In His Bed

Chapter 4: Business as Usual

ARIA

I did not sleep.

I spent most of the night doing the math instead, counting backward, recounting, telling myself it was stress, it was the gala, it was the champagne throwing my cycle off by a few days, it was anything other than the thing my body seemed to already suspect before my mind was ready to catch up. By six in the morning I'd landed on a plan: work. Normal Monday. A pharmacy stop on the way home, quiet and private and entirely within my control, and until then, nothing. No spiraling. No math.

I made it four hours before the plan fell apart.

"Wood, conference room two, ten minutes." My boss, Deborah, didn't look up from her tablet as she said it, which was never a good sign. "Montenegro Holdings pulled their outside counsel from the Whitfield acquisition. We're covering it as of this morning."

My stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with the thing I was refusing to think about.

"Montenegro," I repeated, carefully.

"You know the company?"

"I know the CEO." It came out flatter than I meant it to. "Personally. Old, family friend."

Deborah finally looked up. "Is that a problem?"

Yes, I thought. Catastrophically. "No," I said. "Not a problem."

He was already in the conference room when I walked in, and the sight of him in a suit, seated, unbothered, flanked by two associates from his in house team, hit me harder than I'd braced for, not because he looked different, but because he looked exactly like himself, exactly like the version of him I'd spent all of Sunday trying to talk myself out of wanting again.

His eyes found mine the second I walked in. Something flickered across his face, surprise, fast, gone before either associate could clock it, and then, infuriatingly, he recovered faster than I did.

"Ms. Wood." Perfectly professional. Perfectly controlled. "I didn't realize Halloway and Pierce was handling this."

"As of this morning." I took the seat across from him because it was the only one open, and because sitting anywhere else would have made the tension in the room a topic instead of a subtext, and pulled out my files with hands that were, I was fairly sure, not shaking. "Let's start with the due diligence gaps your last firm left us."

For forty minutes, it almost worked. I was good at my job, precise, unshakable, the kind of lawyer who read every clause twice and caught the ones that mattered, and burying myself in the Whitfield acquisition's warranty language was, if nothing else, an excellent way to not think about a pharmacy test I hadn't bought yet. Stan matched me, clause for clause, sharp and exact in the specific way I remembered from years of watching him win arguments before anyone else in the room had finished forming theirs.

It was almost enough to make me forget I was furious at him. Almost.

"This indemnification cap is unworkable," I said, tapping the relevant page. "Whitfield's lawyers are going to push back hard, and honestly, they should. You're asking them to eat risk that should sit with you."

"That's the point," Stan said. "We negotiate down from unreasonable. You know how this works."

"I know how it works when the other side doesn't have competent counsel. Whitfield does."

Something shifted in his expression, not annoyance, something closer to the old, private amusement I remembered, the specific look he used to get when I beat him at something and he respected it more than he minded losing. "Since when do you root for the other side?"

"Since the other side has a point."

"Careful," he said, low enough that it wasn't really meant for the room. "That almost sounded like you missed arguing with me."

It landed exactly where he meant it to, and I felt my composure slip half an inch, a pen gripped a fraction too hard, nothing anyone else would notice, everything he would.

"Don't flatter yourself," I said.

"Wouldn't dream of it."

One of his associates cleared his throat, oblivious, and mercifully redirected the conversation back to the indemnification clause, and I spent the next twenty minutes very deliberately not looking at Stan's hands on the table, not thinking about where those hands had been thirty six hours ago, not doing any of the things my body seemed determined to do regardless of what I told it.

The meeting ended a little after noon. Associates filed out first, papers under arms, already talking logistics. I was gathering my own files when Stan's voice stopped me at the door, quiet, pitched just for me.

"Aria."

I turned. He hadn't moved from his seat, hadn't reached for his own files yet, just sat there watching me with an expression that had dropped, for one unguarded second, the professional mask entirely.

"Are we going to talk about Sunday, or are we going to do this instead? Pretend our way through every room we end up in together?"

"We're going to do this instead," I said. "For now."

Something that might have been an old inside joke rose behind his eyes and nearly made it out, I saw it forming, saw the exact shape of the thing he almost said, something we used to say to each other back when for now had never once been true between us, before he caught it, visibly, and swallowed it back down.

"For now," he repeated instead, carefully neutral. "Fine."

I left before either of us could test how long for now was actually going to last.