The Contract Between Us

Chapter 5

Luca

Sunlight was already coming through the curtains when I opened my eyes, and for a moment I didn't understand where I was. Then I remembered the night before. I looked to my side, expecting to see the strange woman, but there was no one there, because she had left before I woke up.

I lay on the bed for a long moment, staring at the ceiling and trying to work out how the night had happened at all. It wasn't like me. I didn't approach women at bars, didn't buy rooms on impulse, and didn't let a stranger cry beside me and then act on wanting her anyway. She had left without a word, with no note and no thank you, not even the awkward conversation that usually followed a night like this. It was strange, but a part of me liked it.

I sat up, dragged a hand down my face, and realized I didn't know her name.

It shouldn't have mattered, and it never had before. My name is Luca Ashford, and at thirty-four I controls Ashford Group, the real estate company my father built and left to me when he died. I had taken over at twenty-eight and grown it well beyond anything he imagined, and I had crossed a billion in personal wealth before anyone thought to write about it. Buildings all over the city carried my family's name, and people wanted things from me because of it. I dealt with every one of them the same way, through terms, so that everyone knew what they were getting and what I expected in return, and nothing was left unclear.

Women were no different. Clara had been the longest of them, a paid arrangement we had both understood from the first day, with nothing owed and nothing expected beyond what we agreed to. I had never been in love, and I had never seen the appeal. I didn't understand why people gave up so much control for a feeling that couldn't be put into writing. My mother, Kiarra, had never accepted that. She was the only family I had left, and for a year she had been pushing me toward Eva Douglas, certain that a wife would settle me down, while I kept telling her I had no interest.

But something about last night stayed with me. It was the way the stranger had cried at the bar before I had said more than two words to her, and the way she had let go against the door the second it closed, as if she had been holding herself together for days and had finally been allowed to stop.

I showered, dressed, and checked out, telling myself the whole drive home that I would forget it by the time I reached my desk. I didn't chase things, because I acquired them when it suited me and let them go just as easily. I had told myself that three times before I even left the parking garage, which should have shown me how convinced I actually was.

At home, while my coffee brewed, I opened the city's gossip pages on my phone, more out of habit than intention, and stopped scrolling almost immediately. A video sat near the top of every trending list. I recognized her the moment the footage started, and it was the woman from last night.

It was fifteen seconds of a restaurant and a slap that turned her head hard enough to make my own jaw tighten. I watched it twice before I set the phone down.

By the time I reached Ashford Group's top floor, I knew what I intended to do. I called my PA before I had put my bag down.

"Margaret, my office."

She appeared almost at once with a tablet in her hand, unbothered by the abruptness, because she had worked for me long enough to know that was simply how I operated. "Mr. Ashford."

"There's a designer, a scandal from earlier this week, a video that's been circulating. I need a full background check on who she is, what she does, and what happened to her, by tonight."

Margaret didn't blink, which was one of several reasons I had kept her for as long as I had. "Understood."

She was already turning to go when I added, "Quietly."

She nodded once, because she knew what quietly meant.

I spent the rest of the day the way I spent every day, or tried to. There were calls about a development stalled in permits somewhere in the Bronx, and a board member who believed he understood real estate better than the man who had doubled the company's holdings in six years, and said so at length in a meeting that ran forty minutes over. There were contracts to sign and numbers to approve, decisions that usually held my full attention and today didn't. My mind kept returning to a bar stool and a stranger's face whenever the room went quiet. I asked a colleague to repeat himself twice on a call before I gave up and told him I would review the terms in the morning, which hadn't happened to me in longer than I could remember.

Margaret returned with what I had asked for just as I was closing out for the day. She set the folder on my desk without a word, the way she did when the contents needed no commentary, and I opened it at once.

Aurelia Smith, twenty-eight, owns a small fashion studio downtown that had been losing clients since the video spread. The footage had several million views by now, showing a man slapping her across the face in a restaurant full of witnesses. Her engagement had been declared over within hours, in language so sanitized and cowardly that it could only have come from a man trying to distance himself from what he had done. Her name was trending for every wrong reason, and strangers who had decided from fifteen seconds of footage what kind of woman she was were mocking and dissecting her.

Two clients had already pulled their orders, according to Margaret's notes, and her landlord had called about next month's rent. She had built her business by hand, on talent and stubbornness, and it was failing because a man had decided that humiliating her in public would cost him nothing.

I read through it once, slowly, and then again, and somewhere in the second pass I went very still, as I always did before I made a decision I meant to see through.

She had said nothing about any of it the night before, not the man, not the video, not the damage piling up around her name. She had sat at that bar and cried as though her life had ended, and she had let a stranger sit beside her without once asking him to fix anything. I hadn't expected to find that kind of restraint interesting. She could be that undone and still keep the worst of it to herself, and she had left without asking me for a single thing, which was more than I could say for most people who spent a night in my company.

I closed the folder and leaned back in my chair, the city already dark beyond the window, and let the idea that had been forming since I first saw that video take shape. She was a woman with a ruined name and nowhere left to go, her business was worth saving if the right money and the right attention reached it, and the public would believe whatever story was put in front of them next, if it was told well enough.

Meanwhile my mother wanted proof, before the month was out, that I was finally capable of choosing someone and keeping her.

I couldn't yet see exactly how the pieces fit together, but I knew, sitting there with her file open in front of me, that they did.

"Very good," I said to the empty office, my eyes still on the folder. "This is exactly what I need."

A slow smirk pulled at my mouth as I reached for my phone. She had left that hotel room without a trace and probably believed that was the end of it, but it wasn't, not even close.