THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACTED VIRGIN

Chapter Six: Hartwell

I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my hand, reading that message until the letters stopped meaning anything and started just being shapes Hartwell Textiles. Your father's name. The insurance report. My father had died when I was nineteen, in a warehouse fire nobody had ever fully explained to me, in a job he'd taken because we needed the money and he'd never been the kind of man to say no to that.

Hartwell Textiles. I hadn't heard that name in seven years.

By morning I'd convinced myself of exactly nothing, except that I wasn't going to ask Ronan about it over breakfast like it was a passing curiosity. Whatever this was, it deserved better than being wedged between his coffee and his morning calls.

He was already at the table when I came out, jacket off, sleeves rolled, reading something on his tablet with the particular focus of a man trying very hard not to think about the night before. He looked up when I entered, and something in his face softened before he caught himself and put the careful version back on.

"You're up early," he said.

"Didn't sleep well."

"Neither did I." He said it plainly, no elaboration, and I noticed because I was noticing everything about him now, cataloguing it the way you catalogue a person you're not sure you can trust but can't stop watching anyway that there were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there yesterday.

"Bad dreams?" I asked, testing.

"Something like that." He set the tablet down, and for a second I thought he might actually say more, might finally hand me the piece he'd promised me at my door. Instead he slid a small paper bag across the table toward me. "Here."

"What's this?"

"Cinnamon. From the bakery two blocks from your old apartment." He said it like it was nothing, already looking back at his tablet, like he hadn't just told me he remembered the smell of a neighborhood I'd mentioned exactly once, in passing, the week I moved in. "You mentioned it made you think of your mother's kitchen. I thought you might want it here too."

I stared at the bag longer than the gesture probably warranted. It was such a small thing a pastry, a memory, nothing that cost him more than an errand and it undid something in me anyway, some careful wall I'd been building since the text message the night before.

"You remembered that," I said.

"I remember most things you tell me," he said, still not looking up, like the admission embarrassed him more than any confession he could have made across the ballroom. "It's a flaw. Simon says I should work on forgetting more."

"I don't think it's a flaw."

That got him to look up. Whatever he saw on my face made something in his own expression falter, warm and unguarded for just a moment before the careful architecture reasserted itself.

"Vivian" he started, and I thought, foolishly, that this was it, that the cinnamon bun had cracked something open enough to let the rest through.

His phone rang instead. He glanced at the screen, and I watched the warmth drain out of his face in real time, replaced by something flat and controlled.

"I need to take this," he said, already standing.

"Of course you do," I said, quieter than I meant to, and he paused at the sound of it — not offended, exactly, more like he'd heard something true in it he didn't have a defense for.

"I'm not doing this on purpose," he said. "Disappearing on you. I know it feels that way."

"It doesn't just feel that way, Ronan. It is that way."

He didn't argue. That, somehow, was worse than if he had. He just nodded once, like I'd handed him a verdict he already knew was coming, and left for his study with the phone still ringing in his hand.

I texted Maribel from the kitchen table, the paper bag of pastries untouched in front of me, and told her everything the message, Hartwell Textiles, my father's name in an insurance report I'd never seen. It took her four minutes to call me back, which for Mari was practically instantaneous.

"Okay, first of all, are you safe," she said, no greeting, straight to the point in the way she got when she was scared and covering it with efficiency.

"I think so."

"You *think* so is not an answer I love, Vivi."

"I don't know what I'm walking into," I admitted. "That's the honest answer. I don't know if this is dangerous, or just complicated, or if I'm about to find out something that changes everything I thought I knew about my dad."

Mari went quiet for a second, which for her was its own kind of statement. "Do you trust him? Ronan?"

"I don't know," I said, and it was the first time I'd said it out loud, and saying it made it truer somehow. "I want to. That terrifies me more than not trusting him would."

"Then find out about Hartwell," Mari said, all business now, the way she got when she'd decided a problem needed solving rather than feeling. "Not from him. From somewhere else first. That way if he lies to you, you'll already know."

It wasn't a bad plan. It was, in fact, exactly the kind of plan the version of me from six weeks ago before hospitals and contracts and rings that suited me too well would have made without hesitating.

I just hadn't expected it to feel like a betrayal before I'd even started.

I found Simon in the garage that afternoon, checking something under the hood of a car that didn't look like it needed checking, and I recognized, immediately, a man finding busywork to avoid being asked questions he didn't want to answer.

"Simon."

He didn't look up. "Miss Reyes."

"Have you ever heard of Hartwell Textiles?"

His hands went still against the engine, just for a second, before resuming their motion with a deliberateness that told me more than any answer could have. "That's not really my place to discuss."

"That's what you said about Ronan too, before you actually told me something."

"I told you nothing," Simon said, straightening, wiping his hands on a rag with more focus than the task required. "I told you he doesn't usually let people move this fast. That's not the same as telling you anything real."

"Simon."

He looked at me then, and something in his careful professionalism cracked just slightly not into betrayal, I understood immediately, but into something like worry, like a man watching a car headed toward a curve he already knew was too sharp.

"I like you, Miss Reyes," he said quietly. "I didn't expect to. But whatever you're circling around asking me it's not mine to give you. It belongs to him. If he hasn't told you yet, it's not because he's hiding it from you out of cruelty."

"Then why?"

"Because I think," Simon said, choosing his words like they were dangerous, "he's more afraid of losing you over it than he's ever been afraid of anything in his life. And I've known that man since he was twenty-three years old, buying his first building with money he shouldn't have had. I've seen him afraid of exactly one thing before this, and he burned an entire deal to the ground rather than admit it."

I stood there in that garage, sunlight cutting through the open door in long pale stripes, and felt something shift in my chest not less afraid, exactly, but afraid of something different now. Not of what Ronan might be hiding.

Of what it might mean, once I finally understood why.

That night, I did what Mari told me to do. I opened my laptop at the small desk in my room and searched Hartwell Textiles fire with hands that weren't quite steady, and the first article that loaded stopped my breath entirely a headline dated seven years back, a warehouse fire, three names listed among the injured and the lost.

My father's name was the second one.

And in the photo beneath the headline, grainy and half-lit by emergency vehicle lights, standing at the edge of the wreckage in a suit far too clean for a disaster site, was a face I now knew better than almost anyone else's in the world.

Twenty-three years old. Ronan Steele.

I closed the laptop before I could read another word, my hands pressed flat against the desk, and sat there in the dark for a long time, listening to the quiet hum of a penthouse that suddenly felt like it belonged to a stranger.