The Billionaire's Inconvenience

Chapter 4

As the elevator door opened, Vivienne was greeted by Miranda, who was seated across from the doors. On seeing her, she stood up and gave her a warm smile. "Hello. My name is Vivienne, and I'm here to see Dean."

"I'm aware of who you are, we have been expecting you." She looked to her right, and beside Miranda's office was another large room that housed five more people, three men and two women. Those were probably his other secretaries, carrying out lower-tier work under Miranda's supervision.

Vivienne followed her out of the large office, down a long, empty hall to another elevator opposite the one she had come out of. The elevator was just like the previous one, the kind that made no sound. No groan, no shudder, just a smooth, arrogant ascent to the selected floor.

The doors opened directly into Dean's office suite, bypassing the rest of humanity entirely. Of course they did. Men like Dean Ashford did not share floors.

Vivienne had told herself on the elevator ride up that she was not nervous. She had repeated it on the thirty-second floor, again on the fortieth, and once more, quietly and with less conviction, somewhere around the forty-fifth. By the time the doors opened, she had said it so many times it had lost all meaning, the way words do when you hold them too long.

She stepped out and stopped. Later, she would not tell anyone about the stoppage. About the two full seconds she stood in the corridor with her notebook pressed against her chest like armor, just looking. Taking it in. Allowing herself, just briefly, the honesty of being affected.

The forty-eighth floor was not what she had expected, and somehow was exactly what she had expected, and the contradiction of that sat in her chest in a way she couldn't immediately name.

She had seen wealth before, given that she was born into it. She had also interviewed senators in their mahogany offices, CEOs behind their deliberately cluttered desks, old-money families in drawing rooms that smelled of leather and entitlement. She knew the aesthetic of power and how it arranged itself to be seen.

But this was different. This was quieter than she had anticipated. That was the thing that unsettled her first, before the scale of it, before the view came to her notice, she was first hit by the silence.

The corridor was wide and low-lit, floored in dark walnut that swallowed sound rather than reflecting it, and there was no noise. No phones, no keyboards. No murmur of voices carrying through walls. Just a deep, absorptive hush that felt installed because someone had decided that noise was a vulnerability.

It made her want to say something just to break it. She didn't. For all her rebellion, she simply couldn't bring herself to be the first person to break the silence. Mostly because she was already feeling somewhat out of place, she couldn't make it any more obvious how much of a foreigner she actually was in the environment.

"Miss Cole is here, sir." When they were alone, she addressed him by his first name because they were so familiar, but never in the presence of others. That was only how far it was allowed to go.

Vivienne stepped inside. Her first feeling, and she would examine this later, alone, with a glass of wine and the particular forensic honesty she reserved for things she didn't want to admit, was something close to grief. Not sadness exactly. More like the ache you get standing in a beautiful place that has no warmth in it. The office was extraordinary.

She could see, objectively, that the way you see things has been constructed to be seen. The impossible scale of it, two full walls of glass giving way to the city in every direction, the dark walnut floors unmarked and continuous, the shelving in blackened steel filled with the kind of documents and worn-spined books that belonged to a man who actually worked rather than performed work.

The desk was large and almost entirely clear, positioned so you had to cross the full length of the room to reach it, which she understood immediately was not an accident.It was a masterpiece of a room. She observed that it was also completely, deliberately, almost aggressively devoid of anything human.

No photographs. No artworks for decoration except for one hanging on the wall. It was obvious that it was more of a suggestion than a personally chosen addition to the room. No small inherited object on a shelf, or even pictures of loved ones sitting on his desk. There was nothing soft to show emotion.

She looked for him and found him at the west window, his back to the room, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other loose at his side. He was looking at the city below with an expression she couldn't see from this angle, but his shoulders held a particular tension. It wasn't the sort of tension that portrayed discomfort or fear. It would be a joke to assume that such a man had any fears.

There was something almost careful about it. The way he stood. As though stillness, for him, was a thing that required effort.

He didn't turn around.

The silence stretched. Five seconds. Eight. Twelve.

Vivienne knew what this was. She had seen it before, the deliberate pause, the performance of unbothered, and the calculated use of a person's own uncertainty as a tool against them. It was a wicked game, but she had played it countlessly in the past.

She had sat across from men who used silence like a scalpel, who had learned that the person who speaks first in a quiet room hands over something they can't get back, and eventually lost the game.

She allowed herself a small smile.

Her certitude was cut short in the eleventh second when she began to feel the pull of it. The faint, humiliating urge to say something. To fill the space, subsequently making herself easier to be in a room with and make up for something she was not aware of. She pressed her thumbnail into the spine of her notebook very hard, like a silent recalibration.

No.

She looked back at him and took in his build. The set of his shoulders, the deliberate angle of his body, the city framed around him like something that was planned with a certain intention, and she felt the nerves in her chest shift into something else, quieter and more useful. The particular calm that arrived for her when she understood precisely what she was dealing with. She uncapped her pen and waited.

And when he finally turned, it was in an unhurried manner. Composed, his face arranged in the careful neutrality of a man who had decided in advance what expression he would be wearing when he did. He turned to find her already looking at him, her face calm and patient. Her demeanor was one of composure, and it perfectly matched his.

He was, she registered with the detached professionalism she was extremely grateful for in this moment, unreasonably attractive. Dark eyes that moved over her with the same quality as everything else in this room; assessing, controlled, and giving nothing back. A jaw set in a manner which implied that a sculptor had been given very specific instructions and had followed them without any blunders.

He wore a suit the color of midnight that had been made specifically for his body, and he wore it a way that could not ever be copied or imitated by any other man. He looked at her the way she imagined he looked at acquisition proposals.

As though deciding, in the first few seconds, whether she was worth his time, like a silent assessment with him being the only one allowed to know the results of the assessment.

Standing across the room from him, she was very much aware of the fact that in this moment, he wielded all the power, and if she was not careful, he was going to wield it for the entire duration of this arrangement. But Vivian swore she wasn't going to back out, so that even if she lost this silent battle that began as she stepped into the room, it wouldn't be without a hard fight.