Page 16 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

For now I need to get dressed and be a functional professional person who helps her best friend nail the most important pitch of her career.

I turn back to the bed.

The dress is asymmetrical, black, blazer-fitted through the shoulders with a bodycon skirt that hits mid-thigh. Clean, architectural, the kind of thing that reads professional in a boardroom and interesting everywhere else. I’ve been saving it for a client presentation that no longer exists, so it might as well earn its keep in France.

I do my hair. I do my makeup. Foundation, a little bronze, a berry lip that says I’m here on purpose without announcing it. I step into my red bottoms and stand in front of the mirror and assess.

Professional innocence. That’s what I’m going for. Competent. Credible. Absolutely not thinking about anyone’s voice or forearms or the way Killian Thorne looked at Raphael’s hand on my back like it personally offended him.

I’m not thinking about that.

I pick up my black-framed glasses from the vanity and slide them on and that’s it, that’s the look, done.

A knock at the suite door.

I grab my tablet, already cued to the presentation, and open it.

Sophia stands in the doorway in a pinstripe sleeveless blazer, black tailored shorts, white sleeveless blouse, layered gold chain, diamond studs, black pumps. She’s got her portfolio under one arm and her other hand raised mid-knock and she’s staring at me.

Her jaw drops.

“Do a spin,” she says.

“Sophia—”

“Do the spin, Harper.”

I do the spin.

She makes a sound that is somewhere between a gasp and a judgment. “How. How did you take professional innocence and make it clickbait. That is genuinely not fair. I’m pitching today and you look like that.”

“You look amazing,” I tell her, because she does.

“I look like a businesswoman. You look like a businesswoman who someone wrote a novel about.” She gestures broadly at my glasses. “And then you put on the glasses.”

I slide them up my nose. “Shall we?”

Sophia collapses against the doorframe in a full theatrical faint, one hand to her forehead, portfolio clutched to her chest. I grab her free arm and pull her upright before she actually slides down the wall, which she is genuinely committed enough to do.

“You’re so dramatic,” I tell her.

“I learned from the best,” she says, completely recovered, and loops her arm through mine.

We head down the hallway together. Sophia is already talking through her opening lines again, running them the way she does when she’s nervous, the rapid-fire polish of someone who has rehearsed something so many times it’s started to sound like a script and she knows it. I tell her to breathe, that she knows this inside out, that the numbers are solid and her instinct for the market is better than anyone in that room. She nods. She straightens. She looks like her father for half a second and I look away.

Not thinking about it.

The hallway intersects the main corridor near the east guest wing and we’re halfway through it when a suite door ahead of us opens.

Maddox steps out.

He’s in dark jeans, a fitted black crew neck, a leather jacket, and he stops when he sees us the way someone stops when they’ve walked into a room and the floor plan has changed since they were last in it. Just stops. Completely. Hand still on the door handle.

His eyes go to me.

They do a full inventory. Not subtle. Not a glance. The kind of look that starts at the shoes and takes its time getting anywhere else and doesn’t pretend to be doing something other than what it’s doing.

I don’t move. I don’t think I’m breathing.