Signed To The Ruthless Billionaire

The Ruthless Proposition

For ten full seconds, Wren didn't breathe.

The flashes kept coming, white pulses against the glass, each one throwing their tangled silhouette across the marble. Damian's hand stayed pressed to the back of her head. His arm stayed locked around her waist. He held her the way he'd caught the stepladder: precisely, efficiently, with no warmth in it at all.

"Let go of me," she hissed into his lapel.

"Not yet."

"You're crushing my braid."

"Your braid," Damian said, "is currently worth more than your invoice."

Then he moved, one smooth turn, and guided her away from the windows to the far wall, where a long gray sofa sat in the shadow of the basalt column. He released her the instant they were out of sight. Wren stumbled back and slapped his hand away from her elbow.

"What was that?"

"A problem." He crossed to the window and angled the blinds shut with one finger. The room dimmed to a cold blue gloom. "Those were not the usual photographers. They were tipped. Someone told them I'd be here at six with a woman."

"I'm not your woman."

"You are now." He turned, and she saw his phone already in his hand, thumb moving. "Look."

He held out the screen. It was a gossip site, the headline already live, the photo grainy but unmistakable, shot through the penthouse glass: Damian Voss with a woman in a dusty canvas apron pressed against his chest, her face hidden, his arm wrapped possessively around her. **VOSS MERIDIAN HEIR'S SECRET LOVER?**

Wren's stomach dropped. "That was ninety seconds ago."

"Eighty-four." His voice was dry. "Someone was waiting."

"Then tell them the truth! Tell them I'm the florist!"

"And the headline becomes *Billionaire Bullies Crying Florist Out of Penthouse.*" He slid the phone into his pocket. "Photographers saw you running for the door in tears. Do you know what a board of directors does with that story, Ms. Calloway?"

She didn't answer.

"It does what it's been waiting to do for two years. It takes the CEO chair from me and hands it to my uncle."

The name hung in the air. She knew it, the way everyone in the city knew it. *Cornelius Voss*, silver-haired, charming, the beloved elder statesman who had run the company for thirty years and who'd never forgiven his brother's son for being the heir. The business pages called him *the steady hand.* They called Damian *the cold one.*

"The board votes April twenty-third," Damian went on. "Cornelius needs one thing to win: proof that I'm unstable, reckless, or unfit. He's spent months waiting for a scandal. And tonight, you gave him a photograph."

"*I* gave him?" Wren's voice rose. "You grabbed me!"

"And now there's a story." He crossed the room with that unhurried walk, stopped at the glass table by the sofa, and set down a slim black folder. "Fortunately, stories can be rewritten."

She looked at the folder. She looked at him. "What's in that?"

"A solution."

"I'm not interested in your solutions."

"You will be." He opened it and turned it toward her. "Read the first page."

*MARRIAGE ENGAGEMENT AGREEMENT*, it said, in plain black type. *Between Damian Alexander Voss and Wren Calloway.*

Wren laughed. It came out thin and ugly. "This is a joke."

"I don't joke."

"You want me to marry you."

"I want you to *be engaged* to me. For six months, ending on the day of the board vote." He said it the way he'd said *standard terms*, as if he were reading out a lunch order. "You will appear at my side. You will be photographed. You will play a woman I fell in love with quietly, privately, without announcing it, because I valued her too much to expose her to the press. A steady, sweet, ordinary woman. The exact opposite of scandal."

"Ordinary," Wren repeated.

"A compliment, in this case."

"It was *not.*"

He ignored that. "In exchange, I will clear your debt in full. Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars. On the day of the vote, I deed the greenhouse and its land to you outright, free of any lien or lease. Your grandmother's roses stay where she planted them."

The room went very quiet.

Wren stared at the folder, and something dangerous and hungry stirred in her chest. Four hundred twelve thousand dollars. The greenhouse, kept. Her grandmother's last good years, not ripped out by bulldozers. The offer was so exact, so perfectly aimed, that it felt like being read.

*He knew exactly where to press.*

"You planned this," she said slowly.

"No. I improvised." For the first time, something almost like irritation crossed his face. "I would have preferred a woman from my own circle, with a résumé I could vet. But an hour ago I didn't need a fiancée. Now the press thinks I have one, and you're already the face in the photo. Replacing you would take weeks I don't have."

"So I'm convenient."

"You're *useful*." He didn't blink. "I told you earlier you'd be."

Heat flared in her throat, hot and clean and furious. *There it was.* No apology. No hesitation. A man who had looked at her ruin and seen an opening.

"You bought my family's lease," she said, very quietly, "and now you want to rent *me*."

"I want to hire you."

"I'm not an object you can buy, Mr. Voss." She pushed the folder back across the glass. It slid, stopped against his hand. "Not for four hundred thousand dollars. Not for four million. Find another woman."

For a moment, he didn't move.

Then he smiled. It was small and cold and perfectly controlled, and it was the most frightening thing she had seen all day.

"Pride," he said. "I expected that. It's very admirable, Ms. Calloway, and it will cost your grandmother her greenhouse."

He slid the contract back toward her, and laid a gold pen on top of it with a soft click.

"My legal team files the demolition permit at nine tomorrow morning. The permit is already drafted. So is this contract." He checked his watch. "The offer expires at midnight. After that, the permit goes in, the story about the *secret lover* is allowed to die, and you can go back to your greenhouse and watch the bulldozers do what I would have preferred to avoid."

"You're *blackmailing* me."

"I'm making you an offer." He straightened his cuffs. "The difference is that you're allowed to say no."

He picked up his phone and walked toward the door, pausing with one hand on the frame. In the blue dimness, his profile looked like something carved to intimidate.

"Read it carefully," Damian said, without turning. "Everything has a price. Yours is simply higher than most."

The door closed behind him.

Wren stood alone in the cold, silent penthouse, a waterfall of white orchids glowing in the gloom beside her, and a gold pen resting on the page that could save everything she loved.

Her phone buzzed. *Final Notice: Calloway Greenhouse.*

The clock on the wall read 6:14.

She had less than six hours.