haven’t forgotten the history.”

“Good. Then don’t be surprised when someone else remembers it too.”

After the call ended, Luca stayed at the desk long enough to finish the work he had actually come there to do. He approved two contracts. Sent a note to his assistant about the Singapore file. Declined a dinner invitation from a board member who collected other people’s time as if it were a compliment.

Then he opened Elena’s last email again.

She had thanked him for the keys.

She had confirmed the timeline.

Nothing else.

Good.

He preferred people who did not add warmth where none had been asked for. It kept the edges of a working relationship where they belonged.

He closed the laptop, locked the office, and went home to the penthouse he was supposedly replacing. The rooms were exactly as he had left them that morning. Lights on low. Surfaces clear. No evidence of a day except the jacket he dropped over the back of a chair.

He ate standing up, not because he was in a hurry, but because sitting down would have turned the evening into something that required ending. At ten he answered one more message from legal and ignored two others that could wait until morning.

The keys had been left at the building desk as instructed. She would have collected them. That was the next step in the process. There was no reason to confirm it.

He told himself that while he stood at his own windows, looking at a different stretch of the same city, and found no reason to look toward the river.

It was a job.

The apartment needed to be finished.

She knew how to finish a space properly.

The rest was family history, and family history only became a problem if someone insisted on dragging it into a room where it did not belong.

He had no intention of doing that.

Tomorrow would be meetings, a call with finance, and the ordinary work of keeping Moretti Holdings moving. The redesign would take its place in the calendar like any other project: scheduled, limited, and complete when the work was done.

That, at least, was still under his control.