Loving The Billionaire’s Cold Heart

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ethan's POV

I didn't sleep well.

That had been happening more frequently, and I knew exactly why, but I was not prepared to examine it directly yet.

By five thirty I gave up and went to the kitchen and found Nora already there, which was becoming a pattern that I had stopped being surprised by and started simply expecting. She was at the counter with both hands wrapped around a mug, looking out the window at the city coming awake. She was in that oversized sweater again. Her hair was loose.

She heard me and turned.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Good morning to you too."

"I mean it kindly." She moved to the coffee machine without being asked. "You have the face of someone who argued with themselves all night and lost."

I sat at the counter. "Is it that obvious?"

"Only to someone paying attention." She set the cup in front of me. "Which most people here aren't."

I looked at her. She was already looking back and she didn't look away the way she used to in those first weeks — that careful deflection, eyes dropping to her hands or the floor or anywhere that wasn't my face. She held it now. Easy and direct and completely unafraid.

That was new. Or maybe I was only now noticing it.

"The Voss proposal," I said. "My father wants it signed by the end of the week."

"What does the proposal involve?"

"A joint development project. Fifty-fifty stake. Voss gets access to our infrastructure, we get access to his East Asian distribution network." I paused. "Richard Voss attached a personal condition."

She waited.

"He wants Camille formally acknowledged as a future partner in the merged entity. Not just professionally." I watched Nora's face. "He's using the business arrangement to push the personal one."

She set her mug down. "He's trying to build a path back to you for her through the contract."

"Yes."

"And your father supports this."

"My father wants the distribution network. He doesn't particularly care what it costs me."

Nora was quiet for a moment. Then — "What do you want?"

Nobody in this building asked me that. Not Daniel, not Lena, not my father. They asked what I was going to do or what the strategy was or what the numbers looked like. Nora asked what I wanted like it was the most obvious place to start.

"I want the distribution network," I said. "Without the personal condition."

"Then negotiate it out."

"Richard Voss won't —"

"Richard Voss wants the Blackwood name on his project more than he wants anything else," she said. "The distribution network is leverage for him but access to you is the actual prize. He'll fold on the personal condition if you make him believe he'll lose the deal entirely."

I looked at her.

"You've thought about this," I said.

"I've been thinking about it since dinner. Camille mentioned the proposal twice in situations where it wasn't relevant. She was testing what you'd say. Which means she's uncertain — which means Richard hasn't told her it's settled, which means it isn't settled yet." She picked her mug back up. "You have more room than your father is letting you believe."

The accuracy of it landed squarely. I had run this exact logic with Daniel yesterday and reached a softer version of the same conclusion. Nora had gotten there alone overnight from two dinner conversation observations.

"You would have been very dangerous in a boardroom," I said.

"I would have needed someone to let me in the building first."

The simplicity of that hit harder than she intended it to. I thought about everything this woman was capable of and everything the circumstances of her life had never given her room to use and something in my chest did a slow uncomfortable turn.

"Come to the office today," I said.

She blinked. "What?"

"Not formally. I have the Voss meeting at two. I want you there."

"Ethan —"

"You just mapped the entire negotiation dynamic over coffee at five thirty in the morning. I want that in the room." I held her gaze. "Unless you don't want to."

She searched my face for a long moment. Looking for the catch. I understood that — she had been handed things in this marriage that came with catches buried in the fine print. I waited while she looked and tried to make sure she found nothing.

"Okay," she said.

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

She wore something simple to the office. Dark trousers, a clean white shirt. She looked composed and unbothered walking into the Blackwood Industries lobby and I watched Daniel clock her arrival with visible surprise.

"Mrs Blackwood," he said.

"Lane," she said pleasantly. "But thank you."

Daniel looked at me. I kept my expression neutral. He turned and led us toward the conference room and I fell into step beside Nora and she glanced up at me sideways.

"Your assistant is alarmed," she said quietly.

"He'll recover."

"How often do you bring people to meetings unannounced?"

"Never."

She absorbed that without comment but I felt the quality of her silence change. Pleased, maybe. Trying not to be.

Richard Voss arrived at two with a lawyer and a practiced ease that meant he thought this was already decided. Camille was not with him. That was interesting.

I introduced Nora simply, by name, no explanation. Richard shook her hand with the smooth reflex of a man who files people quickly and moves on.

He would not file her quickly. I already knew that.

Twenty minutes in, when Richard tried to reattach the personal condition through a side clause in the revised terms, Nora looked at the document and said, without looking up — "That clause creates a conflict of interest under the partnership agreement you filed in 2019. It would void the indemnity protection on both sides."

Richard went still.

Nora looked up at him calmly. "I'm sure that's just an oversight."

The clause disappeared in the next draft.

Walking back to the car afterward I said nothing for half a block. Then —

"Where did you learn to do that?"

She looked straight ahead. "I read."

I stopped walking. She took two more steps and turned back.

The afternoon light was behind her and she was looking at me with that expression — open and steady and entirely, dangerously herself.

I was in serious trouble.

"Nora."

"Don't," she said softly. Like she already knew what I was thinking.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"I know." Her eyes held mine. "That's why I said don't."