THE DON'S SECRET HEIR

Chapter Five: Across the Room

"You've gone still."

Nadia's voice came from the seat beside me and I pulled my eyes from the window.

"I'm fine." I replied

"You've been staring at that window for twenty minutes without blinking."

"I like the view." I lied

"Julie." She said my name in the particular tone she had developed over two years of working beside me, the tone that meant I am not going to push you but I want you to know that I see you.

"I'm fine, Nadia." I turned to face her fully.

"The presentation is tight, and we have prepared for every question they are likely to ask and several they are not. We are going to walk in there and we are going to close this deal."

She looked at me for a moment. Weighing it.

Then she let it go.

"Okay," she said, and opened her own file.

I looked back at the window. The city was close now, the runway coming up to meet us, and I breathed deeply and told myself the tightness in my chest was just altitude.

It was definitely not altitude.

***Lucas's POV***

My aunt Rosa had been threatening to die for three years,

It was not with any drama, tears, hospital visits or anything that would have been easier to argue against this time. Just a steady, patient assertion on the phone every few weeks, warm and entirely implacable, that if I did not come to see her soon she could not be responsible for what her heart decided to do about it.

She was seventy one years old and she had buried a husband and raised five children and built a house in this city with her own money and her own hands and she had the constitution of a woman who would outlive every single person she had ever loved and would have opinions about paradise once she got there.

But I had run out of excuses.

"You keep saying soon," she had told me the last time, and there was something underneath the warmth in her voice that stopped me. Something that was not the usual dramatics but something quieter and more real. "I am not asking for much, Lucas. I am asking for two days."

I had told Marco to arrange it.

The Delaney Group portfolio was due a review visit. Seville was not far out of the way if you had a private aircraft and a flexible definition of on the way. I would see my aunt. I would walk through the Delaney offices. I would confirm the numbers matched what the reports said and the management team was what they presented themselves to be and I would leave.

I was not supposed to go into the boardroom.

Marco had informed me there was a presentation already running when I arrived. He said I could wait in the corridor or take the meeting room on the fourth floor.

“What do you mean wait in the corridor” I muttered

“I do not wait in corridors” I retorted

I pushed the door open and stepped inside and began my automatic read of the room. Table. Delaney team on the left. Screens set up at the front. The particular quiet focus of a presentation in progress.

And then my gaze reached the front of the room.

And stopped.

She was already standing there.

I recognized her before my mind had finished processing what I was seeing, the way you recognize a sound you heard once a long time ago in a specific moment and never forgot. She had her back half turned, pointing at something on the screen, clicker in hand, her suit dark and her hair pulled back, and she had the absolute composed certainty of a woman who had prepared

She felt the shift when I entered. I saw it in the half second before she turned.

She turned.

Our eyes met across the room.

Neither of us moved.

It felt like something just shifted. Five years compressed into a single second while the rest of the room went on without us, while we kept our eyes locked on each other for what stretched like forever.

The chairs scraping and tablets opening and someone saying good morning brought me back to the moment, tearing my gaze away from her. I sat down and acknowledged their greetings.

I kept my face where I needed it to be on the projected screen. I had spent thirty five years learning to keep my face where I needed it to be and I was not going to stop now, not in a boardroom and most definitely not in front of a Delaney team that would spend the rest of the week discussing whatever they observed in this meeting.

But I did not look at the slides even when I had my face on the board.

I looked at her.

She knew I was looking. I could see the knowledge of it in the way she held herself, the slight extra precision in every gesture, the way her eyes moved to the screen and the table and the Delaney team and everywhere that was not me. She was working hard at not looking back.

People who are indifferent do not work that hard.

I sat with my hands flat on the table and I watched Julie Gail deliver her presentation in the city she had left five years ago without a word, and I let her feel every second of my stare, and I waited.

Because I knew she had a lot of explaining to do, and starting with why she seduced me that night.

And she’s definitely not getting away this time.