Billionaire Romance: Spicy Terms

The boardroom on the forty-second floor of Halcyon Group's Manhattan headquarters had floor-to-ceiling windows that faced east, which meant that on clear October mornings, the sun came in at an angle that made everyone look slightly more heroic than they were.

Ava Sinclair had always thought that was intentional.

She sat third from the left on the long side of the table, not the seat she'd been assigned when she'd joined Halcyon four years ago, and not the seat she'd occupied for the past eight months as Senior VP of Operations. Today she was in Richard Holt's chair. Richard Holt, former COO, was currently explaining himself to a regulatory committee in a building six blocks south, which was why Ava was sitting where she was sitting, and why twelve of the company's most powerful people were watching her with the careful, assessing attention of individuals who had just realized they needed something from her.

She folded her hands on the table. She kept her expression pleasant and neutral, the way she always did in rooms like this, which was to say, in rooms where the temperature shifted depending on whether she seemed too eager or not eager enough. The needle she threaded every time was called *authority without urgency*, and she had been threading it since she was twenty-seven years old and the only woman at a table full of men who thought her ambition was a personality flaw.

Board Chair Eleanor Park spoke first.

"Ava." Eleanor had the precise diction of someone who'd attended enough settlement negotiations that casual conversation had become professionally suspect. "We'd like to begin."

"Of course."

The announcement took four minutes. Ava counted.

Interim Chief Operating Officer, effective immediately, ninety-day trial period with a formal review in January. It was framed, as these things always were, as both an opportunity and a practicality, the company needed operational leadership now, she was the most qualified person in the building, the timing was circumstantial but the appointment was merited. Eleanor said all of this in a tone that communicated full confidence while also communicating that the confidence was contingent, which was the board's way of reminding her that nothing was permanent until it was.

Ava nodded once. "Thank you. I'm prepared to begin immediately."

She felt the room's collective exhale, almost imperceptible, and understood what it meant: they had been concerned she might be difficult about the *interim* framing. She had spent two months managing the fallout of Richard Holt's misconduct, which she had not personally exposed so much as refused to professionally cover. The difference mattered to her. It apparently mattered less to the board.

She smiled at Eleanor. "I'll need a full briefing on the current vendor contracts Holt's team was managing, particularly the three outstanding with the Stratton Group."

"Of course."

"And I'd like access to the Q4 board materials before the full committee review. I should be reading the same documents you are."

A fractional pause. "Naturally."

Good*, Ava thought, and did not say.

She allowed herself the satisfaction. She had earned that much, forty seconds of privately acknowledging that she had done it, that she was here, that four years of competence and discipline and an almost pathological attention to detail had added up to something real.

Thirty-nine. Forty.

"There's one additional item," Eleanor said.

❦

The drive back from the board meeting to her office took approximately four minutes. Ava used them to check her messages, respond to two emails that had been waiting since six a.m., and not think about Dominic Hale.

She was good at not thinking about Dominic Hale. She had been practicing for two years.

The second announcement had been delivered in the same measured tones as the first, as though the board had not noticed, or had not cared, that the two pieces of news were not emotionally equivalent. Ava was Interim COO. Dominic was returning as CEO. These were the operational facts. The operational facts were all that mattered, because everything that wasn't an operational fact was a personal variable, and Ava did not let personal variables affect operational outcomes.

She had learned that, among other things, from Dominic Hale.

The irony was not lost on her. She let it exist and stepped around it.

The car pulled up to Halcyon's lobby. Ava gathered her portfolio, straightened the collar of her blazer, deep charcoal, sharp shoulders, the one she wore when she needed to feel like she was standing up straight even if her posture wasn't the thing in question, and went inside.

❦

Marcus Webb had been her chief of staff for fourteen months, which meant he had survived a performance review cycle, a corporate restructuring, and what the senior team referred to diplomatically as *the Holt situation*, which Marcus referred to privately as *the thing that was going to make Ava's career or get them both fired*. He was thirty-one, meticulous, possessed of an uncanny ability to read a room, and the only person in the building who brought her coffee exactly the way she drank it without being asked.

He was waiting outside her current office, which was, as of this morning, no longer her current office, because she now had Richard Holt's.

"They announced it formally?" he said.

"Fourteen minutes ago."

"I know. It's already on the internal news feed." He fell into step beside her. "How do you feel?"

"Like I have about ninety days to prove this wasn't a political gesture."

"It wasn't."

"The board did it because they had no better option and they trust my judgment. That's partly political." She stopped at the elevator. "I'm not complaining. I'm being precise."

Marcus pressed the button for the forty-first floor. "The new office has better light."

"I know. I've always coveted that office." She paused. "Don't put that in writing."

The elevator doors opened. They stepped in.

"There's something else," Marcus said.

She looked at him.

"Dominic Hale."

"I heard."

"You knew before the meeting?"

"I suspected before the meeting. There's been talk for two weeks. I chose not to address a rumor." She watched the floors count up. "Now I'll address the reality."

Marcus was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for Marcus, who processed most things aloud. "Have you spoken to him since—"

"Since he left? No." The elevator opened. "Did you pull the restructuring deck I asked for on the Stratton contracts?"

"On your desk. New desk."

"Thank you."

She stepped out and turned left toward what was now her office, and did not mention Dominic Hale again for the rest of the morning.

❦

By noon she had reviewed the Stratton contracts, flagged two liability clauses Holt had apparently signed off on without legal review, and conducted back-to-back meetings with the heads of Finance, Operations, and People and Culture. She had also accepted four separate congratulatory messages, replied to each with a single professionally warm sentence, and ignored the three that came with subtle qualifications embedded in the subtext, *well-deserved, given the circumstances*, because she had neither the time nor the interest in decoding the political anxieties of people whose support she would secure through competence rather than reassurance.

At twelve-forty, Marcus appeared in the doorway.

"Lunch?"

"In an hour." She was reading. "Close the door, please."

He closed the door.

She sat back.

The office was Richard Holt's until today, and before that it had belonged to someone else, and before that someone else, and the furniture was all Halcyon standard, dark wood, clean lines, the kind of impersonal tasteful that said *serious company* without saying anything about the person who worked here. She would change it. She knew already what she would do with it: clear the credenza, replace the art print above the door with the architectural photograph she'd had in storage for two years, move the desk chair two inches to the left so the afternoon light didn't land directly in her eyes.

Small things. But they were her things, and they would make this hers.

She turned to the window.

Manhattan spread below her in the sharp-edged clarity of a cold October afternoon, all glass and stone and the particular kind of beauty that required a certain emotional distance to appreciate properly. She had always loved this city in this season, the way it seemed to metabolize summer's extravagance and emerge leaner, brighter, its architecture thrown into relief against a sky that had decided to be unambiguous. She was a New York autumn person. She had never once doubted that.

She thought about the first time she'd sat across from Dominic Hale in a meeting.

She had been twenty-nine and brand new to the company, a hire straight from a successful tenure at a boutique strategy consultancy, brought in to lead an operational efficiency project. He had been thirty-four and already the person the room organized itself around, not because he performed authority, but because he seemed to think at a different speed than everyone else in the room, and had the frustrating habit of asking exactly the right question at the moment when no one else had thought of it yet.

She had been three minutes into her project overview when he'd interrupted her.

"The assumption on page four is wrong,"* he'd said. *"Not the data, the assumption. Walk me through how you got there."*

She had walked him through it. He had been right. She had revised the assumption, rebuilt the model, and delivered a better project outcome, and he had looked at her across the conference table with the particular expression of someone deciding whether another person is worth paying attention to, and said: *"Good."*

She had told herself, at the time, that the thing she felt in response to that single word was purely professional satisfaction.

She had been, at the time, twenty-nine and therefore willing to lie to herself about that kind of thing.

Now she was thirty-three and better at the truth. The truth was: Dominic Hale had been the most professionally formative relationship of her career and the most personally damaging. Both things were true simultaneously, which was annoying, and she had made her peace with the annoyance.

She turned back to her desk.

She had a company to run.

❦

At four-fifteen, Marcus knocked twice and came in without waiting, which meant it was something he considered relevant regardless of whether she was in the middle of something.

She was in the middle of something.

"The Dominic Hale rumors," he said. "No longer rumors."

She set down her pen. "Official confirmation?"

"Eleanor Park sent a company-wide memo nine minutes ago. He's been reinstated as CEO, effective Monday." Marcus came to stand at the corner of her desk in the way he did when he was briefing her on something he knew she wanted to receive without performance. "He lands at JFK tomorrow evening."

Ava picked up her pen again.

"Where is he flying from?"

"Singapore. He's been managing the Asia-Pacific restructuring."

"His choice, or the board's?"

"Both, from what I understand. He requested the posting. They approved it."

She made a note that wasn't about Dominic Hale. "And the board's reasoning for his return now, specifically?"

"The whispers about the Voss acquisition attempt." Marcus said the name with the particular caution of someone who has just introduced a variable whose full implications remain unclear. "Shareholders are nervous. The board wants leadership they associate with stability and growth. Hale's tenure was—"

"I know what his tenure was."

A beat.

"Of course," Marcus said.

She finished her note. "What's my diary tomorrow?"

"Clear until ten. Three calls in the afternoon. The operational review with Finance at five."

"Reschedule the afternoon calls to morning. I want the afternoon clear."

"For?"

"Thinking." She looked up. "That will be all, Marcus, thank you."

He nodded and left without asking why, which was one of the many things she valued about him.

❦

The building emptied slowly and then all at once, the way it always did on Thursday evenings, stragglers until seven, silence by seven-fifteen. Ava was still at her desk at eight. This was not unusual. She had eaten lunch at her desk, which Marcus had brought without commentary, and she had drunk approximately three cups of coffee and one glass of water, which was an inversion of the ratio she usually managed, and she was aware that she had not called her mother back and that there were two personal emails she'd flagged as important and not opened.

She had been, by most measurable standards, entirely productive.

She was also completely exhausted in the way that had nothing to do with the volume of work she'd done, which was the specific exhaustion of spending eight hours not thinking about something.

She got up from her desk and went to stand at the window.

The city at night was different from the city in the afternoon. It didn't ask for distance. It asked you to look at it, really look, all the lit windows and the moving lights and the particular electricity of ten million people doing ten million things simultaneously, most of them unaware of each other, all of them part of the same enormous humming whole. She had always found it clarifying, this view. It reminded her that the things that felt enormous in the contained air of an office were, architecturally speaking, very small.

Dominic Hale was coming back.

She let herself feel it.

Not the professional implications, she had catalogued those throughout the day with the thoroughness she applied to everything, turning them into a set of variables she could manage and account for. The personal implications were harder to systematize, and they were: old. A two-year-old wound that had healed over with professional scar tissue and the forward momentum she was very good at, and that she had convinced herself was genuinely no longer tender.

She pressed her hand briefly, once, against the glass.

Cold.

Here was the thing she could be honest about, alone in this office at eight in the evening with no one to observe her reactions: she had not been entirely surprised by his return. She had seen it coming the way you see weather coming when you've lived in a place long enough to read the particular quality of the light. The acquisition rumors had been circulating for six weeks. The board had needed someone. And Dominic Hale had always, always come back to what he built.

She respected that about him. She resented that she respected it.

She also, and she was only admitting this because the window didn't keep records, felt something she did not yet have an appropriate name for, something in the vicinity of *anticipation*, which was not a feeling she had any business feeling and which she intended to address by going home, sleeping a full eight hours, and arriving at her new office tomorrow morning as the Interim COO of Halcyon Group.

Not as someone with unfinished business.