RUIN ME QUIETLY

Chapter 6

Wren didn't tell him about the call right away.

She told herself it was professionalism — that a message like that deserved to be delivered in person, not shouted through his doorway between meetings. The truth was closer to this: she wanted to watch his face when she said it.

She found her chance at half past six, when the floor had emptied out enough that the quiet stopped being professional and started being something else — the particular hush of a building that thought it was alone.

Callum was still at his desk, jacket off, sleeves pushed up, a glass of something amber and untouched at his elbow. He didn't look up when she knocked.

"If this is about tomorrow's schedule, it can wait."

"It's not about tomorrow." She stepped in anyway, closed the door behind her — a small violation of the rules he'd laid out on day one, and she watched him clock it, watched the flicker of interesting cross his face before he could smooth it away. "Seraphine called. She said to tell you the wedding's back on. Your grandfather's idea, not hers."

The glass didn't move. Nothing about him moved, for a moment that stretched too long to be nothing.

"That's all she said?"

"She said you'd want to hear it from someone who wasn't smiling when she said it." Wren watched him carefully now, done pretending she wasn't. "I assume that was about me."

Something shifted behind his eyes — not anger, not quite. Something closer to a door swinging open somewhere he hadn't meant to leave unlocked.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'd rather stand."

"I didn't ask what you'd rather." But there was no heat in it, just exhaustion wearing the shape of command. He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for the first time since she'd met him, Callum Vance looked less like an idea of a man and more like an actual one — tired, cornered, aware of it. "My grandfather controls forty percent of this company's voting shares. He's decided I don't get to keep running it unless I'm married within the year. It's not a suggestion."

"And Seraphine?"

"Isn't an option." He said it flatly, like a fact he'd repeated to himself so many times it had worn smooth. "Her family has a history my grandfather won't forgive, no matter what she means to me. If I marry her, I lose the company. If I marry someone he approves of, I keep it, and I lose—" He stopped himself.

"Her," Wren finished.

He didn't confirm it. He didn't have to.

She should have felt nothing about that. She reminded herself, standing in his office at six-thirty with the city going dark gold behind him, that none of this was supposed to matter to her — that she was here for a folder of contracts and a dead man's ruined company, not for the private architecture of Callum Vance's heartbreak.

And yet something in her chest tightened anyway, unbidden, unwelcome.

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.

Callum stood, slow, and came around the desk the way he had the night of the storm — not fast, not looming, just close enough that the air in the room changed shape around him.

"Because you're the only person in this building who isn't afraid of me," he said. "And because I think you're about to become a great deal more useful to me than a nine a.m. schedule."

Her pulse kicked hard against her ribs. "Meaning?"

"Meaning I have a proposal for you, Ms. Ashford." His voice dropped, quieter now, closer to something dangerous. "And I'd advise you to actually consider it before you say no."

He hadn't said what it was yet. She already knew, with a certainty that settled cold and heavy in her stomach, that whatever it was, she was going to say yes — and that saying yes was going to cost her more than she currently understood.

"I'm listening," she said.

Callum studied her for a long moment — long enough that she felt it in her skin, in the small hairs lifting on the back of her neck — before he finally spoke.

"Marry me."