The billionaire's off-limits obsession

Chapter two

Damien Cross had learned a long time ago that people who came to evaluate him rarely stayed long enough to see anything true.

Consultants, board liaisons, the string of efficiency experts his uncle kept sending in hopes of finding a crack in the foundation. They arrived with their clipboards and their carefully neutral expressions, and within a week they'd either quit or hand in a report that read exactly like the one before it. Cold. Controlling. His father's son in the worst possible ways.

He stood at his window that night long after the office had emptied, watching the city fold itself into darkness, and found himself thinking about the way Elena Voss had looked at him.

Not with fear. Not with the careful flattery he'd grown used to from people who wanted something from him. She'd looked at him like a problem she hadn't solved yet, and something about that, about being seen as unfinished rather than already decided, had settled into his chest and refused to leave.

He told himself it meant nothing. She was the board's instrument, sent to build a case for or against him, and the fact that she had sharp eyes and asked better questions than the last three combined didn't change what she was here to do.

It didn't stop him from arriving to the seven a.m. briefing eight minutes early, which he never did, or from noticing the exact moment she walked into the room.

She'd traded yesterday's blazer for a charcoal suit that made her look even more like she belonged at the head of a boardroom than half the men currently seated in it. She took a chair near the back, notebook open, expression arranged into something unreadable, and didn't look at him once as the meeting began.

He found that harder to ignore than if she had.

The briefing ran long, quarterly numbers, a manufacturing delay out of the Detroit plant he'd fought to keep open, a testy exchange with his uncle Richard about expansion into European markets that Damien had no intention of rushing. He answered every question directly, gave no ground he didn't intend to give, and was aware the entire time of Elena's pen moving steadily across her notebook, cataloguing him.

"You didn't flinch once," she said afterward, catching up to him in the corridor as the room emptied. "Your uncle came at you twice."

"Richard's been coming at me since I was twelve. I stopped flinching a long time ago."

"That's not an answer."

He glanced sideways at her, surprised despite himself. Most people let him deflect. "What do you want me to say, Ms. Voss? That it doesn't bother me when the board questions whether I deserve to be here?"

"I want you to tell me the truth. Isn't that the arrangement?"

He stopped walking. She stopped a beat later, close enough that he caught the same quiet, clean scent from yesterday, something like rain on stone.

"It bothers me," he said. "Every time. I just don't let it show, because the moment I do, that becomes the story. Cross can't handle pressure. Cross is cracking under his father's shadow. I've spent three years making sure that story doesn't get written."

Something shifted in her expression, careful and considering, like she was recalculating something she'd already decided. "That's the first honest thing you've said to me."

"Careful. I might start thinking you're not just here to write me up."

"I'm here to find out what's true. Sometimes that includes the things that make you look good." She held his gaze a moment longer than professional distance strictly allowed. "You should try it more often. The honesty, not the deflecting."

"I'll take it under advisement."

They reached the elevator bank in silence, and he found himself in no particular hurry to end the conversation, which was unlike him. He had a full morning ahead, calls to return, a lunch with investors he'd rather cancel than attend. None of it felt as urgent as the five feet of space between himself and Elena Voss.

"Dinner," he said, before he'd fully decided to say it. "Tonight. Not a meeting. If you're going to evaluate whether I'm fit to run this company, you should see more than boardrooms and press releases."

She raised an eyebrow. "That sounds like exactly the kind of thing an oversight report would flag as inappropriate."

"It's a working dinner, Ms. Voss. I eat dinner with board members, investors, and consultants on a fairly regular basis. I'm simply extending you the same professional courtesy." He kept his voice even, though the pull low in his chest was anything but professional.

She studied him for a long moment, and he had the distinct sense she knew exactly what he was doing, and was deciding whether to let him get away with it.

"Fine," she said finally. "Working dinner."

"Eight o'clock. I'll have Margaret send the details."

The elevator arrived, and she stepped inside, turning to face him as the doors began to close. "Mr. Cross."

"Damien," he said. "If we're having dinner, you might as well use it."

Something flickered across her face, quick and unguarded before she caught it. "Damien," she repeated, testing the shape of it. "Don't expect me to go easy on you just because the food's good."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

The doors closed, and he stood alone in the corridor for a long moment, aware of a feeling he hadn't let himself have in longer than he could remember. Anticipation. Not for a deal closing or a quarter beating projections, but for eight o'clock, and the particular way Elena Voss looked at him like he was a puzzle worth solving rather than a headline waiting to happen.

He thought of his father, the last conversation they'd had before the stroke that took him three years ago, sitting in this same office telling Damien that the company came first, always, that everything else was a distraction dressed up as feeling. Damien had believed him for a long time. Had built a life around believing him.

He looked out at the city, lights blinking on floor by floor as the evening settled in, and allowed himself, for exactly one moment, to wonder what it would feel like to want something that wasn't the company at all.

Then he picked up his phone, and called Margaret, and told her to book the private room at Antoine's for eight, and to make sure it was the one with the view.

If Elena Voss was going to write the verdict on who he really was, he intended to make sure she saw all of it. Even the parts he'd spent three years keeping hidden from everyone, including, most days, himself.