POV Adrian
I wake to Emilia’s voice and the cold glare of her phone inches from my face. Headlines burn white against the dark.
“There’s audio,” she says, jaw set. “They eavesdropped on my conversation with Melanie.”
I focus. The article isn’t just text—it’s an embedded clip: clink of glassware, the low hum of a Midtown bistro, our names floating up between fork scrapes.
A tinny laugh that’s Melanie’s, then Emilia’s voice—muffled, chopped—stitched into a narrative that makes us look like we planned the entire merger in bed. A transcript scrolls beneath, confidently wrong in all the places that matter.
“How could you be so fucking reckless?”
The words explode out of me before I can stop them, raw and furious and completely unfair. But watching our entire arrangement disintegrate because of one recorded lunch conversation has me feeling like I want to punch holes through expensive walls.
Emilia whips around from where she’s been pacing my bedroom in yesterday’s clothes, her hair still messy from sleep and sex, eyes blazing with the kind of fury that could melt steel.
“Reckless?” Her voice hits that pitch that usually makes grown executives reconsider their life choices. “I was having lunch with my best friend. I didn’t know I was being fucking eavesdropped on by corporate spies.”
“You told her everything!” I’m pulling on pants because having this fight naked feels like adding insult to injury. “Our entire strategy, the fake engagement, all of it!”
“I told her because I needed someone to talk to!” She’s gesturing wildly now, the way she does when she’s trying not to commit homicide. “Because this whole arrangement is driving me insane and I needed one person in my life who knew the truth!”
“Well congratulations, now everyone knows the truth!”
“You think I wanted this?” She stops pacing and faces me head-on, chin raised like she’s ready for war. “You think I wanted to wake up next to you and find out the entire world thinks I’m a gold-digging fraud?”
“Next to me.” The words hit wrong, like she’s regretting last night instead of the media shitstorm. “Right. Because that’s the real tragedy here.”
“Don’t.” Her voice goes deadly quiet. “Don’t turn this into something it’s not.”
“What is it then, Emilia? Because I’m honestly fucking confused about what we’re doing here.”
“We’re dealing with a crisis! We’re trying to figure out damage control before both our fathers have cardiac events!”
“Are we?” I step closer, and something in my chest is cracking open despite every instinct telling me to maintain emotional armor. “Because it feels like we’re dancing around the real issue.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is that none of this feels fake anymore.”
The words hang between us like a live grenade. Emilia goes completely still, eyes wide, like I just admitted to federal crimes.
“Adrian—”
“No, fuck it. I’m done pretending.” The confession builds in my throat like pressure behind a dam that’s about to burst. “I can’t lie to you anymore, Emilia. Not to you, not to myself, not to anyone.”
“You’re in crisis mode. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I’m thinking clearly for the first time in weeks.” I run hands through my hair because standing still feels impossible. “This isn’t fake anymore. It’s real. It’s been real since that dinner with my family, maybe before that. I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere between your resignation speech and that kiss in my kitchen, this stopped being strategy and started being something else entirely.”
She’s staring at me like I just spoke a foreign language. “Adrian, you don’t mean that.”
“I mean every fucking word.” The truth feels dangerous and necessary, like jumping off a cliff because the ground behind you is on fire. “I’m in love with you, Emilia. Completely, catastrophically, inconveniently in love with you.”
Her mouth falls open slightly, and for about three seconds she looks less like a corporate warrior and more like someone who just got hit by emotional lightning.
“You’re in love with me.” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“Yeah. Turns out fake engagements are dangerous as hell when your fake fiancée is brilliant and beautiful and challenges every assumption you’ve ever made about what you want from life.”
“We agreed this was temporary.”
“I know what we agreed. I also know that I haven’t been able to think straight since the moment you walked out of my office wearing that expression that said you’d rather set yourself on fire than continue working for me.”
“Adrian.” She sits down on the edge of my bed like her legs just gave out. “This is insane.”
“Completely fucking insane,” I agree, sitting beside her because proximity feels necessary even if it’s dangerous. “But that doesn’t make it less true.”
“The timing is—”
“Horrible. Absolutely the worst possible timing in the history of terrible timing.” I turn to face her fully because this feels like the most important conversation I’ve ever had. “But I can’t keep pretending I don’t care about you. Can’t keep acting like you’re just another business arrangement when you’ve completely rewired every priority I thought I had.”
She’s studying my face like she’s looking for tells, for signs that this is just another strategic maneuver disguised as emotion.
“Emilia, I know this changes everything. I know it makes everything more complicated. But I can’t—”
Her phone explodes to life between us, ringtone cutting through the tension like a buzz saw through silk. Hospital. Her father’s hospital.
She answers without taking her eyes off my face. “Hello?”
“Miss Hart?” An unfamiliar voice, professional and urgent. “This is Dr. Martinez from Mercy General. You need to come to the hospital right now.”
All the color drains from Emilia’s face. “What happened?”
“Your father’s had another episode. We need you here immediately.”
The phone slips from her fingers like she’s forgotten how to hold things. I catch it before it hits the floor, ending the call while she stares at nothing with the kind of blank expression that comes right before complete emotional collapse.
“Emilia.” I reach for her hand, but she’s already moving, already switching into crisis mode.
“I have to go.” Her voice is mechanical, stripped of everything except necessity. “I have to get to the hospital.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“No.” She’s pulling on shoes, grabbing keys, moving with the kind of focused efficiency that comes from years of handling emergencies. “I need to go alone.”
“Emilia, we just—”
“Not now, Adrian.” She pauses at my bedroom door, looking back with eyes that hold too much confusion and fear and unspoken things. “Whatever this is, whatever you just said—it has to wait.”
She’s gone before I can argue, leaving me sitting on my bed with the taste of confession in my mouth and the terrifying realization that I just laid my heart completely bare right before her world potentially fell apart again.
And I have no idea if she feels the same way, or if I just made everything infinitely more complicated at the worst possible moment.