THE TERMS OF THE MARRIAGE

Chapter 2 — The Residence

The Fifth Avenue penthouse looked like it had been decorated by someone who'd read about warmth in a magazine and decided against it. Grey stone, glass walls, a kitchen so pristine it looked unused. Elena stood in the entryway with two suitcases and the sinking feeling that she'd just moved into a beautiful, expensive cage.

"Mrs. Cole." The housekeeper, an older woman named Marta with kind eyes and a guarded mouth, appeared to take her bags. "Mr. Cole said to tell you dinner is at eight, if you'd like to join him. If not, I can bring something to your room."

"He eats dinner here?" Elena hadn't pictured Damian Cole doing anything as mundane as eating.

"Every night at eight," Marta said, like it was a fact as fixed as gravity. "He's very particular."

Elena filed that away. A man who bought companies for sport and still kept a dinner schedule like clockwork. It didn't fit the version of him she'd built in her head from headlines and hallway gossip — ruthless, cold, allergic to routine because routine implied someone was waiting for him.

She joined him at eight. Not because she wanted to, she told herself, but because disappearing into a bedroom on her first night felt like losing before the game had even started.

He was already seated when she arrived, a glass of wine untouched at his elbow, reading something on his phone with the particular stillness of a man who didn't like to be interrupted. He looked up when she sat.

"You came."

"You say that like you expected otherwise."

"I expected you'd want to make a point of not coming." A ghost of something crossed his face — amusement, maybe. "I'm glad to be wrong."

"Don't get used to it."

That, finally, earned something close to a real smile. It changed his whole face, briefly, before he caught it and put it away again like he wasn't supposed to let it out.

They ate in near silence for the first ten minutes, the kind of silence that felt less like peace and more like two people carefully not saying the things sitting between them. Elena broke it first, because she'd never been good at leaving a silence alone.

"You knew my father was in trouble before he told me," she said. "Didn't you. You'd already been buying shares."

Damian didn't look up from his plate immediately. "I've been watching Rossi Textiles for a long time."

"Why?"

"Business."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight." He finally met her eyes, and there was something almost like an apology in it, buried under all the practiced control. "Ask me again in a year. Maybe I'll have a better one."

"A year," she repeated. "Right. The expiration date."

"Is that what you're calling it?"

"What would you call it?"

He considered that for longer than the question warranted. "I hadn't decided yet."

It should have annoyed her more than it did. Instead she found herself watching him across the table, trying to work out the shape of the thing he wasn't saying, and hating how much she wanted to know.