[Annie’s POV]
Theo's office door clicks shut behind me, and the sound has a different weight than usual. He's standing behind his desk with both hands flat on the surface, sleeves rolled, jaw set—the posture of a man bracing for impact.
"Senior Strategy Director." He says it like reading a verdict. "Full access to the acquisition pipeline, the growth architecture, everything. I need you at the senior table."
I stare at him. The words rearrange themselves three times before they settle. "I've been at Meridian for three months, Theo. I'm a junior hire who still gets cc'd on the wrong email chains. Promoting me will look like exactly what it is."
"And what's that?" His arms cross—pure Wharton challenge, daring me to say it so he can dismantle it.
"A CEO handing his mistress a title." The word slips out raw and clumsy, and his whole body changes.
"You're not my mistress." Flat, immediate, carrying the weight of a correction he's rehearsed.
My ribs tighten and I grip the back of the chair because the next question is going to cost me. "Then what am I?"
He holds my gaze for three full seconds before redirecting. "You're the best strategist I've ever worked with, and right now I need that more than I need to worry about optics."
"Optics." I let the word sit. "That's a generous way to describe promoting the woman you've been sleeping with."
"Caroline's family fund is pulling out of Meridian." The shift in his voice—dropping half a register, stripping the polish—tells me everything his face won't. "White-Alcott Capital is initiating a structured withdrawal. We're losing our biggest backer mid-round."
My hand tightens on the chair because the room has tilted and my knees are reconsidering their commitment to holding me upright. "The engagement—"
"Is over. I ended it." He meets my eyes, and something in the steadiness of his gaze tells me this isn't hypothetical—it's done, detonated, already falling. "She didn't take it well, and not well for Caroline looks less like a breakup and more like a controlled demolition."
I knew it was coming—watched him draw Sarah's fortress while Caroline's name went unanswered on his phone. But hearing that the financial shrapnel is already airborne does something vicious to my chest.
"The board is panicking, investors are circling, and the capital stack needs rebuilding before quarter-close." His thumb presses into the desk hard enough to whiten the nail. "I can do it alone—but with you, we do it better."
Three tracks fire behind my eyes—the fund withdrawal, the board pressure, and the fact that my pulse is hammering against the side of my throat for reasons that have nothing to do with capital structures. "Why did you end things with Caroline?"
"Because the arrangement stopped being enough of a reason." Each word placed like stones across a river.
"That's not an answer.” I push back stubbornly. “That’s a fortune cookie in a suit,” I catch his amused smile, and it softens some of the fire behind my ribs. He hides it almost immediately.
"It's the only answer you're getting right now." His voice drops. "The building is on fire and I need your brain, not a relationship conversation."
The thing about Theo Barnes is that even when he's shutting me out, he's honest about the shut. Jake would have offered a prettier lie. Theo hands me the locked door and tells me exactly which key he's withholding.
Nothing says romance like being recruited mid-crisis because your strategic value outweighs your emotional inconvenience. But the part of me that built an empire from behind glass has been starving for exactly this kind of problem.
"Full authority on the investor pipeline restructure." My voice shifts into the register I recognize from late nights and live ammunition. "No committee approvals, no Davies filter. My way."
"Done." He uncrosses his arms—shoulders dropping a fraction, the first sign he wasn't sure I'd say yes. "What else?"
"Coffee that doesn't taste like an act of war." I sit down, pull his laptop toward me, and open the investor database. "And stop looking at me like that—we have work to do."
We don't leave his office for eleven hours. Theo works the phones—sovereign wealth funds, institutional partners, two calls to Singapore past midnight their time—while I tear the pipeline apart and rebuild it.
I feed him data points between calls the way I used to feed Jake lines through a chat window—except Jake never argued back. Theo fights me on every allocation, and each argument leaves the strategy sharper than before.
"Your sovereign wealth targets are too conservative." I spin the laptop toward him during a break. "You're ignoring the Nordic pension funds—they've increased alternatives allocation three straight quarters."
"Nordic pensions move like glaciers." He leans over my shoulder to scan the screen, and his breath moves the hair near my temple. "We need commitments in six weeks."
"Then call Eriksen at Norges directly—he owes you from Geneva." I pull up the contact. "Use it."
"You've been tracking my conference relationships." Not a question. His mouth is close enough that I feel the words more than hear them.
"I've been tracking your underutilized assets." I keep my eyes on the screen because turning my head would put his mouth four inches from mine. "Make the call."
"You're terrifying when you're right." He says it like a compliment, reaching past me for the phone, forearm brushing mine. "Which is always. That's the terrifying part."
His voice shifts into that persuasive register as the call connects. The proximity keeps shrinking through the hours—his hand on the back of my chair, my shoulder against his arm when I lean toward the screen.
At nine-thirty the pizza arrives cold and we eat it anyway—him by the window, me cross-legged on the floor in printouts. He sits beside me, back against the desk, knee pressing warm against mine.
"This is how it should have been at Wharton." His voice is quiet, stripped of everything except the thought. "Same side instead of opposite ones."
"We would have been insufferable." I tear off another slice. "The faculty would have staged an intervention."
"We're insufferable now. We just have better funding." His knee presses harder, and the laugh that escapes me is sudden and real—the kind that loosens something behind my chest I've been holding for months.
The model is nearly finished. The capital stack is viable if not elegant, and the silence between calls fills with something that has nothing to do with numbers.
His hand finds the back of my neck—one thumb tracing a slow line along the tendon—and every nerve ending recalibrates around that single point of contact.
"Tomorrow this gets complicated." His voice is rough, barely a murmur, and his thumb hasn't stopped.
"It's already complicated." I close my eyes for one second—his warmth, the steady drag of his thumb, eleven hours of arguments still humming in my blood. When I open them, he's watching me without any pretense left.
I should stand up. Collect my bag, walk to the elevator, take the train to my mother's pullout couch. Instead I turn my head, and his mouth is right there—three inches of charged air vibrating with every argument we've had today.
"Take me home, Theo." The words leave my mouth aimed at his, and I don't mean my mother's apartment.