I FELL FOR MY DADDY'S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND

Chapter five

The office was empty by nine, and Rena was still there.

She'd told herself she was staying late to catch up on the files Lucas kept burying her under, but that wasn't the real reason and she knew it. She was waiting for the building to clear out so she could go to Raymond without an audience, without Lucas watching from his glass office, without Kayla's warning replaying in her head every time she thought about walking down that hallway. The cleaning crew had already come and gone. The only light left on the executive floor was his.

His office light was still on when she got there. He looked up from his desk, tie loosened, sleeves rolled to the elbow, like a different man than the one who ran boardrooms in the daylight. There were papers spread across the desk that hadn't been there that afternoon, and dark circles under his eyes that told her he hadn't been sleeping much either.

“You're still here,” he said.

“So are you.”

I could say the same thing about you.” He set his pen down, giving her his full attention in a way he rarely did during office hours. “What happened?”

She shut the door and told him everything. The comment about her onboarding meeting lasted forty minutes. The way Lucas had smiled at her afterward like he already knew more than he should. The phone call she'd caught him on, the way he'd watched her through the glass the entire time he spoke to someone she couldn't identify.

Raymond's expression hardened with every word. “He's testing you.”

“I know.”

If he suspects you're reporting to me, he'll cut you out of anything useful and start covering his tracks in ways we can't trace. Raymond stood, crossing to the window, his back to her. I should never have let you get this close to him.

“You didn't let me do anything. I chose this”

"You chose it because I put you in a position where choosing anything else felt impossible." He turned back to face her, and for the first time since the boardroom, she saw something raw underneath the calm. Every day you go to that office, you're one careless word away from him deciding you're a problem instead of a niece. I keep telling myself I'm protecting you. Most days I don't believe it either.

The admission hung in the air between them, heavier than anything he'd said all week.

“I'm scared” Rena said, and hated how small her voice sounded. "Not Lucas. Of how much I don't know, My parents what actually happened to them. What he's capable of if he thinks I'm getting close to the truth. I keep going over that night in my head, trying to find some detail that doesn't fit, and now I can't stop wondering if there was one all along and I just didn't know what to look for.

“I won't let anything happen to you.”

“You can't promise that.”

“I know," Raymond said quietly. “I'm promising it anyway.”

She crossed the room before she'd decided to move, and he met her halfway, like some part of him had been waiting the same way she had. Jena's voice surfaced somewhere in the back of her mind — “keep both eyes open, for all of it, including him” — and Kayla's voice right behind it, cold and certain, telling her exactly how this would end. She heard both of them, and she stepped closer anyway.

“This is a mistake” " Raymond said, his voice low, even as his hand found the side of her face.

“I know that too.”

Neither of them moved away. His thumb traced her jaw, slowly, like he was giving her every chance to stop this before it happened, and when she didn't take it, something in his restraint finally broke. He kissed her like a man who'd spent a week convincing himself he wouldn't, one hand sliding into her hair, the other pulling her against him like the distance between them had been unbearable for longer than either of them wanted to admit. Every rule he'd laid out that first day in the boardroom, every wall he'd built to keep this from happening, gave way at once.

Rena kissed him back, every warning Jena and Kayla and her own good sense had given her dissolving under the weight of ten years of wanting exactly this. For a moment there was no company, no dead parents, no suspicious transfers, no Lucas watching from somewhere in the dark. There were only the two of them and the wall neither of them could rebuild now that it was gone.

It was the sharp buzz of Raymond's phone against the desk that broke them apart.

He pulled back first, breathing hard, already reaching for it out of habit before he'd fully returned to himself. Rena watched his face change the second he read the screen — the warmth draining out of it, replaced by something closer to alarm. She'd seen him closed off before, in the boardroom, across a negotiating table. This was different, This was fear, quick and unpracticed, the kind he clearly wasn't used to wearing.

“What is it?”she asked.

He turned the phone toward her without a word.

It was a text from an unknown number, no name attached, sent less than a minute ago.

“Careful, Raymond, some things aren't as private as you think.”

Attached beneath it was a photo — the two of them, taken through the glass wall of his office, her hand still resting against his chest, his fingers still tangled in her hair.

Rena's stomach dropped. “Who sent this?”

“I don't know”, Raymond was already moving, crossing to the window and scanning the street below, the parking structure, the rooftop of the building across from theirs, like whoever had taken the photo might still be standing there watching. “The number's blocked. Untraceable, probably burner.”

“Kayla?”

“Maybe, Or Lucas” His jaw tightened. “Or someone neither of us has thought to be afraid of yet. This building has more enemies than either of us can count right now, and apparently one of them owns a camera.

Rena looked at the photo again, at how exposed they looked, how easily one image could undo everything Raymond had spent six months trying to build in secret. An hour ago the biggest risk in her life had been a spreadsheet. Now it was standing in this room with her, and there was no version of tomorrow where she could pretend otherwise. Someone had been watching, and whoever it was wanted them to know it.