Chapter 6
“Arthur,” Victoria whispered, her voice dead, lifeless, stripped of all arrogance.
Arthur scrambled forward, gripping the edge of the walnut desk. “Yes, Vic?”
“Get Vance Croft,” Victoria said.
Arthur blanched. “Croft? The family’s general counsel? But Vic, Croft is in Southampton. If we bring him into an active short-settlement negotiation, the legal retainers alone will—”
“Call him!” Victoria slammed her flat palm against the desk, rattling the crystal decanter. “Tell him to patch into the secure conference line immediately. Tell him to pull the master surrender templates from the family trust vault.”
She turned her hollow, haunted eyes back to me.
“You win, Miss Vance,” Victoria said, each word sounding like it was being dragged across broken glass. “You want blood? You’ll get it. But before I authorize the transfer to whatever anonymous account you’ve set up, the Sterling family general counsel will witness the settlement. You won’t get a single cent until Croft verifies that your disclosure files are permanently erased.”
I raised an eyebrow, entirely unimpressed by her dramatic soap-opera phrasing.
*Surrender templates? Master disclosure files?*
She meant the invoice release form. Standard procedure. High-maintenance clients always wanted their corporate attorneys to review the final release of liability before cutting the check, hoping to find some tiny semantic loophole that would let them withhold payment.
I’d dealt with plenty of lawyers like Croft. They used thousand-dollar fountain pens and spoke in passive-aggressive Latin, but at the end of the day, a completed contract was a completed contract.
“Bring on your lawyer, Mrs. Sterling,” I said coolly, retrieving my red pen from the desk and slipping it back into the front pocket of my canvas bag. “He can review the numbers all he wants. But remind him: the clock is ticking. At three p.m., my terms double for late non-compliance. And unlike your London tax team, I don't give discounts for wasted time.”
Arthur fumbled with his satellite phone, his fingers trembling so hard he almost dropped it as he dialed the emergency legal dispatch.
Julian didn’t release my hand.
Instead, he pulled me gently toward the wide bay window overlooking the estate’s manicured, sprawling rose gardens, giving his hysterical family the illusion of privacy while Arthur screamed into the receiver.
The afternoon sun poured through the glass, bathing Julian’s chiseled jaw in warm, golden light.
“You’re completely insane,” Julian murmured, leaning in until his lips were inches from my ear, his breath a warm, teasing current against my skin. “You know that, right?”
“I’m not insane,” I whispered back defensively, trying to ignore the way my stomach flipped every time his chest expanded against my shoulder. “I’m a professional. Your mother tried to slip a predatory subcontractor liability waiver past me disguised as an offshore royalty deal. If I hadn’t red-lined that section, I would have forfeited my right to collect the remaining five thousand dollars.”
Julian paused.
A strange, quiet expression washed over his features—half amusement, half profound, overwhelming wonder. He looked at me as if I were a puzzle he had spent his entire life trying to solve, only to realize the answer was staring him in the face, wearing a nineteen-dollar skirt and holding a legal pad.
“Right,” Julian said softly, his voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t quite identify. “The five thousand dollars. Can’t let them get away with that.”
“Exactly,” I said firmly. “It’s the principle of the thing, Julian. If you let billionaires stiff you on five grand, what’s next? They start withholding the dry cleaning fee.”
Julian let out a low, breathless chuckle.
He raised his free hand, his knuckles brushing gently along the curve of my cheekbone, his touch so unexpectedly tender that my breath hitched in my throat. His gray eyes darkened, the teasing humor fading into something intensely serious, something heavy and real.
“Clara,” he said, his voice dropping to a rough, quiet whisper that made the hairs on my arms stand up. “When this is over... when three o'clock comes and goes, and my family has finished surrendering their souls to you...”
“Yes?” I breathed, unable to pull my gaze away from his lips.
“You and I are going to have a very long conversation about your billing rates,” Julian said softly, his thumb tracing the soft line of my lower lip. “Because whatever you’re charging me right now... it’s not nearly enough for what you’re doing to my heart.”
Before I could process the words—before I could point out that romantic entanglements were strictly barred under standard temp agency codes of conduct—the heavy oak doors behind us flew open once more.
A tall, silver-haired man in a razor-sharp charcoal three-piece suit strode into the study, carrying a leather briefcase with gold combination latches. His face was set in the grim, ruthless lines of an apex predator called in to clean up a corporate massacre.
Vance Croft, general counsel to the Sterling dynasty, had arrived.
And in his hand was the final, binding document meant to end the war.
Vance Croft did not look like a man who spent his Sundays relaxing. He looked like an apex predator who had been taxidermied into an eight-thousand-dollar Brioni suit.
His silver hair was combed back with pomade that smelled faintly of sandalwood and old courtrooms. His steel-rimmed spectacles sat perched on the bridge of an aristocratic nose, framing eyes so pale and devoid of warmth they belonged in an icebox. Behind him, the oak study door closed with a muffled, heavy thud that sounded unnervingly like the latch of a vault locking from the outside.
He set his briefcase on the center of the walnut desk. Two gold latches snapped open with the sharp, metallic crack of a double-barreled shotgun.
“Victoria,” Croft said, his baritone voice cultured, measured, and completely devoid of panic. “Arthur. Step back from the desk, please. Let the professionals handle the cleanup.”
Arthur let out a ragged sigh of relief, collapsing against the mahogany wainscoting like a condemned man who had just received a temporary stay of execution. Victoria, however, didn’t move. She remained rigidly upright in her leather chair, her manicured fingers white against the armrests, her gaze fixed entirely on me.
“She’s fast, Vance,” Victoria warned in a raw, gravelly whisper. “She identified the Section 367 exposure in under a minute. She has an automated trigger set for three o’clock.”
Croft didn’t flinch. He adjusted his silk cuffs, turning his icy gaze toward me for the first time.
His eyes swept over my polyester clearance-rack skirt, my scuffed faux-leather loafers, and the twelve-pack of generic red ballpoint pens sticking out of my canvas tote bag. For a fraction of a second, an expression of profound, sneering contempt flickered across his aristocratic features—the reflexive reflex of a Manhattan litigator who measured a person’s worth by the thread count of their lapels.
Then, just as quickly, the contempt vanished, replaced by the grim, hyper-vigilant calculation of an intelligence officer facing an undercover operative in disguise.
“An effective affectation, Miss Vance,” Croft said smoothly, opening the briefcase lid. “The unbranded synthetic fabrics. The absence of digital devices on the desk. The deliberately pedestrian stationery. It projects an image of total deniability. If the Department of Justice subpoenas your physical records tomorrow, there’s nothing for them to find, is there?”
