Claimed By The Cold Billionaire

Chapter 4

DAMIEN'S POV

I didn't expect her to come back.

That was the honest truth and I didn't spend time decorating it. I had made the offer, she had refused it, and I had returned to my schedule with the intention of finding another solution. There were other options. There were always other options. I had built an entire career on never being dependent on a single outcome.

But when Charles told me there was a woman at the front desk giving my name with no appointment and no explanation, I knew before he finished the sentence who it was. I don't know how I knew. I just did.

I had thought about Aria Sinclair more than I intended to after she walked away from me in the lobby. Not in a way I was willing to examine too closely. More the way you think about a variable that doesn't behave the way your model predicts. She was unexpected and I had always paid close attention to unexpected things because in my experience they were either opportunities or threats and it was important to determine which quickly.

She had refused one hundred and eighty thousand dollars without flinching. In my world people bent themselves into shapes I didn't ask for in pursuit of a fraction of that number. She had stood up, said no, and walked away with her catering trolley like the conversation had been a minor inconvenience.

That told me things about her that an entire background report couldn't have.

Now she was sitting across my desk telling me her terms with her hands folded in her lap and her chin level and her eyes on mine without wavering, and I was finding it difficult to locate the angle. Everyone had an angle. In thirty-two years I had not met a single person who didn't want something beyond what they were asking for out loud. But Aria Sinclair sat in my office and asked for exactly what she needed and not one thing more and I didn't know what to do with that.

I agreed to her terms because they were reasonable and because the arrangement required her cooperation and cooperation required that she felt secure in the boundaries. That was the logical explanation. I didn't reach for another one.

After she left I sat at my desk for longer than I usually sat after a meeting and stared at the signed contract on the surface in front of me.

Charles appeared in the doorway.

"Should I begin making arrangements for the Blackwell dinner on Saturday?" he said.

"Yes," I said. "Miss Sinclair will be attending as my guest. Make sure she has everything she needs before then. Whatever is appropriate for the evening."

Charles wrote something on his tablet without commenting and I appreciated that about him. In ten years he had never once offered an opinion I didn't ask for.

"Also," I said, "contact Meridian Medical Credit. Clear the remaining balance on the Sinclair account in full today."

"Today," Charles repeated.

"Before five o'clock."

He nodded and left and I turned back to the window and looked at the city below and thought about what I was doing and why, the way I thought about every significant decision, by stripping it down to its functional components and examining each one without sentiment.

The arrangement made sense. My mother had been pushing the match with Helena Voss for four months and it was becoming a conversation I had at every family event regardless of how clearly I communicated my disinterest. A credible relationship would close that door without a prolonged argument. Aria was real, grounded, and had no social agenda inside my world, which made her far less complicated than anyone I might have found through conventional means.

The fact that she had saved my life was incidental.

The fact that I could still hear the steadiness in her voice from the hospital room, the way she spoke to me when I was fading in and out of consciousness, not with the particular reverence that people usually brought into rooms where I was present, but with plain, direct calm, that was incidental too.

I was very clear with myself that all of it was incidental.

My phone rang at two in the afternoon and I looked at the screen and felt the particular cold that only one person in my life reliably produced.

My mother.

I answered because not answering created more problems than answering.

"I heard you called off the meeting with the Voss family," she said, skipping a greeting the way she always did when she had something to address.

"I didn't call it off. I postponed it."

"Your father postponed it on your behalf because you didn't respond to three emails, Damien. That is not the same thing."

"I've been managing a company, Mother."

"You've been avoiding," she said. "Helena Voss is a perfectly suitable—"

"I'm seeing someone," I said.

The silence that followed was the particular kind my mother produced when she was recalibrating. It lasted four seconds. I counted.

"Since when," she said.

"Recently."

"How recently."

"Recently enough that it's real and early enough that I'd appreciate you not turning it into an agenda item at the Saturday dinner."

Another silence. Shorter this time.

"She'll be at Saturday's dinner?" she said.

"Yes."

"Then I'll meet her Saturday," she said, and hung up.

I put the phone down and looked at the contract on my desk and thought about the fact that I had just told my mother, a woman who could dismantle a person's composure with a single well-placed question over a dinner table, that Aria Sinclair was real.

Aria, who had been in my world for exactly one signed document and forty minutes.

Aria, who didn't know what Saturday dinners in the Blackwell house actually looked like.

Aria, who I realized with a clarity that was not entirely comfortable, I had not warned about my mother at all.

I picked up my phone and called Charles.

"Get me Aria Sinclair's number," I said. "And when you do, clear your afternoon. We have a problem to manage.”