Page 83 of Secret Heir For The Billionaire Twin

“Then send me five.”

Daniel makes the adjustment without comment. He’s spent the last several days coordinating Italy with the efficiency I expect from him, which means the trip now exists as a sequence of departure times, cars, meetings, hotels, security details, and carefully protected windows for anything that might go wrong.

Sophie appears throughout the itinerary almost as often as I do. Her arrival time. Her interviews. Her access clearance. Her transportation from Malpensa. The Milan hotel. Lake Como. I turn the page before I linger on any of it.

“Anything else?” I ask.

“Nothing that requires you today,” Daniel replies.

“The rest can be handled from Milan.”

“Good.”

He gathers his tablet and stands.

“Try leaving before 9:00 tonight.”

I look up at him. “Was that professional advice?”

“It was a scheduling observation.”

“I don’t remember asking for one.”

“No,” Daniel says as he reaches the door.

“You rarely do.”

He leaves before I can answer. I lean back and look through the glass wall toward the city.

Sophie was here for three days last week. Not constantly. She moved between interviews, archive sessions, conference rooms, and the visitor office while I maintained my own schedule. Still, her presence had a way of registering wherever I was. I’d pass her in a corridor and find myself carrying the image with me into the next meeting. She called twice after leaving the office to clarify points from her notes, and both conversations lasted longer than the questions required.

The second call only ended when she realized it was nearly midnight. I remember her laugh when she apologized. I remember too much about the sound of it. I close the Milan briefing and reach for the Zurich documents instead. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand what happened between us. I understand it perfectly well.

I wanted her.

I still do.

What I’ve been less willing to examine is everything that comes with that fact. The article will end. The anniversary interviews will end.

Italy is the final scheduled portion of her access, and once we leave Lake Como, there’s no legitimate reason for her calendar to stay connected to mine. No archive session. No follow-up interview. No company dinner that places us in the same room under the protection of professional necessity.

The realization doesn’t arrive with drama. It just settles. I look down at the report without reading it.

For this past month, Sophie has been part of the architecture of my days. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes because Daniel put her on a schedule, sometimes because she called with a question and I answered when someone else could have done it. Soon, none of those reasons will exist. The obvious solution comes before I can stop it.

I could ask her to stay.

Not in Italy—not at the estate–but in my life. The thought is so direct I almost laugh at myself. I’ve negotiated multibillion-dollar acquisitions with less hesitation than the idea of asking one woman what happens after an article is published.

I know what I’d want to say. That whatever exists between us doesn’t have to end because the assignment does. That I’d like to see her without a recorder on the table or an interview waiting afterward. That Boston wasn’t an aberration I’m trying to forget. None of that is difficult to put into words, but saying it is something else.

Sophie has built her career on maintaining control over her own choices. I’ve already complicated her work simply by becoming personally involved with her. The Blackwell name guarantees that anything between us will carry consequences she didn’t ask for, and I don’t trust myself to offer her something casual when nothing about my reaction to her feels casual anymore.

Worse, I’m not even sure I know how to offer anything else. My relationships have always existed around the edges of my life. Dinner when schedules allow. Weekends when convenient. Women who understood that work would come first and rarely asked me to rearrange it.

Sophie has been rearranging it without asking. That should probably tell me something. I’m not ready to decide what. I close the Zurich folder and sign the approval page before placing it in the outgoing stack.

By 8:40, the executive floor has thinned to a handful of lights. I shut down my computer, leave the remaining files for the morning, and finally take Daniel’s unsolicited advice.