Claimed By The Cold Billionaire

Chapter 3

ARIA'S POV

I sat with what James said for a long time after he walked away.

A formal review. Next Friday. Over a debt that had nothing to do with my work, nothing to do with my competence, nothing to do with a single thing I had done inside that hospital. I had never been late. I had never made a reportable error. I had given this place everything I had for three years and now a collections agency had made one phone call to the right administrator and suddenly my position was under review.

I finished my shift on autopilot. I smiled at the right moments and answered questions and did everything that was required of me and then I walked to the parking lot and sat in my car and allowed myself exactly four minutes to feel the full weight of it before I put it somewhere manageable and drove home.

Lena was on the couch when I got in, sketchbook open, pencils everywhere, takeout container on the coffee table that I was fairly sure was from two days ago. She looked up when I walked in and immediately read my face the way only someone who grew up watching you could.

"What happened?" she said.

"Nothing," I said. "Long shift."

She watched me move to the kitchen and fill a glass of water and she didn't push because she had learned over the years that I would talk when I was ready and not a moment before. What she didn't know, what I never let her know, was that ready sometimes meant never. Some things I carried alone because putting them down in front of Lena meant watching her carry them too and she was twenty-two and still learning how to carry herself.

I went to bed at eleven and stared at the ceiling until one.

One hundred and eighty thousand dollars before the end of the week.

I pushed the thought away. I pulled it back. I pushed it away again. It kept returning the way inconvenient truths do, quietly and persistently, sitting at the edge of every other thought I tried to have.

By morning I had made a decision. Not the one I wanted to make. The one I had to make.

****************

Getting back into the Blackwell Industries building without a catering assignment required more confidence than I actually had, but I had learned a long time ago that confidence was mostly performance and I was a decent enough performer when the situation demanded it. I walked in like I had somewhere to be and told the front desk I had a meeting with Mr. Blackwell and gave my name and waited.

I expected to wait a long time. I expected to be told he was unavailable or that I needed an appointment or that the answer was simply no.

His assistant appeared in four minutes and took me up without a word.

The office on the top floor was exactly what I expected and somehow still more than I was prepared for. Floor to ceiling windows, city spread out below like something from a photograph, a desk that probably cost more than my car, and Damien Blackwell standing with his back to the door looking out at all of it like he was surveying something he was still deciding whether to keep.

He turned when I walked in.

He didn't look surprised to see me and I found that quietly irritating.

"You came back," he said.

"I have conditions," I said.

He gestured to the chair across from his desk and sat down and folded his hands on the surface in front of him and waited. No smirk. No victory. Just attention, which was somehow more unsettling.

I sat and I looked at him directly and I said what I had rehearsed in the car.

"Three months. I will attend the events you need me at. I will be convincing in public. I will meet your family and I will be polite to all of them. But I will not move into your space, I will not answer to you outside of agreed appearances, and I will not pretend in private. When there is no audience, we are nothing. Those are my terms."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The debt gets cleared before I attend a single event," I added. "Not after. Not halfway through. Before."

"Agreed," he said.

I blinked. I had prepared for negotiation and he had simply agreed and now I felt slightly unsteady in a way I hadn't anticipated.

"There are things you need to understand about my world," he said. "My mother is observant and she will look for inconsistencies. My father is transactional and he will ask you questions designed to find your weak points. My brother Marcus is the only one who will be genuinely kind to you, which you should not mistake for the absence of intelligence."

"I've handled difficult families before," I said.

"Not like mine," he said, without arrogance. Just fact.

"There's one more thing," I said. "Nobody at my hospital can know. Not the nature of the arrangement. Not the money. Nobody."

"Understood," he said.

"And my sister cannot know."

Something moved across his face at that. Not quite curiosity. Something quieter.

"Why?" he said.

"Because she worries," I said. "And she's been through enough."

He nodded slowly and reached for a document on the corner of his desk and slid it across to me. I looked down at it. Clean, formal, three pages. He had already had it drawn up. Which meant he had known I was coming back before I had known it myself and I filed that information away in the part of my mind I reserved for things that bothered me.

I read every line. It took me twelve minutes and he didn't rush me once.

Then I picked up the pen he placed beside it.

My hand didn't shake. I was proud of that.

I signed my name and put the pen down and looked up at him and he was already watching me with an expression I couldn't read.

"Welcome to my world, Miss Sinclair," he said.

And something in the quiet way he said it made me feel, for the first time since I walked in, like I had not thought this through nearly enough.