The CEO’s Hamster

Two

The Italian Mogul

Lorenzo

My phone vibrated on the table behind me. Matteo.

I answered. “Where are you?”

“Still in the room.”

“Of course you are.”

I heard him laugh. “You’re the one who insisted we arrive early.”

“I came for business.”

“And I came because you threatened to leave me behind.”

“You needed supervision.”

“I’m twenty-eight, Lorenzo.”

“And still incapable of behaving for an entire evening.”

“That is slander.”

I smiled despite myself. Matteo was my younger brother, and where I was reserved, he was impossible to ignore. He had inherited our mother’s warm olive complexion, thick dark hair, and expressive brown eyes. He dressed beautifully, spoke too quickly when excited, and possessed enough confidence for three people.

Where I preferred silence, Matteo filled it. Where I calculated every decision, he followed instinct. We were different. But family was family.

“Be downstairs in ten minutes,” I said.

“Ten?”

“Nine now.”

He cursed playfully before hanging up.

I adjusted my cufflinks and looked at myself in the mirror. Thirty-two. Six-foot-three. Dark hair, cut short at the sides and slightly longer on top. A trimmed beard. Broad shoulders. A face people often described as intimidating when I wasn’t smiling.

The man in the glass looked perfectly calm. He was lying. My pulse had been unsteady since the plane touched down.

Nine hours over the Atlantic, and I had not slept. I had watched the ocean go dark beneath the wing and rehearsed a single sentence over and over: Hello, Victoria. Two words. I had negotiated across continents in four languages, and I could not make those two words sound like anything but a confession. Not one part of me felt ready.

I rarely smiled. Not because I was unhappy. I simply had little reason to. Business had taught me that expressions revealed more than words. My father had taught me that weakness was expensive. When I was twelve, he told me after a negotiation that I had smiled too early, and I had not smiled early since. And life had taught me not to give strangers access to either.

I owned companies across Europe, investments in America, and enough money to purchase almost anything I wanted. Almost. There were some things money couldn’t buy. Trust. Peace. And memories.

Two weeks earlier, I had done something I had never done in my professional life. After my lawyers finished drafting the partnership proposal for Hayes International, and after they had left the room, I uncapped my pen and added a line in my own hand beneath the formal letter. I have waited a long time to meet you. Nine words. I told myself it was strategy. It was not.

Her reply had arrived three days later. Two polite sentences, perfectly worded, perfectly cold. I had read them eleven times. Then I had instructed my lawyers to begin talking to hers, because a partnership was an acceptable reason to be in the same room with Victoria Hayes. It was a far better reason than the truth.

My gaze fell toward the small wooden box sitting on my desk. I opened it. Inside was an old photograph, its edges worn from years of handling. Two children stood beneath a tree. A little boy with messy dark hair. And beside him, a little girl with enormous hazel eyes and a cookie stuffed into both cheeks.

I smiled. “Cricetina.”

Hamster. The ridiculous nickname I’d given her when we were children. She had hated it. At least, that’s what she had claimed. But whenever I called her Hamster, she would chase me around the garden until we were both laughing.

I had been nine. She had been eight.

I could still see her that first afternoon, sitting beneath the tree with a plate of cookies guarded like treasure, glaring at me as though I were a thief. I was a thief. That was the beginning of everything. That night, I had looked up the Italian word for hamster in my mother’s dictionary, because I wanted a secret name for her, something only I could say. Cricetina. She never knew I had gone to the trouble.

We had met during one summer when our families were staying in America. For a few weeks, she had been my entire world. Then, without warning, my father pulled us out of the country, and Victoria disappeared from mine.

I never forgot her. I tried. School. University. Business. Relationships. Success. Nothing erased that little girl from my memory. Women had come and gone. One had told me, gently, that I was a locked door: beautiful, expensive, and impossible to enter. Another had cried and said I looked at her as though I were waiting for someone else to walk in. She had been right, and I had never forgiven myself for it.

Then, three months ago, I saw her face in a business magazine. VICTORIA HAYES: AMERICA’S RISING BUSINESS POWERHOUSE.

I bought the magazine. I read the article twice. I told no one. Then I searched for everything I could find about her.

Victoria Hayes. Thirty-one. CEO of Hayes International. Brilliant. Private. Cold. The Ice Queen.

I knew immediately. It was her. Same stubborn chin. Same eyes that looked straight through people. My Hamster.

Tonight, our companies would meet at the charity gala. Officially, I was there to discuss an international investment partnership. Unofficially, I wanted to see her, to know whether the little girl I remembered still existed somewhere beneath the woman the world feared.

A knock sounded at the door, and Dario, the head of my security, appeared in the doorway. “The car is ready, sir. I would like two men inside the ballroom tonight.”

“It’s a charity gala.”

“It is a room full of people who would very much like to know your plans.” He had worked for my family for fifteen years and had never once been wrong about a room. “Two.”

“Two,” I agreed.

“Lorenzo!” Matteo’s voice came from the hallway, and Dario stepped aside just in time to avoid being run over. “It has been twelve minutes. I came to collect you.”

I turned. He entered wearing a midnight-blue tuxedo, his hair perfectly styled. He looked at me, then at the photograph still in my hand. His eyebrows rose.

“Who’s she?”

I closed the box and slid the photograph into my jacket, over my heart, where I could pretend it was only for luck. “No one.”

Matteo stared at me. “You are a terrible liar.”

I looked at him, irritated. “Go downstairs.”

He smiled. “Oh, this is interesting.”

“It isn’t.”

“You look like a man about to sign a merger.”

“I am about to sign a merger.”

“No.” He tilted his head. “You look like a man about to propose.”

“Matteo.”

“Is she as terrifying as the magazines say?”

“More.”

“Then you are doomed, fratello. Utterly.”

“You have been smiling at that box for ten minutes.”

“Matteo!”

“Fine.” He walked toward the door, then stopped. “Whatever you are hiding, fratello, I hope she knows what she’s getting herself into.”

I said nothing. I wasn’t sure she did.

Alone again, I rested two fingers against my jacket, where the edge of the photograph pressed faintly against my chest. It weighed almost nothing. It had weighed more than every contract I had ever signed. I had carried it through boardrooms and airports, through more than two decades of other people’s expectations, and never once had I allowed myself to wonder what I would do on the day I finally had to give it back.

The elevator carried us toward the lobby. In the mirrored wall, I caught Matteo grinning at me. I straightened my cuffs again. He grinned wider. I rehearsed three different greetings on the way down and discarded every one of them. Tonight, I would finally see Victoria again. I wondered whether she’d remember me. Then another thought occurred to me. What if she didn’t? For the first time in years, the possibility unsettled me. What if she had built a life so complete that there was no room left in it for a boy who once stole her cookies? I had spent twenty-three years preparing for every possible outcome except that one.

The elevator doors opened. The lobby glittered. Cameras flashed at the entrance, and guests in jewel tones drifted toward the ballroom doors. I saw none of it. I touched my jacket one last time. Still there. Still hers. I stepped out. And somewhere across New York, the little girl who once chased me for stealing her cookie was getting ready to walk back into my life.

This time, I wasn’t nine years old. And I wasn’t planning to let her disappear again.