His Reluctant Bride

CHAPTER FIVE —The Call She told herself she was being practical. She almost believed it.

Mia had a system for making decisions.

She wrote things down. Two columns — reasons for, reasons against — and whichever side carried more weight, not just more items, won. It was the same method she used for manuscript acquisitions, for apartment hunting, for every significant choice she'd made since she was nineteen and decided that lists were more reliable than feelings.

She had made the list at seven in the morning, sitting at her kitchen table in yesterday's clothes with a fresh coffee she kept forgetting to drink.

Reasons against calling Dante Mori: she didn't know him. It had been one night. She had work due. She wasn't the kind of person who got tangled in things she couldn't untangle. She valued her uncomplicated life. And the situation involved a man actively trying to destroy a company — which meant her colleagues, and the manuscript she'd been shepherding for eight months.

Reasons for: that last one.

She looked at the list for a long time.

Then she picked up her phone.

She didn't have his number. That was the first practical problem. She had his first name, his last name, and the knowledge that he owned her building. She had his assistant's handwriting on a small white card that had come with a midnight blue dress.

She turned the card over. On the back, in the same precise handwriting: a number. No name. Just digits.

Of course.

She dialled before she could make another list.

It rang twice.

"Mia."

Not a question. He'd known it was her before she spoke, which meant he'd saved her number, which meant at some point — between the terrace and the car and the moment she'd folded his jacket and walked away — he had done that quietly, without mentioning it.

She filed that away.

"You said don't think too long," she said. "It's been eleven hours."

A pause. Brief, but she heard what was in it — something that wasn't quite surprise, controlled before it could become anything else.

"It has," he said.

"I've been thinking."

"I assumed."

"I made a list."

Another pause. Longer. "That tracks."

"There were more reasons against than for," she said. "Significantly more."

"And yet you called."

"And yet I called." She looked at the list on her kitchen table. At the single item in the right column. "The people downstairs matter more than my reasons against. That's not going to change."

Dante was quiet for a moment. She was learning his silences — that this one wasn't empty. It was the kind where he was choosing his words with the precision he brought to everything.

"I need to be clear about what I'm asking," he said. "This isn't one more night. Russo will be watching now. If we stop — if it ends abruptly — it creates a different story. One that's worse than the original."

"How long?"

"Until the Kellner situation resolves. Weeks, possibly. A month."

Mia breathed in slowly. A month of pretending. A month of events and appearances and standing beside a man she had met less than twenty-four hours ago.

"Terms," she said.

"Name them."

"I keep my job. Obviously. The lease stays regardless of what happens between us."

"Already filed. Non-negotiable from my side as well."

"I need twenty-four hours notice before any event. I'm not available to be summoned."

"Understood."

"And—" She stopped. Started again. "Honesty. If something changes — on either side — we say so. No performing past the point where it makes sense."

The silence this time was different. Softer, somehow, which shouldn't have been possible on a phone call.

"Yes," Dante said. "That's fair."

"Then we have an arrangement."

"We have an arrangement."

She looked at her list again. At all the reasons against, lined up neatly in their column, thoroughly outvoted by one single thing.

"Dante."

"Yes."

"Did you sleep last night?"

A beat. She had surprised him — she could tell by the half-second delay, the slight shift in the quality of his silence.

"Some," he said.

"That's not a real answer."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

She picked up her forgotten coffee. Cold now. She drank it anyway, without thinking. "I'll see you when I see you, then."

"Mia."

"Yes."

"Thank you." Said simply. Not performed. Just — true.

She hung up and sat for a moment in the quiet of her kitchen with the morning coming through the window and the list still on the table in front of her.

She turned it over so she couldn't see it anymore.

Some decisions didn't need to be looked at once they were made.

The sixteenth floor looked exactly the same.

That was the strange thing. Mia had half-expected it to be different somehow — charged, or altered, reflecting the fact that twenty-four hours ago she had been on an eighteenth-floor terrace with the man who owned this building, wearing his jacket, standing close enough to see the scar along his jaw.

Instead: the familiar hum of the AC. Marcus arguing with the printer. Priya eating lunch at her desk at ten in the morning because she'd skipped breakfast again. The manuscript on Mia's desk exactly where she'd left it, three hundred pages she loved, waiting.

She sat down and opened to where she'd stopped.

She read the same paragraph four times and retained none of it.

"You look different," said a voice.

Priya had appeared at the edge of her desk, lunch in hand, with the expression of someone who had known Mia for three years and could read her the way Mia read manuscripts — looking for what wasn't on the page.

"I look exactly the same," Mia said.

"You have the face you make when something happened that you haven't decided how to explain yet."

"I have a resting thinking face. It's not a signal."

"Mia."

"Priya."

Priya sat on the edge of the desk uninvited, which she had been doing for three years and which Mia had never successfully stopped. "Did something happen with the lease? I saw the building management email this morning — it said the renewal had been confirmed."

Mia looked at her. "It was confirmed."

"How?"

"I had a conversation with the building owner."

Priya stared at her. "You had a conversation with Dante Mori."

"I pressed the wrong elevator button."

"That's not an explanation."

"It's all I have right now." Mia looked back at her manuscript. "The lease is safe. Everyone's jobs are safe. That's what matters."

Priya was quiet for a moment. Then: "Are you okay?"

The question was simple. The kind friends asked without knowing they were asking something much larger.

Mia thought about a terrace at night and a jacket that smelled like cedar. She thought about a phone call and a list turned face-down on a kitchen table. She thought about a month — possibly — of standing beside someone who said so do I without any performance in it at all.

"Yes," she said. And then, because it was Priya and Priya always knew anyway: "I think so."

Priya nodded once, like that was enough for now, and slid off the desk.

"He's going to be at the Hart Foundation dinner next week," she said casually. "It's on the building notice board. In case you need to press any more elevator buttons."

She walked away before Mia could respond.

Mia looked back at her manuscript.

This time, she managed two paragraphs before her phone lit up on the desk.

A message. No name — just the number she'd called that morning.

One line:

I had your number before you called. Just in case that matters.

She read it twice.

Then she turned her phone face-down on the desk, the same way she'd turned the list, and went back to her manuscript with something warm sitting quietly in her chest that she was absolutely not going to examine yet.

End of Chapter Five

He had her number before she called.

Chapter Six — coming next