His Obsession

Chapter 5: First Slip

Amelia didn't see Adrian again until the next afternoon.

She'd spent the morning drowning herself in work…emails, scheduling, a stack of invoices that needed sorting…anything to keep her mind from circling back to that hallway, that photograph, that single word he'd said like a warning carved in stone.

Dangerous.

She was still turning it over when Mrs. Grey appeared at her desk, looking uncharacteristically rattled.

"Where's the Meridian file?" Mrs. Grey asked. "The one for the three o'clock board call."

"On his desk. I put it there myself this morning."

"It's not there. He's asked for it twice already." Mrs. Grey's mouth pressed into a thin line. "He has the investors on in four minutes, Miss Carter."

Amelia was already moving. She pushed into Adrian's office without knocking…a rule broken without even thinking about it…and found him standing behind his desk, jaw tight, scanning through a mess of folders with barely contained frustration.

"It's not here," he said, not looking up. "I need the Meridian projections. Now."

"I saw it…" Amelia's eyes swept the room and landed on a folder half-buried under a stack near the window, clearly moved by cleaning staff. "There."

She grabbed it and flipped it open as she crossed the room, scanning the numbers fast, the way she'd learned to over the last two weeks of watching him work.

And stopped.

"These are wrong."

Adrian looked up sharply. "What?"

"The Q3 growth projection. It's using last year's tax bracket." She turned the folder around so he could see, tapping the page. "If you present this to the board with these numbers, you'll be overstating Meridian's margins by almost six percent. Someone didn't update the formula."

For a moment, Adrian just stared at her.

Then he was beside her, close enough that she caught the clean, sharp scent of his cologne, his eyes moving fast over the page she'd flagged. His expression shifted from irritation to something focused, calculating.

"You're right," he said quietly. He didn't sound surprised so much as recalculating something about her entirely. "How did you catch that?"

"I minored in economics before I switched to business admin. Old habit…I always check the tax year first." She shrugged like it was nothing, even though her heart was hammering. "You would've caught it too. Eventually."

"Eventually isn't good enough with investors." He was already pulling out a pen, correcting the number himself, movements quick and sure. "Get me the updated figure. Now. I have three minutes."

She had it to him in ninety seconds.

The call went smoothly. Amelia listened from just outside the office, arms crossed, allowing herself the smallest flicker of pride as Adrian's voice moved through the numbers on the other side of the door…steady, commanding, correct.

When he finally stepped out afterward, tie loosened, some of the tension gone from his shoulders, he found her still standing there.

"That could have been a disaster," he said.

"But it wasn't."

"No." He studied her for a long moment, and something in his expression had changed since yesterday's hallway…the coldness was still there, but there was something else underneath it now, something curious. Careful. "It wasn't."

"You're welcome," she said, when he didn't say anything else.

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Closer than she'd ever seen him get to one.

"Noted," he said. "Miss Carter."

He turned to walk back into his office, and Amelia should have let it go. She should have gone back to her desk and finished the invoices and left well enough alone.

She didn't.

"Adrian."

He stopped in the doorway.

"You said yesterday that asking about my father was dangerous." She kept her voice low, aware of Mrs. Grey two desks away, aware of every rule she was breaking just by opening her mouth. "I just saved your board call. I think I've earned at least part of an answer."

He turned around slowly.

For a second, she thought he'd shut her down again…the same wall, the same flat no she'd gotten a dozen times already. But something in his face was different this time. Softer, maybe. Or just more tired.

"It's not that simple," he said.

"Then make it simple. Start anywhere."

He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that she thought he genuinely might. His eyes searched hers, like he was trying to decide something important, weighing her against some private scale she couldn't see.

"Your father worked for my father on something confidential," he said finally, each word careful, deliberate. "Something that ended badly. People got hurt because of it. That's as much as I can tell you."

Amelia's stomach dropped. "Hurt how? What happened?"

"I said that's as much as I can tell you." His voice hardened again, the wall going back up brick by brick right in front of her. "Not because I don't trust you. Because some things are safer left buried."

"Safer for who?"

"For you." The words came out sharper than he probably meant them to, urgent in a way that startled her. "For your family. Amelia…"

He stopped.

It was the first time he'd said her first name. Not Miss Carter. Not rule one. Just Amelia, quiet and unguarded, like it had slipped out before he could stop it.

They both seemed to notice it at the same moment.

Adrian's jaw tightened. He took a half-step back, like he needed the distance, like he'd caught himself doing something he'd promised himself he wouldn't.

"Finish the invoices," he said, voice clipped again, cold again. "I have another call in ten minutes."

"Adrian, wait…"

"Rule ten, Miss Carter."

He disappeared into his office and closed the door…not slammed, just closed, quiet and final, which somehow felt worse.

Amelia stood there for a long moment, staring at the door, her pulse still racing from the way he'd said her name.

People got hurt because of it.

She thought of Sophie's voice on the phone. He sounded scared, Amelia. Dad never sounds scared.

She thought of the photograph in that hallway, her father's face, younger and unguarded, standing beside a man who was now dead…because Adrian had inherited this company after some tragedy, hadn't he, the outline of it sitting there in everything nobody would explain to her.

Whatever had happened, it connected her father to Adrian's father. And whatever it was, it had ended badly enough that a grown man…cold, controlled, terrifyingly composed Adrian Blackwood…still couldn't say her name without looking like it cost him something.

Amelia sat back down at her desk, hands trembling slightly as she opened her laptop.

She wasn't going to stop asking questions.

She was just going to have to get smarter about who she asked.