His Contract: Billionaire Boss, Fake Fiancée

Chapter 9: Saturday, No Script

He texted me the address at 8:47 Saturday morning.

Not an email. A text, from a number I hadn't saved yet, which meant my phone displayed it as eleven digits and nothing else — the kind of anonymous string that could have been a spam warranty extension offer except for the content.

High Line, Gansevoort entrance. 9:30. Dress for cold. — LK

I stared at it for a moment.

The High Line. The elevated park built on a disused freight rail line running along the west side of Manhattan, which in February meant exposed sky and wind off the Hudson and whatever temperature the weather app was currently lying about. It was not a power-lunch location. It was not a press-facing venue. It was not anywhere I would have predicted Liam Knight spending a Saturday morning.

I typed back: Confirmed.

Then I looked at my closet.

Comfortable shoes, he'd said. Dress for cold, he'd texted.

I owned exactly one pair of shoes that qualified as both comfortable and not embarrassing — dark green hiking-adjacent boots I'd bought on sale at a REI in Columbus before I moved to New York, on the theory that a city this large required footwear that could handle anything. I had worn them approximately twice since arriving because New York had a specific relationship with visible practicality that I was still negotiating.

I pulled them out from under the bed.

Dark jeans. A cream thermal underneath a heavy knit sweater the color of charcoal that my mom had sent in a care package in November with a note that said I saw this and thought of you, which means I think of you as gray and serious, which I realize sounds bad but I mean it as a compliment. My good coat — the charcoal wool one that hit mid-thigh and had buttons that actually worked.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror with the flickering left-side light.

I looked like a person going for a walk. Not a person going on a date — fake or otherwise. Just a person with somewhere to be on a Saturday morning in February.

That felt right. I hoped it felt right.

I left at nine.

The Gansevoort entrance was at the southern end of the High Line, where the park descended from its elevated rail bed to street level in a curve of weathered steel and winter-bare plantings. The Meatpacking District surrounded it — cobblestone streets, the skeletal trees along the avenue, a coffee cart on the corner already doing steady business with the particular demographic of people who went outside willingly on cold Saturday mornings.

I got there at 9:27.

He was already there at 9:28.

Liam Knight without a suit was a specific experience I was not entirely prepared for.

Dark jeans — good ones, fitted, not trying too hard. A heavy charcoal peacoat over what looked like a thick cable-knit sweater. No tie. No pocket square. No architecture of professional authority to stand behind. He was standing near the entrance with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at something on the park's information board, and he looked — not like a billionaire CEO, exactly. Like a person. A tall, composed, unreasonably well-structured person, but a person nonetheless.

He heard me approach and turned.

His eyes did the thing they always did — a quick, complete assessment, over before it registered as a look. "You found it," he said.

"I've lived in this city for four years," I said. "I know where the High Line is."

"I wasn't sure about the boots."

I looked down at my REI boots. "What's wrong with my boots?"

"Nothing," he said. And moved toward the entrance. "Come on."

We walked north.

The High Line in February had a specific beauty that I suspected most people missed because they were too busy waiting for it to be spring. The plantings along the rail bed were skeletal and brown and somehow architectural in their bareness — grasses stiff with cold, the dried seed heads of things that had been flowering six months ago, all of it silver-gray against a sky the color of old pewter. The Hudson was visible between the buildings to the west, flat and dark and enormous.

There were other people — joggers, dog walkers, a few tourists with the particular look of people who had been told the High Line was worth it in any season and were deciding whether they agreed. But it was thin enough at this hour that we could walk without navigating crowds.

We walked for a few minutes without talking.

It wasn't uncomfortable. That was the first thing I noticed — that the silence between us on a public footpath felt different from the silence across his desk. Less charged. Less weighted. Like something had been set down that we'd both been carrying.

"Sandra sent me a summary of your session," he said finally.

"What did it say?"

"That you were thorough, honest, and that your instincts about how to present the relationship were stronger than most people she works with."

I looked at the frozen grasses along the rail. "What were my instincts?"

"She quoted you." A pause. "You said when someone asks how you knew it was real, your answer was that you didn't ask the question until after you signed."

I kept walking. "She told you to use that too."

"She did." Another pause. "I'm not going to use it. It's yours."

I glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead.

"Why not?"

"Because it's true," he said. "And true things belong to the person they're true about."

We stopped at one of the overlooks on the west side of the path, where the park cantilevered out slightly above street level and the Hudson opened up — wide and gray and moving slowly under the February sky, the New Jersey shoreline a low dark line across the water.

He stood with his forearms on the railing, looking out.

I stood next to him, close enough for the picture we were supposed to be composing in the world's mind but not performing it. Just standing.

"Tell me something true," he said.

I looked at him. "That's not a normal sentence."

"We have two weeks before we stand in front of two hundred people and perform a convincing relationship," he said. "Sandra can give us talking points. She can't give us the thing that makes talking points believable." He glanced at me. "So. Tell me something true. Something you wouldn't put on a résumé."

I looked at the river.

"I almost didn't come to New York," I said.

"What stopped you from not coming?"

"My dad." I pulled my coat tighter. "He drove a delivery route for seventeen years. Same route, same truck, same radio station. He knew every pothole on every road in Franklin County by the sound it made under his tires." I paused. "When the company restructured and eliminated his route, he was fifty-one years old and had a back that two herniated discs had made into a full-time negotiation. And the thing that killed me — the thing I still think about — was that he wasn't angry. He was just tired. Like he'd known it was coming and had already used up all his anger waiting for it."

Liam said nothing. He was listening the way he listened — archiving.

"I came to New York because I decided I was going to understand how those decisions got made," I said. "Restructuring. Elimination. The math that turns a person's seventeen years into a line item. I wanted to be in the room where that math happened so that I could — I don't know. Push back on it. Or at least see it clearly."

The river moved. The cold pressed against my face.

"Did you tell him that?" Liam asked. "Your dad."

"No." I almost smiled. "I told him I was going to make enough money to retire him. He told me to stop being dramatic and eat something before I got on the train."

A beat.

Then Liam made a sound. Low, brief — not quite a laugh but adjacent to one, the kind of sound that escapes before a person decides whether to allow it.

I looked at him.

He was looking at the river, but the line of his jaw had shifted. Something had relaxed in it — some small structural tension I hadn't known was there until it loosened.

"Your turn," I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

"I grew up in a house with eleven rooms," he said. "In Greenwich. My parents collected things — art, furniture, other people's admiration. They were very good at acquiring and very bad at keeping." A pause. "I don't mean money. They had plenty of money. I mean — attention. Warmth. The specific thing that makes a house feel like someone lives there and not just stays there."

I didn't say anything.

"I built Knight Industries because I understood acquisition," he said. "It was the language I grew up in. The only one I was fluent in." He straightened from the railing. "It took me longer than it should have to understand that acquisition and belonging are not the same thing."

The river. The cold. The low gray sky pressing down on the city.

"How much longer?" I asked.

He looked at me. Something in his eyes — not vulnerability, exactly, but the specific expression of someone standing at the edge of it, deciding.

"Still working on it," he said.

We walked for another hour.

We talked about small things after that — his coffee order, my textbook habit, whether the High Line was actually better in winter or whether that was something people said to cope. He had opinions about architecture that surprised me with their specificity. I had opinions about public space that surprised him with their passion.

At one point he said something dry and precise about a building we could see from the park, and I laughed before I could decide to, and he looked at me when I did — just briefly, just a glance, but the kind that landed.

At eleven, we reached the northern end of the park at 34th Street.

We stood at the terminus, the city spreading out below and around us, the Hudson still moving in its slow February way to the west.

"Better?" he said.

I considered it. "We don't look like two people who met five days ago anymore."

"No." He looked at me steadily. "We don't."

A jogger passed behind us. A dog pulled its owner toward the railing. Somewhere below on 34th Street, a cab leaned on its horn in the particular Manhattan way that meant nothing personal.

"Same time next week?" he said. "Before the gala."

"Sure." I pulled my coat tighter. "But I'm picking the location."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The architecture of one.

"Alright," he said.

I turned toward the stairs.

"Jenna."

I stopped. He had never used my first name before.

I turned.

He was looking at me with the expression that lived between calculated and something warmer. His hands were back in his coat pockets. The wind off the Hudson pressed against us both.

"The boots are fine," he said.

I looked at him for one beat.

"I know," I said.

And walked down the stairs into the city.