The Billionaire's Broken Account

Chapter Two: The Terms of Engagement

Vivian didn't sleep.

She lay in her hotel room—a sterile, beige box on the thirty-first floor of a hotel Julian Cross didn't own—and stared at the ceiling while the city hummed twenty stories below. The numbers were still there, burned behind her eyelids. Forty thousand. A hundred and twenty. Two point three million.

And Julian Cross's face, hovering just at the edge of every thought.

She'd worked with difficult clients before. Men who thought a forensic accountant was a species of secretary. Women who assumed her calm exterior meant she could be steamrolled. She'd learned to smile, nod, and then eviscerate their assumptions with incontrovertible proof.

Julian wasn't difficult.

Julian was *dangerous*.

Not because he'd threatened her. He hadn't. Not because he'd been rude or dismissive. He'd been neither. The danger was in the way he'd looked at her—like she was a puzzle he wanted to take apart. Like he'd already decided that whatever boundaries she tried to set, he'd find a way around them.

Vivian rolled onto her side and punched her pillow.

She'd dealt with men like him before. Once. His name had been Marcus, and he'd had the same predatory stillness, the same way of making a room feel smaller just by entering it. She'd fallen for it. Fallen for *him*. And three years later, she'd walked in on him in their bed with a woman whose name she'd never bothered to learn.

*Never again.*

She closed her eyes and forced her breathing to slow. Two weeks. Fourteen days. Two hundred and eighty hours, most of which she'd spend in a conference room with a man who made her pulse stutter.

She could survive anything for two hundred and eighty hours.

---

The Cross Tower at 7 p.m. was a different animal than it had been at 9 a.m.

During the day, it hummed with the sterile efficiency of corporate machinery—suits and pencil skirts, the click of heels on marble, the low murmur of deals being made in elevators. But at night, the building seemed to breathe differently. The lights dimmed in the common areas. The cleaning crew moved through the lower floors like ghosts. And on the executive level, the silence was absolute.

Vivian stepped off the elevator at 6:55 p.m., five minutes early because she was never late.

The executive suite stretched before her, all glass and brushed chrome and the kind of expensive minimalism that cost more than most people's annual salaries. Julian's office occupied the corner—she'd seen it once during her initial walkthrough—but tonight, the lights were on in the conference room instead.

She stopped at the door.

He was already there.

Julian sat at the head of the table, surrounded by stacks of files that looked like they'd been pulled from a dozen different cabinets. His jacket was gone, draped over the back of his chair. His sleeves were rolled higher than yesterday, exposing more of that tattoo—a series of black lines that looked like coordinates, or maybe constellations. His tie was loosened. His hair was slightly disheveled, as if he'd been running his hands through it.

He looked tired.

He also looked, Vivian admitted with private irritation, obscenely attractive.

"You're early," he said without looking up.

"So are you."

"I live here."

She set her bag on the table and pulled out the chair at the opposite end. Far away. Safe distance. "That's not healthy."

"No." He lifted his gaze, and those winter-storm eyes caught the low light. "It isn't."

The silence stretched. Vivian refused to break it first. She'd learned that trick from years of interrogations—the first person to speak in a power vacuum always lost ground.

Julian smiled. It was a small thing, barely a curve of his mouth, but it transformed his face. Made him look almost human.

"You're good at this," he said.

"At what?"

"Waiting."

"I'm good at a lot of things."

"I don't doubt it."

He stood, and Vivian's body tensed before her brain could catch up. But he didn't come toward her. He walked to a sideboard against the wall—a piece she hadn't noticed before, dark wood and brass—and lifted a crystal decanter.

"Drink?"

"I don't drink on the job."

"Your job ended six hours ago. You're here on my time now."

"I'm here because you insisted on babysitting your own investigation."

He poured a finger of amber liquid into a glass. Didn't offer one to her. "I prefer the term *oversight*."

"I prefer the term *paranoid*."

He laughed. Actually laughed—a low, rough sound that seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised her. He covered it quickly, lifting the glass to his lips, but Vivian had already seen it.

The man had a crack in his armor.

She filed that information away for later.

"The files are organized by quarter," Julian said, returning to the table. He sat down three chairs away from her—not across, not beside, but somewhere in between. A deliberate choice. "Gregory delivered them this morning. He seemed... eager to cooperate."

"What did you say to him?"

Julian took a sip of his drink. "Nothing he'd repeat to HR."

Vivian pulled the first stack toward her. Q1, two years ago. The earliest transactions she'd flagged. "I need to cross-reference these against the general ledgers from the same period."

"On the table behind you."

She turned. Three more stacks. Her eyebrows rose. "You pulled everything."

"You said you needed access. You have it." He set down his glass and folded his arms across his chest. The movement pulled his shirt tight across his shoulders. "Consider every locked door in this building open to you."

"That's a lot of trust for a man who said he doesn't trust easily."

"I don't trust you." His voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. "I trust your reputation. Victoria Hart—"

"*Vivian*."

"Vivian." He said her name like he was tasting it. "You caught the Emerson Group fraud when three federal agencies couldn't. You traced the St. James embezzlement to a subsidiary in the Caymans that didn't officially exist. You've never lost a case."

Vivian's hand stilled on the file. "You did research on me."

"I did research on the woman the board hired behind my back. Wouldn't you?"

She would. She already had—she knew Julian Cross's birthday, his net worth, the names of his dead father and his estranged mother and the three board members who wanted him removed. She knew he'd gone to Harvard but dropped out. That he'd built the Cross Hotel Group from a single struggling property into a global brand in less than a decade. That he'd been engaged once, seven years ago, and the engagement had ended so abruptly that no one seemed to know why.

"Fair point," she said.

They worked in silence for the next hour.

It should have been uncomfortable, two strangers sharing the same air in a room that felt smaller than it was. But Vivian found herself settling into a rhythm—file, cross-reference, note, repeat—and Julian, to his credit, didn't hover. He read through his own documents, made phone calls in a voice too low for her to hear, and once, when she glanced up, caught her staring at his tattoo.

She looked away first.

*Damn.*

"The coordinates," she said, without meaning to. "On your arm. What are they?"

A pause. She felt his attention shift, heavy as a hand on her shoulder.

"You noticed."

"I notice everything."

"They're the latitude and longitude of a place in Iceland. My mother's hometown." He said it flatly, like he was reading from a report. "She left when I was twelve. I had it done the year she died."

Vivian's chest tightened. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. She made her choices." He turned a page in his file with more force than necessary. "The fraud. How confident are you that it's an insider?"

"Eighty percent. The shell companies are sophisticated, but the initial access point came from inside your network. Someone with credentials." She pulled out a sheet of her own notes. "I've narrowed the possible accounts to twelve people. All with C-suite or senior VP access."

Julian's jaw tightened. "Names."

"I'm not giving you names until I'm certain. Accusing the wrong person could blow back on both of us."

"I'm not asking for your protection."

"I'm not offering it. I'm protecting the investigation." She met his gaze and held it. "You hired me for my expertise. Let me do my job."

For a long moment, he just looked at her. She could see him weighing options behind his eyes—push or relent. Control or trust.

He looked away first.

"Fine. But when you have something solid, I want to know immediately."

"You will."

The silence that followed was different. Less adversarial. Vivian didn't trust it.

She returned to her files, but the numbers blurred. She kept noticing things she shouldn't—the way Julian's fingers moved across the page, precise and deliberate. The sound of his breathing when he leaned back in his chair. The fact that he'd rolled his sleeves up again, and she could see the tendon in his forearm flex every time he wrote something.

*Two hundred and eighty hours*, she reminded herself.

She was already counting down.

---

At midnight, Julian stood.

"You should go home."

Vivian blinked. She'd lost track of time—something she never did. "I'm not finished."

"You've been staring at the same page for fifteen minutes. You're done for tonight."

"I'm fine."

"You're exhausted." He walked to the door and held it open. "I'm not paying you to burn out in the first week. Go home. Sleep. Come back tomorrow."

Vivian wanted to argue. She had a hundred arguments lined up, each one more logical than the last. But her eyes were gritty, and her neck ached from leaning over files, and the truth was, she hadn't eaten since breakfast.

She stood slowly, packing her bag with movements that felt heavy.

"Seven tomorrow?" she asked.

"Seven." He didn't move from the door. As she approached, he stepped aside—but not far. Close enough that she had to brush past him to reach the hallway.

She felt the heat of him. Smelled cedar and smoke and that indefinable *him*.

She didn't look back.

"Goodnight, Miss Hart," he said to her retreating back.

"Goodnight, Mr. Cross."

The elevator doors closed between them, and Vivian leaned against the wall and pressed her palm to her racing heart.

*Two hundred and seventy-nine hours.*

She was in trouble.