THE BILLIONAIRE'S BARGAIN BRIDE

THE ANNIVERSARY

Chapter Nine: The Anniversary

Damian didn't answer his phone on the fourteenth, and Elena noticed.

It wasn't unusual, exactly he had days like that, days when the CEO version of him took over completely and texts went unanswered for hours at a stretch. But this felt different. Margaret had mentioned, weeks ago, almost offhand, that October the fourteenth was a difficult date for her grandson, and Elena hadn't put it together until she scrolled back through an old article Priya had shown her and matched the dates herself.

October fourteenth. The Saturday Vanessa didn't show.

Elena sat with her phone for a long time that evening, thumb hovering over his name, trying to decide whether reaching out was crossing some line the contract hadn't accounted for. In the end, she didn't call. She got in her car instead.

She found him exactly where she suspected she would his office, dark except for the city lights bleeding through the windows, no assistant at the desk outside, security waving her up without question because apparently her name was on some list now, fiancée or not. He was standing at the window in the same spot she'd first seen him, three months and a lifetime ago, tie loosened, a glass of something amber and untouched on the desk behind him.

"You shouldn't be here," Damian said, without turning around. His voice was rougher than she'd ever heard it.

"I know," Elena said, and came in anyway, closing the door behind her.

"I'm not particularly good company tonight."

"I didn't come for company. I came because I didn't like the idea of you being alone with this."

He turned then, and in the low light she could see it not the composed CEO, not even the careful, dry-humored man from the night market, but someone rawer than either, someone who'd been carrying something heavy for exactly this long, exactly two years, and had run out of places to set it down.

"Margaret told you," he said. It wasn't quite an accusation.

"She mentioned a date. I did the math myself." Elena crossed the room and sat, uninvited, on the edge of his desk, close enough that he'd have to actually look at her instead of past her. "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"I don't," Damian agreed. And then, after a long silence, he did anyway. "I keep thinking about the version of that day I'd built in my head. Not the wedding ….the after. Twenty years from now, some anniversary dinner, telling the story of how nervous I'd been that morning, laughing about it because it would have stopped mattering by then. I had an entire imagined life resting on forty minutes that never happened."

"That's not foolish," Elena said quietly. "That's just what hope looks like, before it gets broken."

"It made me stupid. Standing there in front of four hundred people, still hoping, for at least ten of those forty minutes, that it was traffic. That she'd walk in breathless and apologetic and it would become a funny story instead of the worst day of my life." He laughed, short and humorless. "I don't do that anymore. Hope like that. It's inefficient."

"Is that why you built the contract the way you did? So there'd be nothing left to hope for, and therefore nothing left to lose?"

Damian went very still.

"That's a very direct question," he said.

"You did teach me that's how you prefer them."

He looked at her for a long moment, something moving behind his eyes that looked almost like fear … the specific fear, Elena thought, of a man being seen too clearly by someone he hadn't planned on letting see him at all.

"Yes," he admitted, finally. "That was exactly why. A contract can't leave. A contract has terms, and an end date, and nobody's heart is required to survive it." He exhaled, long and unsteady. "I've done a poor job keeping to that plan, lately."

"Me too," Elena said softly.

The silence that followed wasn't tense. It was the particular quiet of two people admitting the same quiet, terrifying thing without either of them saying it outright.

"Come on," Elena said finally, standing, holding out her hand. "You're not spending tonight alone in an office with a drink you haven't touched."

"Where are we going?"

"The pier. It's not Thursday, so no market, but the water's still there, and so is the air, and neither of us needs anything fancier than that tonight."

Damian looked at her outstretched hand for a long moment… long enough that Elena wondered if she'd misjudged the moment entirely… and then took it, his fingers closing around hers like he was anchoring himself to something solid.

"Thank you," he said, as they walked out together, "for not letting today be forty minutes long."

Elena squeezed his hand and didn't let go the entire way down.