Anastasia’s POV:
Robert Vane stood when I walked in.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not the private dining room he had reserved at the far end of the Meridian’s restaurant floor, quiet and deliberately removed from the lunch crowd filling the main space. Not the bottle of still water already poured into two glasses or the way the room had been arranged so that his chair faced the door and mine faced away from it. Not any of the careful choreography of a man who controlled every variable of every room he walked into.
He stood when I walked in.
Like a gentleman. Like someone I was supposed to feel immediately comfortable with. Like a man who had spent eleven years doing this and understood that the first thirty seconds of any meeting determined everything that followed.
He was olde
