Not Born To Inherit

The Client From Hell

Chapter Three

“You,” Zuri said, standing frozen just inside the door. “You are Meridian Projects.”

“Technically Meridian Projects is a shell company,” Roman said, closing the door behind him. “I am just the guy who used it.”

“You lied to me.”

“I did not lie. I omitted.”

“That is the same thing with extra steps.” She set her portfolio down harder than she meant to, the folder sliding an inch across the glass table. “I turned down two other clients this week to clear my schedule for this. I told my partner this was our biggest opportunity yet.”

“It still is.”

“It is a trick.”

“It is a real project.” Roman pulled out the chair across from her and sat, unbothered, like this was any other Friday meeting. “The riverside development is real. The budget is real. The timeline is real. The only thing that was not real was the name on the email.”

Zuri stared at him for a long moment, arms crossed, clearly deciding whether to walk out. He watched her weigh it — the anger, the opportunity, the very real fact that Hayes Design Studio needed a project like this to survive its next two quarters. He had read enough about her firm to know that. He hated that he had used it.

“Sit down,” he said. “Hear me out. If you still want to walk after that, I will have my assistant escort you out personally and you will never hear from me again.”

She sat. Not because she trusted him. Because she was, above everything else, a professional, and professionals heard people out before they burned bridges.

“Talk,” she said.

He talked. For twenty minutes, he laid out the site, the scope, the vision Brooks Holdings had for a public riverside space that was not just another glass tower with a coffee shop on the ground floor. He knew the material better than she expected — not boardroom-memorized, but actually understood, the kind of understanding that came from someone who had spent real time with the plans instead of skimming a summary an assistant had prepared.

By the end of it, her arms had uncrossed. She was leaning forward, sketching something on the corner of her notepad without seeming to notice she was doing it.

“You actually care about this,” she said, like the realization surprised her.

“Do not sound so shocked.”

“I looked you up. Society pages call you a lot of things. ‘Engaged’ is not usually one of them.”

“I contain multitudes.” He watched her fight a smile and mostly lose. “So. Are you in, or am I finding a different architect for a project I specifically wanted your firm to build?”

She studied him for a second too long. “I am in. But I have conditions.”

“I am listening.”

“This stays professional. No favors, no name-dropping to my staff, no using this project to get whatever it is you were trying to get by lying about who you were in the first place.”

“I was not trying to get anything.”

“You anonymously hired my firm two days after I slapped you at a gala. Forgive me for having questions.”

He did not have a good answer for that, mostly because the honest one — I just wanted to see you again — was not something he was ready to say out loud. So he said nothing, and she took his silence as agreement, and they shook on it, and that was supposed to be the end of it.

It was not.

Three weeks in, they were arguing about load-bearing structures in a hallway outside her studio, and Roman realized somewhere in the middle of it that he was enjoying himself more than he had in months.

“You cannot put a viewing platform there,” Zuri said, pointing a finger at his sketch. “The angle is wrong. You would have people staring directly into the maintenance yard.”

“So we move the maintenance yard.”

“It is not a chess piece, Roman, it is infrastructure.”

“Fine. Move the platform.”

“That is what I have been saying for ten minutes.”

“You have been saying it in a very confusing way.”

“I have been saying it clearly. You have been ignoring me because you like arguing more than you like being right.”

He smiled, because she was not wrong, and because watching her get worked up over sightlines and drainage was doing something to him he had not planned for. She caught the smile and rolled her eyes, but there was something underneath the irritation now — something that had been building for weeks, quiet and stubborn, that neither of them had said out loud.

“You are impossible,” she muttered, gathering her papers.

“You like it.”

“I tolerate it. There is a difference.”

“Barely.”

She was almost smiling when she turned to leave, and he almost — almost — said something he would have regretted. Instead he let her go, watched her walk down the hall, and told himself for the fourth time that week that this was still just business.

He was getting worse at believing it.

Two days later, she came by his father’s estate to walk the original riverside blueprints Julian kept in his private study — an errand that should have taken twenty minutes and instead turned into an accident.

She arrived early. The assistant who was supposed to meet her at the door was on a call. So Zuri let herself in through the side entrance, the way Roman had told her to weeks ago, and found her way toward the study on her own.

The door was half open. She almost knocked. Then she heard Julian’s voice, low and tired in a way she had never heard it in public.

“I am not asking you to be someone else, Roman. I am asking you to stop treating this family like a burden.”

“I do not treat it like a burden.”

“You treat every gala, every meeting, every dinner like a sentence you are serving.” A pause. “Do you know what people said to me, the year I brought you home? They said I was foolish. That blood matters more than a name on paper. I spent fifteen years proving them wrong, and some days I still do not know if I did.”

Silence, longer this time.

“I know I am not what you wanted,” Roman said, and his voice sounded nothing like the version of him Zuri knew — no charm in it, no ease, just something raw and tired underneath. “I know I will never be him. The son you would have had if things had gone differently.”

“That is not—” Julian stopped. Started again, softer. “You are my son. I have never once thought otherwise. I just want you to believe it before I am not here to keep saying it.”

Zuri stood frozen in the hallway, hand still halfway raised to knock, feeling like she had walked into something she was never meant to see.

She backed away slowly, careful not to make a sound, and by the time she reached the front entrance her chest was tight with something she did not have a name for yet.

Roman Brooks — reckless, smiling, impossible Roman Brooks — was standing in that room like a man carrying something heavy he had never once let anyone see.

And she could not stop thinking about it for the rest of the night.