Page 149 of Wait for Him

Hence the choking.

"Sorry — I can't have you dying on me before you put a ring on it." She waits it out with a small, patient smile while I stop coughing long enough to set my glass on the railing.

"I'm sorry," I manage. "Could you repeat that? I think I hallucinated the last thirty seconds."

She doesn't laugh. "I'd like to marry you."

Right. Definitely not a hallucination.

"I realize that's not how these conversations typically go," she says, perfectly calm.

"I've attended a lot of investor meetings over the years." I clear my throat. "None of them ended in a proposal."

"Then they lacked imagination."

"Or appropriate boundaries."

That earns me the faintest smile — a gorgeous, white, magazine-cover smile that stops a full inch below her eyes. Her eyes are somewhere else entirely. Hollow. Haunted, even. It's the kind of detail you'd never catch on a cover and can't unsee across a dinner table. The rest of her is flawless in a way that reads like armor: porcelain skin luminous in the last of the sunset, glossy blonde hair swept up into a style severe enough to chair a board meeting, softened by a few tendrils placed too perfectly to be stray. Her white-tipped fingers hold the stem of her wine glass just a little too tightly, the one crack in all that polish.

"Lane & Fields is over two hundred years old," she says, folding her hands against the rail. "My father died two years ago. I inherited the company. The board inherited doubts."

I've heard the rumors. The oldest real estate dynasty on the West Coast, generations of influence, billions in holdings — and a board quietly wondering whether the founder's daughter can keep the empire standing. Which is absurd, because I've read the numbers. She's outperformed her father's last five years in her first two.

"They don't think I can do it," she continues. "Not because I'm incapable. Because I'm alone."

I study her for a moment. "So your solution is... me?"

"My solution is optics." She turns to face me fully. "I want you on my board. I want the market to see a united front — two firms, two portfolios, two reputations becoming one."

"And the marriage?"

"The marriage is what makes the story believable."

The scary part isn't that she's serious. It's that from a purely business perspective, I can already see the math.

"That's..." I search for the least offensive available word. "...the most corporate proposal I've ever heard."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"I didn't intend it as one."

"No," she says. "But I suspect you'll think about it anyway."

Unfortunately, she's right.

A breeze rolls off the city and she turns into it, and her nipples pebble against the silk of her blouse. My eyes drop before I have a vote in the matter. She catches me looking, but she doesn't cover up or call it out. She just drags her tongue across her bottom lip and holds my stare.

My cock thickens, and there's nothing dignified about it. Ten months, a rooftop, wine in my blood, and a beautiful woman six inches away. I'm a man in a drought staring at rain.

The guilt lands half a second behind the blood. Rian Fields is the first woman to pull a physical response out of me since Rose left, ten months and eighteen days ago, and my body just broke a streak I never consciously started and have been keeping like a vow.

It means nothing, I tell myself. Biology isn't betrayal. A pulse isn't a decision.

I tell myself that twice, which is once more than a man tells himself things that are true..

"I'm sorry, Ms. Fields. I don't think we're on the same page."

"Rian, please." She sets the glass down on the rail, and the CEO recedes just enough to show something rawer underneath. "I'm aware I'd benefit from this arrangement more than you would. I'm not kidding myself there. And I'm not opposed to begging, Mr. Jackson. In fact, I'm a very good beggar."