LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER TWO

The call came at 11:47 PM.

Aisha was still at her desk, reading through quarterly reports with a cold cup of coffee, and her shoes kicked off under the chair when her phone lit up with a number she didn't recognise. She almost ignored it. She had a rule about unknown numbers after dark — nothing good ever came from them.

But something made her pick up.

"You left your pen."

She went very still.

Kael's voice in her ear at midnight was not something her carefully constructed walls had been built to handle. Low, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and had decided to spend some of it on her.

"Excuse me?"

"Your pen. The gold one with the engraving. You left it in the boardroom." A pause. "It says A.F. — Never Settle. I'm guessing it means something."

Her throat tightened. Her father had given her that pen the day she registered TechNova. He had died eight months later.

"Leave it with reception," she said. "I'll pick it up tomorrow."

"I'm still in the building."

"Then leave it with security."

"Aisha."

Just her name. Nothing else. But the way he said it — like it cost him something — made her grip the phone tighter.

"How did you get this number, Kael?"

"You put it on the proposal."

She had. Of course she had. She pressed her fingers to her temple and reminded herself that she was a grown woman who had survived worse than a late night phone call.

"What do you want?" she asked.

A long silence. Long enough that she almost thought he had hung up.

"I want to explain," he said finally. "What happened three years ago. I know I don't deserve the chance. I'm asking anyway."

Aisha set down her pen — the other one, the ordinary one — and stared at the spreadsheet on her screen without seeing any of it.

Three years ago, she would have given anything to hear those words. She had rehearsed conversations in the shower, arguments she would never get to have, questions that had no answers because the person she needed to ask them to had simply vanished. She had carried the weight of his silence like something she deserved.

She didn't feel that way anymore.

"The time for explanations expired a long time ago," she said. "Right now, you are my creditor, and I am your client. That is the only relationship we have."

"And if I want more than that?"

The audacity of it almost made her laugh. Almost.

"Then you are going to be very disappointed, Mr. Donovan." She kept her voice smooth as river stone. "Goodnight."

She hung up before he could say another word and sat in the silence of her office for a long moment, listening to the hum of the city outside her window.

Then she picked up her cold coffee, took a long sip, and went back to her spreadsheets.

She was fine.

She was absolutely fine.

She saw him again the next morning.

I'm not in a boardroom this time. Not behind the safety of a long table and a room full of witnesses. She rounded the corner of the building coffee shop with her eyes still half-closed from a short night and walked directly into his chest.

His hands caught her arms before she could stumble. Warm. Steady. Exactly as she remembered.

She stepped back immediately.

"Sorry," she said, purely on reflex.

"Don't be." He was holding a coffee cup in one hand and her gold pen in the other. He held it out to her. "I thought you might want this before I handed it to strangers."

She looked at the pen. Then at him. He was dressed more casually today — dark shirt, no tie, like he had somewhere more human to be. It was worse somehow. The suit had been armour for both of them.

She took the pen.

"Thank you," she said, because her mother had raised her right even when she didn't feel like it.

"Can I buy you a coffee?"

"I have one." She held up her cup.

"Can I walk you to your office?"

"I know the way."

"Aisha." That voice again. That infuriating, unfair voice. "Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."

She looked at him for a long moment. Studied the lines of his face, searching for the man who had left and trying to understand what he had become. He looked tired, she realised. Not physically — he was as immaculate as ever. But behind the eyes. Like he had been carrying something heavy for a long time and hadn't found anywhere to put it down.

Good, "said a small mean part of her.

Don't, said the rest.

"Five minutes," she said. "And then we go back to being professionals."

Something in his face shifted. Relief, maybe. Or the beginning of something more dangerous than relief.

"Five minutes," he agreed.

They walked in silence for a moment, out of the coffee shop, and into the pale morning light. The city was just waking up around them, taxis and street vendors, and the smell of fresh bread from somewhere nearby.

"I was sick," he said quietly.

She hadn't expected that.

"Three years ago. When I left." He kept his eyes forward. "It wasn't — I didn't plan it. I found out two days before I disappeared and I didn't know how to tell you. I didn't know how to be what you needed and be what I was becoming at the same time."

Aisha kept walking. Kept her breathing even. "What kind of sick?"

"The kind that changes things." He paused. "The kind I thought I wasn't going to come back from."

The city noise filled the space between them. A taxi honked. Someone laughed loudly across the street.

"You should have told me," she said finally. Her voice came out quieter than she intended.

"I know."

"I would have stayed."

"I know that too." He stopped walking. She stopped, too, without meaning to. He turned to look at her, and his eyes were every complicated thing she had spent three years trying not to think about. "That's why I left. You had just launched TechNova. You had everything ahead of you. I wasn't going to let my problems become the ceiling on your future."

Aisha stared at him.

Of all the explanations she had invented — another woman, cold feet, simple cruelty — she had never once considered this one. That he had left not because she meant nothing to him but because she meant too much.

She didn't know what to do with that.

"Your five minutes are up," she said.

He nodded slowly. "I know."

She turned and walked toward the building entrance. Her heart was doing something complicated and inconvenient inside her chest, and she refused to give it permission.

At the door, she paused without turning around.

"I'm glad you didn't die," she said.

She went inside before she could hear his response.