In His Bed

Chapter 15: The Public Appearance

Aria

The Whitfield acquisition gala, a smaller, private affair meant to celebrate the deal's near completion, landed exactly nine days before the blackmail deadline, and Stan's team made it clear attendance wasn't optional.

"We need visible confidence," his head of communications had said on the call that morning, brisk and businesslike in a way that made both of us feel like assets on a balance sheet instead of people. "If there's any rumor circulating about instability around this deal, the two of you being seen together, calm, composed, is the fastest way to kill speculation before it starts."

"Together how?" I'd asked, already dreading the answer.

"As a couple. Publicly. Just for tonight."

Which was how I found myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror at seven that evening, in a dress Stan's team had sent over without asking, doing up the zipper myself because some stubborn part of me refused to call him in to help even though he was in my living room, waiting.

"You look, " Stan started, when I finally came out, and then seemed to lose the rest of the sentence entirely, something unguarded moving across his face before he caught it.

"Don't," I said, though not as sharply as I would have a month ago. "We're playing a role tonight. Let's not confuse the performance with the thing underneath it."

"Is that what we're doing? Confusing it?"

"I don't know anymore." Honesty slipped out before I could stop it, a side effect of four days of careful distance since the almost-kiss neither of us had mentioned again. "That's the problem."

He didn't push. He just held out his arm, old fashioned and formal in a way that made something in my chest ache, and we left for the gala in a silence that felt less like avoidance and more like two people conserving energy for the performance ahead.

The performance, it turned out, wasn't difficult at all. That was the unsettling part.

Stan's hand found the small of my back the moment we walked in, an old, easy gesture that felt less like theater and more like muscle memory neither of us had fully unlearned. He introduced me to Whitfield's leadership with genuine warmth in his voice, laughed at the right moments, watched me across the room with an attentiveness that drew more than one curious glance from people clearly doing the math on the timeline of our reunion.

"You're good at this," I murmured, during a rare quiet moment near the edge of the room.

"At what?"

"Making it look real."

Something flickered across his face, quick and complicated. "Maybe it's not that hard to make look real."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't try to find one.

We were three glasses of champagne into the evening, mine sparkling water dressed up to look like champagne so nobody would ask questions I wasn't ready to answer, when a photographer from the deal's press coverage caught us near the terrace doors, Stan's hand resting easy at my waist, my head tilted toward him mid laugh at something he'd said.

The shutter clicked before either of us fully registered it happening.

"Perfect," the photographer said, already moving on to the next shot, oblivious to the way both of us had gone slightly rigid at the sound.

"That's fine," Stan said quietly, more to himself than to me. "It's supposed to be public tonight. That's the whole point."

"Right."

But something about it sat wrong regardless, a photo taken with our knowledge feeling too close to the one taken without it, the balcony image still sitting somewhere in an unknown blackmailer's possession, waiting to detonate whenever they chose.

We left a little after eleven, the performance apparently successful, whatever rumors had been circulating about instability presumably quieted for another news cycle, and Stan walked me to my door in a silence that had shifted, somewhere over the course of the evening, into something warmer than either of us seemed prepared to name.

"Thank you for tonight," he said, at my door, not quite ready to leave. "I know it wasn't easy, performing something neither of us has fully figured out yet."

"It wasn't as hard as I expected."

"No," he agreed, quiet. "It wasn't."

We stood there a moment too long, close enough that I could feel the same old gravity pulling at the edges of the evening, and I found myself, despite every warning bell, not stepping back.

Then my phone buzzed, sharp in the quiet of the hallway, and both of us went still at the sound, the same reflexive dread from nine days of waiting settling over the moment before either of us could stop it.

I pulled it out with hands that had gone cold.

Not the blackmailer's number. Worse, somehow, in its own smaller way. A link, forwarded from an unknown sender, to a gossip site's breaking headline, already circulating, already picking up traction, the photo from the terrace splashed across the top of the page with a caption neither of us had written and neither of us controlled.

Montenegro Heir's Secret Reunion, Sources Say There's More To This Story Than A Business Deal.

Stan read it over my shoulder, and I felt him go very still.

"That's not from the blackmailer," he said slowly. "That's a leak. Somebody at that gala talked, or someone's already selling pieces of this story before the real deadline even hits."

"Which means we're not just racing a blackmailer anymore."

"No." His jaw had gone tight, eyes fixed on the screen like he could will the headline into unwriting itself. "We're racing the entire story getting out before we're ready for any of it."