THE BILLIONAIRE'S KITTEN

Damon Voss did not do women. Not since Elaine, three years ago, who had smiled at him over candlelight while her lawyer quietly drafted the settlement papers she'd need the moment the ring was on her finger. Not since he'd learned, the hard way and more than once, that a woman's interest in him was rarely in "him" — it was in the thirty-two-story building with his name carved into the stone above the entrance, the private jet parked at a hangar he rarely visited, the number that trailed after his name in every business magazine's annual list like a shadow he couldn't outrun. He had built Voss Industries out of nothing but hours and hunger, and he had no patience left for people who wasted either — least of all women who mistook his net worth for his personality. So when his driver slammed the brakes outside the Voss Tower loading dock hard enough to send Damon's forehead nearly into the privacy partition, his first emotion wasn't concern. It was irritation, sharp and immediate, the reflex of a man who had not been inconvenienced by anyone in years. "What the hell—" he started. "Sir, someone stepped off the curb—" Damon didn't wait for the rest of the sentence. He shoved the door open into the gray afternoon and found himself face to face with the woman his car had nearly turned into a headline. She was still standing exactly where she'd stopped — untouched, unbothered, glaring at the hood of the car like it had personally offended her. A courier bag was slung across her chest, the strap worn pale at the edges from years of use, and her dark hair had half escaped a hasty bun, strands lifting in the wind coming off the river. She didn't look shaken. She looked *annoyed*, the particular annoyance of someone for whom this was simply one more small disaster in a morning that had already handed her several. "Are you insane?" he said. "Are *you*?" she shot back, not moving an inch. "This is a pedestrian crossing. You know — the little white lines painted on the ground that mean cars stop." "My driver stopped." "Two feet from turning me into a hood ornament." Up close, she was unfairly striking — sharp eyes that assessed him like a problem to be solved rather than a man to be impressed by. She looked at his suit, his car, the tower of glass and steel looming over both of them, and her expression didn't change at all. No flicker of recognition. No calculation, no quick recalibration of tone the way people's faces did the instant they placed him. Nothing. That absence of interest hit him harder than admiration ever had. "Do you know who I am?" The question left his mouth before he could stop it, and he hated himself instantly for asking it — for sounding exactly like every insufferable man he'd ever despised across a boardroom table. "No," she said, adjusting the strap of her bag like she had somewhere better to be, which she did. "Should I?" "Damon Voss." She shrugged, entirely unmoved. "Congratulations. You still almost hit me with a car." She stepped around the vehicle and walked away without a backward glance, disappearing into the lunch-hour crowd on the sidewalk like she hadn't just detonated something in his chest. Damon stood there a moment too long, traffic sliding past him, a stranger's shoulder clipping his without apology, the city moving on the way it always did — indifferent to whatever had just happened to him, which was, he was beginning to suspect, exactly the point of a city like this one. Nobody here owed him a second look. She, apparently, had decided the same thing before he'd even finished introducing himself. "Sir?" his driver said carefully, window down now, watching him in the mirror with the particular caution of a man who had learned to read his employer's silences. "Should I pull forward?" Damon didn't answer. He got back into the car and called the one person who would neither flatter him nor lie to him. "You sound strange," Julian Cole said by way of greeting, the noise of some venture pitch meeting fading behind him as he stepped out into a hallway to take the call. Julian had known Damon since business school, since the day he'd told Damon to his face that his pitch deck was garbage — and he was the only person left in Damon's life who still spoke to him like that. Everyone else had learned to flinch. Julian never had. "I need you to find someone for me." "Should I be worried?" "She almost got hit by my car. I want to know who she is." There was a pause on the line long enough that Damon could practically hear Julian sit up straighter. "Damon Voss," Julian said slowly, tasting the sentence like it might be a joke he hadn't caught up to yet, "wants to track down a woman's name. Personally. Not through Legal." "It's a liability matter." "It's really not, is it." "Find her, Julian." "On it," Julian said, and Damon could hear the grin in it even through the phone. "This is the most interested you've sounded in a human woman since Elaine, and I mean that as the insult it is." Damon hung up without dignifying that with a response, though privately, he didn't disagree. Three blocks away, in a coffee shop that smelled like burnt espresso and wet umbrellas, Wren Ashworth ordered a black coffee and told herself, with great conviction, that she was not thinking about the man in the car. She lasted eleven minutes. For her, that was practically a personal record. She was still congratulating herself on it when her phone buzzed with a text from Priya Malhotra, her roommate since freshman year and the only person alive who could get Wren to laugh until she couldn't breathe. "Emergency. Come home NOW. You will NOT believe who's in our building." Wren typed back: "I just almost got run over by a car outside Voss Tower, so my day is already full, thanks." "WHOSE car" "Does it matter?" "WREN." Wren rolled her eyes at her phone, the way she always did at Priya's flair for turning everything into a catastrophe, and typed one word back: "Later".Priya was loud where Wren was quiet, warm where Wren kept people at arm's length, and she was, infuriatingly, almost always right about the things Wren didn't want her to be right about. If Priya said it was an emergency, it probably wasn't. But if Priya said someone was in their building, it was worth walking home a little faster. Wren stared at the coffee going cold in her hand and felt the first real prickle of unease she'd had all day — the kind that had nothing to do with almost being hit by a car, and everything to do with the way that man had looked at her, like she was a question he fully intended to find the answer to. She had no idea that he already did. Or that his best friend was, at that very moment, starting to look.