THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACT BRIDE

Rules of Engagement

Adrian found her at breakfast the next morning, already dressed for the office, already carrying the particular brisk energy of a man who preferred solving problems to discussing them.

"We should establish some ground rules," he said, without preamble, sliding into the seat across from her while Mrs. Doyle set down a pot of coffee and retreated with the quiet efficiency of staff who had learned exactly how much to overhear. "Separate bedrooms, obviously. In public, we perform whatever affection the situation requires — board events, family functions, the occasional photograph. In private, none of that is necessary."

"How generous," Amelia said dryly, wrapping both hands around her coffee cup.

"I'm told sincerity isn't my strongest quality." Something almost like humor flickered at the corner of his mouth, gone as quickly as it came. "I'd rather be direct than pretend this is something it isn't."

"Fine. Then let me be direct as well." Amelia set down her cup. "Someone left a note under my door last night. *Leave while you can.* Your grandmother seemed to think it wasn't the first warning this house has produced."

Whatever brisk efficiency Adrian had walked in with evaporated instantly. He went very still, the particular stillness of a man recalculating everything he thought he knew about the last twelve hours. "Show me."

She retrieved it from her room and watched him read it twice, his jaw tightening with each pass. "This isn't the first strange thing to happen since the succession crisis began," he said finally, quiet in a way that suggested the admission cost him something. "Files misplaced. A security breach in a system only a handful of executives have access to. Numbers that don't reconcile, explained away by people whose entire job is explaining away things that don't reconcile." He looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd met him, the mask of controlled competence had a visible c***k in it. "I don't know who to trust in my own company, Ms. Hart. I need you to look at the books. Not as a formality. Because I genuinely do not know who else I can ask."

Amelia studied him for a long moment, cataloguing the shift the way she catalogued discrepancies in a financial statement — noting what had changed, and what that change implied. This was not the flat, unreadable man from the dinner table the night before. This was someone closer to frightened, doing an admirable job of not showing it.

"I'll need full access," she said. "Not the sanitized version your board sees. Raw ledgers, vendor records, audit trails going back at least five years."

"You'll have it." He hesitated, then added, with visible reluctance, as if the words cost him something to say aloud: "Thank you. For not laughing at me."

"I'm not in a position to laugh at anyone's problems right now, Mr. Blackwood."

"Adrian," he said. "If we're going to be doing this together, I'd rather not spend a year being called by my last name at my own breakfast table."

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The organizational chart he handed her that afternoon was meant, he said, "for context" — a map of Blackwood Global's executive structure, vendor relationships, and subsidiary holdings going back two decades, the kind of document Amelia had spent her career learning to read the way other people read maps of unfamiliar cities, searching for the roads that didn't quite connect to anything.

She found it within the hour, sitting at the temporary desk set up for her in a spare study, sunlight slanting low through tall windows onto sheets of financial data that meant nothing to anyone who hadn't spent a decade training their eyes to see exactly this kind of anomaly.

A vendor entity. Small, unremarkable, easy to overlook among hundreds of others — except that its name matched, almost exactly, an entry in her father's private ledger. Not identical. Close enough that her pulse spiked before her mind had even finished processing why.

She pulled up the entity's registration history with the access Adrian had granted her, hands moving faster than her breathing, and found what she was half-expecting and wholly dreading: the shell company had been formally dissolved eighteen years ago, on paper, in every filing that mattered to a casual audit.

And yet it was still listed, quietly, as an active vendor in the current system. Reactivated, or never fully closed. Someone with deep, sustained access had either failed to bury it properly two decades ago, or — more chilling — was using an old, forgotten shell as camouflage for something new.

Amelia sat back in her chair, staring at the screen, feeling the particular vertigo of watching two separate griefs — her father's and this company's present crisis — reveal themselves as branches of the same tree.

She thought of the ledger entry. *L.G. — confirm shell filings before board mtg.*

She thought of Lucas Grant's hand lingering a beat too long in hers, his voice saying *I don't believe I've met a Hart in a very long time*, in a tone that made the word *believe* sound like a private joke only he understood.

It proved nothing yet. She knew that. A reactivated vendor entity, a coincidence of initials, a lawyer's overly warm handshake — none of it would survive scrutiny in any courtroom, and she of all people understood exactly how far short of proof mere suspicion fell.

But it was a thread. And Amelia Hart had spent ten years learning that threads, pulled patiently enough, eventually unraveled entire garments.

She was still at the desk well past dinner, cross-referencing dates, when Adrian appeared in the doorway, having clearly come looking for her once her absence at the table became conspicuous.

"You missed dinner," he said, an observation rather than a complaint, though something in his tone suggested he'd noticed her absence more than his flat delivery let on.

"I found something." She hesitated, weighing how much to share before she understood the shape of it herself. "A vendor entity that was supposedly dissolved almost two decades ago. It's still active in your current system. Someone reactivated it, or never actually closed it."

Adrian crossed the room to look at the screen over her shoulder, close enough that she was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of him in a way that had nothing to do with the numbers in front of her. "Eighteen years," he murmured. "That predates my running anything. That's — that's my father's era. Possibly my grandfather's."

"Does the name mean anything to you? Harrow Bridge Holdings?"

He frowned, searching, and shook his head slowly. "No. But I want to know who set it up, and I want to know who's been keeping it alive." He looked at her then, something shifting behind his eyes — not quite warmth, not yet, but the beginning of something that hadn't been there in his office three days earlier, when she'd been nothing to him but a résumé and a solution to a legal problem. "You found this in one afternoon. My internal auditors have had months."

"Your internal auditors," Amelia said carefully, "may not want to find what I'm looking for."

Adrian didn't answer that immediately. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped lower, quieter, a man choosing his next words with unusual care. "Keep looking, Amelia. Whatever you find. I'd rather know the truth and hate it than keep living inside a lie I can't see the edges of."

She almost told him then. Almost said *Richard Hart was my father, and I think whoever built that shell company destroyed him for finding exactly what I'm finding now.* The words sat right at the back of her throat, dangerously close to the surface.

She almost told him then. Almost said *Richard Hart was my father, and I think whoever built that shell company destroyed him for finding exactly what I'm finding now.* The words sat right at the back of her throat, dangerously close to the surface.

She swallowed them instead, and told herself it was strategy, not cowardice, though some small, honest part of her suspected it was already becoming both.

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