THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACTED VIRGIN

Chapter Two: The Penthouse

The elevator required a keycard just to reach the top floor, which felt like the first real proof that I'd stepped into a different world not the folder, not the number wired into my mother's account overnight, but this: a small black card that Simon pressed into my palm like it was nothing, like it hadn't just unlocked a life I had no idea how to live in.

"Mr. Steele had your things sent up already," Simon said, not quite meeting my eyes. "He thought you'd want time to settle before he's back tonight."

"How considerate of him," I said, and Simon had the grace not to smile at the edge in my voice.

The doors opened onto a hallway that looked more like an art gallery than an entrance, and I stood there for a second too long with my one duffel bag over my shoulder, aware of exactly how little I'd brought into a place that clearly didn't hold anything little.

My room because apparently I had a room, not a suite I shared with a man I'd met once for ten minutes was at the far end, all glass and pale wood, a window that looked out over the city like the city belonged to whoever slept behind it. My duffel bag sat on the bed, already dwarfed by the space around it, and for a second I let myself sit down on the edge of the mattress and just breathe, because nobody could see me here, and because it was the first time in six days I hadn't had to be brave in front of anyone.

That lasted until I found the note.

It was on the nightstand, in handwriting too neat to belong to someone who wrote things by hand very often. *Called your mother's cardiologist this morning. Dr. Patel says the new medication should show results within the week. R.S.*

I read it three times before I understood what it meant not the words, which were simple enough, but the fact of it. He hadn't just paid a bill and walked away. He'd called. He'd asked questions I hadn't thought to ask, or hadn't had the strength left to ask, and he'd done it without telling me first, without making it a performance, without needing credit for it.

I didn't know what to do with a man who did quiet, useful things and then said nothing about them.

He came home a little after nine, and I heard him before I saw him the particular quiet of someone used to rooms going still when he entered them. I'd changed into something plainer than what my bag had offered, an old sweater that still smelled like my apartment, and I was standing in the kitchen when he found me, not cooking so much as staring into a refrigerator stocked with things I didn't recognize the names of.

"You didn't eat," he said. Not a question.

"I wasn't sure what was mine to eat."

Something flickered across his face — not quite surprise, more like he hadn't considered that his abundance might read as a boundary instead of an invitation. "All of it is yours to eat. That's rather the point of you living here."

"Is it," I said, and I meant for it to sound sharper than it did.

He crossed the kitchen without asking, pulled containers out of the refrigerator with the efficiency of a man who'd clearly never cooked a day in his life but knew exactly how staff had labeled everything, and set two plates on the counter like this was a negotiation he intended to win by attrition.

"Sit," he said again the same word from the conference room, except this time it didn't feel like an order so much as an old habit he hadn't thought to soften.

"You know that's not actually how you talk to people, right?"

That almost-smile again, quick and gone. "I'm told it's a flaw."

"By who?"

"No one who stayed long enough to keep telling me." He said it lightly, like a joke, but something in it didn't sit like a joke, and I found myself watching him a beat too long, trying to read whatever was underneath it before he closed the drawer on that too.

We ate mostly in silence, which should have been unbearable and somehow wasn't. He asked, once, how my mother was resting. I told him. He didn't offer commentary, just nodded like he was filing the answer away somewhere he intended to check on later, and I thought about the note on my nightstand and wondered how many other things he was quietly filing away that I hadn't given him permission to care about.

"Thank you," I said finally. "For calling Dr. Patel."

He went very still, the way people go still when they've been caught doing something they didn't mean to be caught doing. "It wasn't part of the arrangement."

"I know."

"I didn't do it so you'd thank me."

"I know that too," I said. "That's sort of the problem."

He looked at me then — really looked, in a way he hadn't in the conference room, where I'd been a solution to a problem, a name on a page. Here, in this kitchen, in this too-large sweater, I was something he clearly hadn't accounted for, and I watched him try to recalculate in real time and fail.

"I'm not a kind man, Miss Reyes," he said quietly. "You shouldn't build anything on the assumption that I am."

"I'm not building anything," I said. "I'm just noticing."

"Don't."

The word came out harder than anything else he'd said all night, and I flinched before I could stop myself. He saw it of course he saw it, he seemed to see everything and something in his expression cracked, just slightly, like he regretted the sharpness even as he stood by it.

"I only meant" he started, and then stopped, his jaw working like the rest of the sentence had gotten caught somewhere he couldn't reach it. He looked away, out toward the window, toward the city that belonged to him and everyone in it who hadn't yet learned better than to trust him. "It's easier if you don't."

"Easier for who?"

He didn't answer that. He gathered the plates instead, rinsed them himself instead of leaving them for whoever it was that usually cleaned up after him, and I understood, without either of us saying it, that the conversation was over not because he wanted it to be, but because he didn't trust himself to keep having it.

I couldn't sleep that night. The bed was too soft, the room too quiet, the city too bright through the glass for a girl used to falling asleep to the sound of a television through a thin apartment wall. Around midnight I gave up and went looking for water, and found him instead sitting on the terrace off the living room, jacket gone, tie loosened, a glass of something amber untouched on the table beside him, looking out at the skyline like it owed him something it hadn't paid yet.

I almost turned back. I don't know why I didn't.

"Can't sleep?" he asked, without turning around, like he'd known I was there before I'd made a sound.

"New bed."

"New everything," he said, and there was something almost gentle in it, the kind of gentleness that felt more dangerous than his sharpness had, because it made me want to sit down next to him, and some careful part of me knew that sitting down next to him was exactly the kind of complication he'd warned me about on our first day.

I sat down next to him anyway.

We didn't talk for a while. The city hummed below us, indifferent to both of us, and I found myself stealing glances at his profile in the dark, at the way his jaw was set even when nothing was demanding anything of him, like he didn't know how to exist without bracing for something.

"Why did you really pick me?" I asked, quiet enough that he could have pretended not to hear it if he wanted to.

He was silent long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped into something lower, something I hadn't heard from him yet.

"Because the moment I saw your file, I knew you'd ask me that question eventually," he said. "And I still don't know what I'm going to tell you when you do."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

He turned to look at me then, and for one unguarded second, something raw moved across his face something that looked almost like fear, though I couldn't imagine what a man like him had left to be afraid of.

"Vivian," he said, my name sounding strange and careful in his mouth, like he wasn't used to saying it. "There are things about this arrangement I haven't told you. Things I'm not sure I can."

My chest went tight. "What kind of things?"

He opened his mouth to answer and his phone lit up on the table between us, buzzing hard against the glass, an unknown number flashing bright in the dark.

He looked at it. Then at me. Then, without a word, he stood, took the call, and walked back inside, leaving me alone on the terrace with a question that would take me three more weeks to understand I should have been afraid to ask.