Trusting the Billionaire

Chapter Twelve: Dancing II

"Don't." She kept walking. He kept following, unbothered by the two failed attempts she'd already made to lose him in the crowd, and by the time she reached the bar he was still half a step behind her, infuriatingly unshaken, his knuckles already reddening.

Tracy appeared out of the crowd a moment later, flushed and concerned, her eyes landing on Marshall with recognition and somewhat disdain.

She rushed to Audrey's side, checking if she is okay. Audrey assured her that she is fine. she then proceeded to introduce Marshall; an answer to Tracy's on voiced question.

looking him over with the frank, assessing eye of someone doing quality control, and didn't bother hiding it.

"So you're the fiancé," Tracy said, amusement threading through the words. "Audrey said obnoxious. She left out hot."

"Tracy," Audrey muttered, mortified.

"I'm just saying what I see." Tracy folded her arms, though there was nothing hostile in it, more the posture of a woman settling in to enjoy herself. "For the record, I don't think much of the way you went about it. Asking a woman to play pretend fiancée like it's a line item on a term sheet. That's not romance, that's a merger."

"It wasn't meant as either," Marshall said. "It was a practical solution to a problem we both needed solved."

"Mm. See, that's exactly the sentence a man says right before he ruins something good." Tracy tilted her head, studying him a moment longer. "You may be every woman's dream, but you sure are not good at wooing".

Marshall was taken aback. 'that's not what he is doing?' he thought ' it's just like any other business or job he had done'

Tracy continued without waiting for a reply, "So here's my professional opinion, since you seem like the type who respects one. Skip the pretense. If you want to take my friend out, ask her out. Like a man who wants a date, not a man who wants a signature."

"Tracy, that is not happening," Audrey said, color rising in her cheeks.

"Isn't it?".

"There's nothing. He made an insulting offer and now he's decided showing up here fixes it, and it doesn't." She turned to Tracy, done entertaining the conversation. "Can we just go? I don't want to be anywhere near him right now."

Tracy's teasing eased at that, replaced by something more careful. She reached for Audrey's hand and gave it a squeeze. "Yeah. Course we can." She threw one last look back at Marshall as she reached for her coat, not unkind, more like a woman filing away a verdict for later. "You've got to step up man" pointing to her own head.

Audrey didn't look at him again. She grabbed her clutch off the booth table and let Tracy steer her through the crowd toward the exit, and within a minute the two of them were gone.

Marshall stood there a moment longer, the music pressing in around him, Francis calling his name from the table somewhere behind him. He didn't answer right away.

He'd expected resistance. He'd expected her to negotiate, to push back the way she had in his office, arms crossed and chin lifted, telling him exactly what she thought of his terms before eventually seeing the sense in them the way most people did once the numbers were laid out clearly enough. That was how these conversations usually went. People resisted, and then they understood, and then they signed.

He hadn't expected her to simply leave. Twice now.

And he hadn't expected the friend, a woman he'd met for exactly ninety seconds, to see the one thing he hadn't let himself look at directly. That he hadn't been able to stop watching Audrey all night, displeasure and all, and that apparently it had shown.

'Ask her out. Like a man who wants a date' she had said

'Dating is not his priority right now and he is fifty percent sure is not hers either.. how could he get her to accept.

He didn't hold Audrey's animosity against her. If anything, some part of him thought she'd earned the right to it, he'd attached strings to a deal that was beneficial to both of them. He wondered how he was going to get her to accept sooner, yes he knew she would come around, but when he could not tell. He could just lay low waiting like a tiger ready to pounce but seeing her tonight had unraveled something in him.

It had been hard to focus on Tracy at all with all the lectures, each time his eyes drifted back to Audrey, the flush still on her skin from the dance floor, the strap of her dress sliding slightly off one shoulder, the long, bare line of her legs under the hem of that dress, something in his chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with contracts, bets, or business. He'd always known she was attractive. He hadn't been prepared for this. For the sudden, physical urge to reach out and run his hand along the smooth skin of her exposed shoulders, just to know if it was as soft as it looked.

He had caught the thought before it went any further and made himself look away, jaw tight.

All he wanted was to prove to himself and his family that he is a committed relationship so they could stop bothering. She is very attractive but he has been with plenty attractive women, so he can and will play this game right. He'd handed her a business proposal wrapped in cold, careless words, and it had cost him whatever ground he might have had.

He will find a way to make it sound more reasonable they will both get what they want out of the partnership.

Audrey...

Audrey left the club flustered, the night air doing nothing to cool the heat crawling up her neck. Angry, that was the word for it, except she couldn't pin down exactly what she was angry about. Marshall, obviously. But which part of Marshall? The way he'd ruined her night just by existing in the same room? The infuriating calm he wore like it was tailored for him too, same as everything else he put on? Or the audacity, the sheer audacity, of asking if she was alright, as though he isn't the reason her entire week had unraveled in the first place?

Why would he even ask that? Why would he put himself in the position of concerned bystander when he was the storm she was trying to survive? It didn't make sense, and the not-making-sense of it needled at her more than she wanted to admit.

She had done so well, too. Days of carefully planning alternatives and forgetting Mr Ki, filing him away under 'problem to solve later', and then he'd shown up. Not just shown up, unannounced, like he had some divine right to occupy whatever room she happened to be standing in. And of course he hadn't shown up looking anything less than devastatingly handsome. That was the part that really irritated her. He could have at least had the decency to look ordinary.

He hadn't. He'd had his suit jacket off, sleeves loose over his forearms, just a plain dress shirt with the top button undone, the kind of casual that should have made him look like any other man out for a drink. It hadn't. If anything, it made him hotter. She could still see it when she closed her eyes: the clean line of his throat, the small stretch of skin at his collar, the way his shoulders filled out the fabric like the shirt had been cut with the express purpose of proving a point. It wasn't the suits that made him look powerful, it is the man himself, she understood that now, annoyingly.

It wasn't fair. Powerful men were supposed to be either handsome or terrifying, not both, not stitched together so seamlessly that she couldn't find the seam to pull the two traits apart and hate properly.

By the time she got home, she didn't even bother turning on the hallway light. She kicked off her heels somewhere near the door, left her bag on the counter, and dropped onto her bed still half-dressed, staring at the ceiling like it owed her an explanation. Her mind ran laps, the loan portfolios, the board meeting Marshall had asked for, the two weeks he'd given himself to decide, the ridiculous, impossible condition he'd laid on the table like it was a footnote and not the entire plot twist of her life. 'Pretend to be my fiancée', As if that were a small thing. As if she hadn't spent the last few days turning the phrase over and over until it lost all meaning, the way a word does when you say it too many times.

She thought about Halden Cross's name, mentioned only once but heavy enough to explain everything, why Marshall needed this to look personal, why he needed a woman on his arm and not just a signature on a contract. She thought about her father, about Bellamy Trust, about the fact that turning Marshall down outright might be the very thing that let the bank slip through her fingers.