THE BILLIONAIRE'S BARGAIN BRIDE

WHAT SHE SAID TO THE REPORTER

Chapter Twelve: What She Said to the Reporter

Elena hadn't meant to end up cornered by the press twice in one relationship, but apparently that was simply the tax on dating on being engaged to. She corrected herself, still not quite used to the phrase even in her own head, a man who's every appearance made headlines.

This time it was a different reporter, a different event, a ribbon-cutting for a new Cole Hospitality property downtown, the kind of function Elena had started attending as a matter of course, always a half-step behind Damian, always half-listening for trouble the way she'd learned to since the gala. Damian had been pulled away by the property manager for a walkthrough, leaving Elena near the refreshment table with a glass of sparkling water and the false sense of safety that came with him simply being out of the room.

"Ms. Reyes." The voice was familiar enough to make her stomach drop before she even turned around. Cynthia Voss, notebook already out, smile sharpened to the exact same edge as the Foundation dinner. "No fiancé to run interference this time. Lucky me."

"Ms. Voss," Elena kept her tone, even though her pulse had picked up considerably. "I don't have anything to add to what Mr. Cole already said to you."

"I'm not here about your mother today," Cynthia said, which somehow made Elena more wary, not less. "I'm curious about something else. Sources close to the family say Damian Cole's engagements have a pattern of impulsive, convenient, timed suspiciously close to corporate deadlines. First Vanessa Kirkland, conveniently announced right before a shareholder vote two years ago. Now you, conveniently announced right before a will's deadline. Doesn't that strike you as a man who proposes to solve problems rather than out of any genuine feeling?"

It was a good question, in the specific way a knife is a good tool, sharp, precise, aimed at exactly where it would do the most damage. Elena felt the old instinct rise in her, the sixteen-year-old's instinct to go quiet, deflect, disappear from the conversation before it could hurt her. She thought, instead, of Damian's face on the terrace, the anniversary in his office, the way he'd said: I don't know what to do with the fact that a woman I've known for eleven days can make me feel something like that like the admission cost him something real.

"I think," Elena said slowly, "that's a very convenient story for you to tell, because it lets you avoid asking a harder question."

Cynthia's pen paused. "Which is?"

"Whether a man who watched his father work himself into an early grave for a company that didn't love him back might have very good reasons to be careful about who he lets in. Whether being left at the altar in front of four hundred people might make someone cautious in ways that look, from the outside, like calculation. You're welcome to print that Damian Cole proposes to solve problems. I'd suggest, if you actually wanted the truth instead of a headline, that you consider the possibility that the problem he was solving this time was loneliness, and that it stopped being a solution and became something real somewhere around week three, which is more than I can say for most of the men I've dated who weren't contractually obligated to anything."

She hadn't meant to say quite that much. She hadn't meant to say any of it, really hadn't planned this defense the way Damian had clearly planned his at the Foundation dinner. It had simply arrived, whole and true, the moment the question demanded an answer she actually believed.

Cynthia studied her for a long moment, something shifting behind the practiced skepticism. "That's a very passionate defense for a business arrangement, Ms. Reyes."

"Then maybe reconsider your premise," Elena said, and walked away before the reporter could ask anything else, heart hammering with the particular adrenaline of having said something true and unrehearsed in front of someone whose entire job was catching people in exactly that.

She didn't notice Damian until she'd nearly walked into him.

He was standing a few feet away, near the edge of the crowd, close enough that she understood immediately with a hot flush of embarrassment that he'd heard at least the tail end of it.

"How much of that did you catch?" she asked.

"Enough," Damian said. His voice had a strange quality to it, careful in a way that wasn't his usual carefulness like he was holding something fragile and trying not to grip it too hard. "The part about loneliness. And week three."

"I didn't plan to say any of that."

"I know." He stepped closer, and the noise of the ribbon-cutting event seemed to recede around them, the way it had on the terrace, the way it had at the gala, some private atmosphere that only seemed to exist when the two of them stood close enough. "Elena, at the Foundation dinner, I defended you because it made me angry to watch someone hurt you unfairly. What you just did was different."

"How so?"

"You weren't defending my reputation," Damian said quietly. "You were defending the truth. Which means you'd already decided, before I ever said a word to you about it, that what's happening between us is real enough to fight for in public, with no contract requiring it and no cameras you asked to be there."

Elena felt something in her chest crack open, the same unguarded feeling she'd had watching him on the anniversary, holding his hand on the walk to the pier. "I suppose I did."

"I'd like to take you to dinner," Damian said. "Not for the story. Not for the cameras, or the board, or anyone's benefit but ours. Just dinner. As two people who apparently ran out of pretending somewhere around a night market and a terrace and, evidently, a ribbon-cutting."

"That sounds," Elena said, smiling despite the lingering pulse of nerves in her chest, "suspiciously like a real date."

"I believe it would be exactly that," Damian said, and reached for her hand not for any camera, not for any watching crowd, simply because he wanted to, and Elena let him take it, thinking that whatever came next, whatever Richard Cole was still quietly plotting somewhere in the city, whatever the will's six-month clock still counted down toward, she was no longer entirely sure she wanted this to end in six months at all.