My Wife Is Addictive
853 Words
Chapter 14
(Xander's POV)
The boardroom cleared at five.
I stayed behind.
Stood at the window with my hands in my pockets, watching the city shift from afternoon grey into the first amber streaks of evening, running through everything the last fourteen hours had delivered.
Rachel Voss. Theo Grant. Victor's silence since my declined voicemail.
Silence from Victor was never absence.
It was preparation.
Richard appeared in the doorway. "Nadia pushed tomorrow's calls to the afternoon as requested. And Dax confirmed the car for seven. The Beaumont dinner is still on."
"Tell Dax eight," I said. "And send Sophia the updated time."
A pause. "Should I contact her assistant or..."
"Her directly."
Richard absorbed that without comment and disappeared.
I turned back to the window.
The problem with Sophia Laurent was that she was becoming a variable I couldn't calculate cleanly anymore.
That had never happened to me before.
I ran every situation through the same framework; identify the moving parts, isolate the risks, control the outcome. It was how Reginald had taught me to think before I'd understood that Reginald himself had been a moving part in someone else's framework.
That realization still sat uncomfortably.
Sophia had taken the documents yesterday with a composure that had cost her considerably more than she'd shown. I'd watched her process her mother's signature in real time, seen the precise moment it landed and the precise moment she'd decided not to fall apart in front of me.
Most people would have.
She'd simply filed it somewhere internal and kept standing.
The woman was extraordinary.
I was becoming less careful about how often I thought that.
She was already dressed when I arrived at the penthouse at seven-thirty.
Black this time. A sleek column dress with a neckline that required considerable discipline not to react to. Her dark hair was pulled up, a few loose waves framing her face, hazel eyes sharp and already assessing me the moment I walked through the door.
"You changed the time," she said.
"I needed an extra hour on the Grant financials."
"Did you find anything?"
"Enough to be useful." I set my jacket on the chair. "I'll brief you tomorrow."
She held my gaze for a moment, deciding whether to push it.
She let it go.
That was new.
The Beaumont dinner was a private affair, twelve guests, the kind of old Manhattan money that didn't need galas to remind itself of its own significance. The host, Gerald Beaumont, had been a Laurent Luxe board advisor before Henri's death and had watched Sophia rebuild the company from its lowest point with what I now understood was personal investment.
He greeted her with genuine warmth that had nothing to do with business.
"You look like your father tonight," he told her quietly, holding both her hands.
Something moved across her face. Brief. Deep.
"He would have enjoyed the fight," she replied.
Gerald laughed softly. "He always did."
I watched her navigate that moment and the twelve that followed it with the same quiet mastery she brought to everything. Dinner conversation flowed through art acquisitions, European market shifts, the Laurent Luxe autumn collection. She was engaged, warm and precise.
She was also doing something I hadn't seen her do before.
She kept finding me across the table.
Not performing. Not for the room.
Just checking. Small glances that lasted a fraction of a second longer than necessary before she returned to whoever she was speaking with.
I found myself watching for them.
That was the problem with Sophia Laurent stated plainly.
She was addictive in a way that had nothing to do with the obvious things, though God knew those were considerable enough. It was the way her mind worked. The way she held a room without commanding it. The way she'd looked at her father's old colleague tonight with real grief and real love and real steel all at once.
The way she kept finding me across the dinner table like it was involuntary.
In the car afterward she was quiet in that particular way of hers, processing, cataloguing, filing.
"Gerald knew my father well," she said eventually.
"I gathered."
"He told me something tonight." A pause. "He said my father trusted Reginald Voss completely. Called him one of the only honest men in their circle." Her voice was carefully neutral. "Which makes what happened either a profound betrayal or something else entirely."
I looked at her.
"Something else," I said.
She turned to face me in the dim back seat of the car, the city lights moving across her features.
"Victor," she said.
"Victor," I confirmed.
The word settled between us like something finally named.
She looked at her hands for a moment.
Then back up.
"Then we have a common enemy," she said quietly.
Not a question.
Not a performance.
Just truth, spoken plainly in the back of a car moving through a city that had no idea what we were building inside it.
"Yes," I said.
And for the first time since the contract was signed
the war between us felt like it was pointing somewhere else entirely.
- Writer
