COLD TERMS

EPISODE TWO DAMIAN CREST

He was standing at the window with his back to her when she walked in.

That was clearly intentional. She recognized a power move when she saw one — she'd worked for lawyers long enough to know that the person who makes you wait always has the upper hand. The person who doesn't turn around right away is telling you that your arrival is not, in fact, an event worth acknowledging.

She crossed the room without pausing, sat in the chair positioned in front of his desk as if it were a chair she'd chosen herself, crossed her ankles, folded her hands in her lap, and waited. She looked at the skyline beyond the window. She looked at the desk, which was clear except for a single folder positioned exactly in the center. She looked at her hands and told them to stay still.

When he turned, she was ready.

She wasn't ready.

Damian Crest was thirty-two. She knew that from the articles. In photographs, he looked like what he was — powerful, composed, engineered to exist in spaces like this one. In photographs, you could appreciate the quality of his suits and the structure of his face the way you appreciated architecture: from a safe and theoretical distance.

In person, he was something different.

He was taller than she expected, broader through the shoulders. His face had a quality she found difficult to name immediately and then found the word for: still. Not blank — still. Like he had made a deliberate decision, somewhere along the way, to stop letting things land visibly on him. Dark eyes that were looking at her with a directness she felt in her sternum. Strong jaw, clean-shaved. A suit that had not come from any shop she could afford to walk past, and which he wore with the ease of someone who had never once thought about whether he looked good in it.

He walked to the desk and sat down across from her with the unhurried ease of a man who had never, not once in his adult life, rushed for anything or anyone.

The silence sat between them for three seconds. She counted.

'Ms. Malone.' His voice was low. Even. The kind of voice that had never needed to be raised. 'You came.'

'You said you could solve my problem.' She kept her voice level. Good. 'I'm curious what you think my problem is.'

Something flickered in his expression. The faintest ghost of something — not quite amusement, not quite surprise. More like he'd filed her response away somewhere useful and was already deciding what to do with it.

'You're facing eviction,' he said. 'Your paralegal certificate lapsed during your employment gap because you couldn't afford the sixty-dollar renewal fee. Your mother's medical debt — forty-three thousand, two hundred and sixteen dollars — went to collection six weeks ago. You're currently working weekend shifts at the Meridian Hotel downtown. You were shortlisted for two paralegal positions in the past month and did not receive offers for reasons unrelated to your qualifications.' He paused. 'Do you want me to continue?'

The blood left her face so fast she felt the absence of it.

'How do you know any of that?'

'I know things,' he said. It was not a boast. It was simply a fact of his nature, delivered the same way he might have said: I have a desk. 'It's one of the things I'm very good at.'

The vulnerability of it was almost physically painful. To sit here in her fraying-cuff blazer while he listed her failures with the clinical efficiency of a man reading a balance sheet — the exposure of it made her want to stand up, to say something sharp and leave and hold onto the last seven inches of dignity she possessed. She gripped the arm of the chair instead.

'What do you want?' she asked. Because if this was a power play, she was not going to give him the satisfaction of flinching at first.

He looked at her for a long moment. The unhurried measuring look of someone who had already made a decision and was simply confirming that the situation remained consistent with it.

'A wife,' he said. 'Temporary. Contractual. Twelve months.'

The word landed in the room and just sat there, taking up space.

'You want a—' She stopped. She could hear the words, and they did not make sense in the way she needed them to make sense before she said them. She started again. 'You want to hire a wife.'

'I want a business arrangement that presents as a marriage.' He slid the folder across the desk toward her with two fingers — a precise, unhurried movement. 'My grandmother controls forty percent of Crest Industries' board votes. She has decided she will not support my next acquisition unless I am married. She believes a man without commitment is a man without stability. It is an outdated view. It is also the view I have to work with.'

Aria looked at the folder. She didn't touch it.

'And I'm your candidate because—'

'Because you are intelligent, you are presentable, you understand legal language, and you need money.' He said without softening any of it. 'Three hundred thousand dollars. Deposited in full on the day we sign. Your mother's debt was cleared. Your apartment — or a better