Legally bought by the billionaire

Chapter 5 — Headlines

Mia's POV

I didn't sleep.

I tried to lay in the dark with my phone face down and told myself it was fine, that Cole had people for this, that by morning it would be contained. I lasted forty minutes.

At 2 a.m. I picked up my phone.

Seventeen notifications. The Post had run it at midnight.

BILLIONAIRE'S SECRET CLAUSE: COLE ASHFORD BUYS MORE THAN A COMPANY HE BUYS A BRIDE.

The headline dropped through my chest like something cold and heavy. I read the article with my legs pulled to my chest and my heart doing something slow and terrible. They had real details. The clause number, one-year timeline, my father's name, my name and the acquisition amount. Not everything but enough. Enough to make it look exactly like the worst version of what it was.

My phone rang. Francesca.

"I'm already awake," I said before she could speak.

"Mia." Her voice was tight and scared Francesca didn't scare easily. "It's everywhere. Twitter. i********:. You're trending."

"I know."

"Are you okay?"

I looked around my apartment. The one space in my life that had always been completely mine. Thrifted furniturewith good lighting and that had somehow survived my neglect. "I'm fine," I said.

"You don't sound fine."

"I know."

I called Cole.

He answered before the first ring finished.

Like he'd been holding the phone.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"My PR team has been working since midnight. We need to be seen today, together but on our terms."

"You want to get ahead of it."

"I want to give them a different story. Right now the narrative is that you're a transaction. We change that."

"What does that look like?"

"Breakfast but somewhere low-key

"Just two people who are contractually obligated to marry each other."

"Mia."

"I know. What time?"

"Eight. Columbus Avenue."

I looked at the clock. Six forty-two.

"Fine," I said. And hung up.

The cafe was called Rowe's. Warm lighting. Exposed brick. The kind of coffee so good it was almost aggressive. Cole was already in the corner booth no suit today, grey sweater, dark jeans, a coffee in front of him he hadn't touched. He looked up when I walked in and something moved through his expression that wasn't quite relief but lived in the same neighborhood.

I slid into the seat across from him. "You look terrible."

"Thank you." He pushed a coffee toward me. Already ordered. Black exactly how I took it, which I hadn't told him. "Did you sleep?"

"None. You?"

"Two hours."

We sat in a silence that was somehow not uncomfortable. Two people too tired for pretense who had wordlessly agreed to skip it.

"Vanessa gave them the story," he said.

I stared at him.

"I confirmed it an hour ago. She had dinner with a Post editor after she left our table." His jaw tightened fractionally. "She did it to damage the deal. To make the acquisition look unstable and to make you look like a victim."

The word hit me like cold water.

Victim.

I had signed that contract to save thirty-eight people. I had walked into that boardroom with my spine straight and my voice steady. I had handled everything thrown at me in the last forty-eight hours without flinching once.

I was not a victim.

"No," I said. "She doesn't get to write that story. Nobody does." I set my cup down. "What do we need to do?"

Something shifted in his face that same loosening I'd glimpsed before, something that looked like relief if Cole Ashford were the kind of man who let himself feel that openly.

"My PR team drafted a statement. Short, clean confirms the relationship, reframes the clause as a historical family arrangement both parties entered willingly."

"Both parties entered willingly," I repeated.

"Mia"

"I'm not complaining. I'm noting that we'll have to be convincing." I held his gaze. "People are going to look at us and decide in four seconds whether this is real. Whether I chose this. Whether you're" I paused. "Someone worth choosing."

The almost-smile. "And am I?"

"Jury's still out."

He slid his phone across the table. I read the statement and changed two words then I slid it back. He read the changes.

"Better."

"I know."

Outside the window, two women had stopped on the sidewalk, one showing her phone to the other and even through the glass I could see the Post headline on the screen.

"They're going to ask if we're in love," I said quietly. "Eventually. Some camera, some unguarded moments they'll ask and we'll have to answer and it needs to be convincing."

Cole said nothing.

"So I'm suggesting," I continued carefully, "that if we're going to do this, we actually do it. No half measures. No performance that falls apart the moment someone looks closely. We figure out who we are to each other not for the cameras. For us. So when the cameras show up, we don't have to think about it."

Silence.

Cole looked at me across the small table in the warm light of that ordinary cafe. "Okay," he said.

Just that. One word but the way he said it quietly, without a single beat of hesitation felt like something being decided at a level I couldn't yet see.

My phone buzzed on the table between us.

Unknown number. No name. No greeting.

Just seven words:

You should know what you signed up for.

I stared at the screen. Then I looked up at Cole.

He had already seen it. His expression had changed completely harder, more guarded, something darker moving just beneath the composure. Something that had been waiting for exactly this moment.

"Who sent that?" I asked.

"I don't know."

But the way he said it too controlled, too careful, each word measured in a way his words hadn't been measured before told me that wasn't entirely true.

He knew something.

Something he had been holding since before we sat down. Maybe since before this morning. Maybe since the moment he invoked a clause that should have been simple and wasn't.

Something bigger than Vanessa. Bigger than a leaked contract and than anything I had walked into that boardroom prepared for.

I set my phone face down.

"Cole," I said quietly. "What exactly did I sign up for?"

He looked at me across the small table in the warm light of that ordinary cafe, with the city moving outside the window and my name still trending and his hand resting near mine but not touching it.

And for the first time since I had met him, Cole Ashford looked like a man who didn't know where to start.

Because wherever he started

Nothing between us would ever be simple again.

He opened his mouth.

And before he could speak, the cafe door swung open.

A man walked in. Mid-forties, expensive coat and eyes that went straight to Cole not searching, not surprised. Targeted. Like he had known exactly where to find him.

Cole went completely still.

"We have a problem," the man said. His gaze cut briefly to me assessing, then dismissing. "Both of you do."

He set a photograph on the table between us.

I looked down.

And felt the ground disappear beneath my feet.

Because the photograph was of me.

Taken last night outside the restaurant. Through the window. Cole's hand over mine, both of us caught in the candlelight looking at each other like

Like it was real.

"That's not the problem," the man said. "Turn it over."

I turned it over.

On the back, in red ink, someone had written four words:

Tell her the truth.

The cafe went very quiet.

I looked up at Cole.

He was already looking at me.

And this time, he didn't look like a man who didn't know where to start.

He looked like a man who had run out of time.