Coffee With a Stranger
1725 Words
The car was black, the driver silent, and the restaurant, when they finally stopped in front of it, was the kind of place that didn't put its name on the awning because everyone who mattered already knew it. Rose stood on the sidewalk for a full ten seconds, gripping the strap of her bag like it was a life raft, before she made herself walk through the door.
He was already seated. Of course he was. Rowan Miller did not strike her as a man who waited for anything, except, apparently, her.
He stood when he saw her — an old-fashioned courtesy that looked strange on a man the internet described as allegedly responsible for the disappearance of a rival businessman in 2019. She'd read that headline twice on the ride over, mostly to make her hands stop shaking, and it hadn't worked either time.
"You came," he said, pulling out her chair. "I had money on you not showing." "You bet against me?" "I bet against everyone. It's a good policy. Keeps the disappointments manageable." "That's bleak." "I contain multitudes," he said, echoing himself from the club, and the corner of his mouth curved in a way that made her forget, for one full second, to be afraid of him. "Mostly bleak ones."
She sat. The table between them was small enough that she could smell his cologne — something dark and expensive that had absolutely no business being that distracting. "So," Rose said, folding her hands to keep them still. "Are we going to talk about the elephant in the room, or are we going to pretend I didn't spend this morning reading a federal inquiry with your name in the headline?" Something flickered behind his eyes — not surprise, she realized. He'd expected this. He'd probably drafted three different versions of tonight in his head before she'd even walked through the door. "Which elephant would you like first?" he asked. "I have several. It's practically a herd." "Rowan."
"Rose." He said her name the same way he had at the club — like he was testing it, deciding if he liked the taste of it in his mouth. Then the humor dropped, just slightly, just enough that she saw something underneath it. "What do you want to know?" "Is it true?" "Depends which part." "Any of it. All of it." He was quiet for a moment, turning his water glass in slow, unhurried circles. "My family runs a company called Miller Holdings," he said finally. "On paper, it's real estate, shipping, and enough charitable donations to make the tax attorneys sleep at night. Underneath that paper, it's something else. Something older than me, that I inherited the way other men inherit a house or a set of golf clubs, except mine came with enemies." "That's not an answer. That's a press release."
The corner of his mouth twitched — not quite a smile, more like respect. "You're sharper than you were last night." "Last night I was drunk on tequila and your jawline. Tonight I'm sober and reading Wikipedia entries about you under the table." That got the real laugh out of him — the short, surprised one, like it kept catching him off guard that she could still make him do it. "Fine. Yes. It's true. Most of it. I've done things you'd read about and things you'll never read about, because the people who could report them stopped being able to report anything a long time ago." Rose's stomach dropped, cold and sudden, even though some small, stubborn part of her had already known. Had known from the moment a man in a suit said Mr. Miller like it was a loaded gun.
"You're telling me you're a killer."
"I'm telling you," Rowan said, voice low, level, terrifyingly calm, "that I run an empire built by men who did whatever it took to survive, and I've kept it standing by doing the same. I'm not going to lie to you about that. I'm also not going to apologize for it at a dinner table, because it wouldn't mean anything if I did." His eyes held hers, steady, unflinching. "You should probably leave."
"You keep saying that. Telling me to leave." "Because you should. I'm handing you every reason on a silver platter, Rose. I don't do this — this softening, this second dinner, this caring what you think of me." He said it like a confession, and like an insult to himself in the same breath. "It's inconvenient. It makes me careless. Careless gets people killed in my line of work." "So why are we here?" He looked at her for a long moment, grey eyes unreadable, and when he finally answered, his voice had lost every trace of its earlier sharpness.
"Because I haven't been able to stop thinking about a woman who spilled tequila on herself and laughed about it instead of pretending it never happened," he said. "Everyone around me plans every word before they say it. You don't. You're the only unplanned thing in my life, and I have spent every hour since last night trying to talk myself out of wanting more of it." The words landed somewhere under Rose's ribs and stayed there, warm and terrifying in equal measure. "That's either the most romantic thing anyone's said to me," she managed, "or the beginning of a horror movie." "With me," Rowan said, and this time the smile reached his eyes, "it's almost never just one thing."
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