Chapter 5 Watching
The housing project was two million dollars over budget on paper, and the man presenting the numbers wanted permission to fix that by cutting sixty of the planned affordable units down to forty.
“We hit our margin targets either way,” the man said. “Nobody outside this room checks unit counts against the original filing.”
“I check,” Rhys said.
The room went quiet in the way rooms did when people realized the meeting had just changed shape.
“Find the two million somewhere else,” Rhys said. “Materials, timeline, contractor fees. Not the units. The units are the point of the project, not a line item we trim when the math gets uncomfortable.”
“Your father’s plan for this project didn’t have unit minimums at all.”
“My father’s not running this one.” Rhys closed the folder in front of him, a clean, final gesture. “Find the money. I don’t need a plan by Friday. I need the right plan.”
The man nodded, gathered his papers, and left without further argument, and Rhys felt the small, private satisfaction of having said something he actually meant, in a room full of people paid to agree with whatever he said regardless.
Theo caught him in the hallway afterward, falling into step beside him the way he’d done since business school, when neither of them had owned a suit that fit properly.
“You just made an enemy in there,” Theo said.
“I made a decision in there.”
“Sometimes those are the same thing, in this building.” Theo glanced sideways at him. “You’ve had your driver logging late pickups three nights this week. Your driver thinks I don’t notice because he logs everything after midnight.”
Rhys didn’t answer right away, which was answer enough.
“I’m not asking to interrogate you,” Theo said. “I’m asking because you don’t usually let anything interrupt your schedule twice, let alone three times, and I’d like to know if this is a problem I need to help you solve.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“Then what is it?”
Rhys considered how much to give him. “Something I didn’t expect to still be thinking about a week later.”
Theo studied him a long moment, something shifting behind his usual easy expression. “That’s the most honest sentence you’ve said to me in about a year, and you still didn’t actually tell me anything.”
“I’m aware.”
“Fine. Keep your secrets.” Theo clapped him once on the shoulder, already peeling off toward his own office. “Just don’t let whoever it is cost you the one project in this building that isn’t about the money.”
Rhys worked through the rest of the afternoon with unusual focus, cleared his desk earlier than he had in longer than he could remember, and told his driver a destination he didn’t normally give before eight.
By the time he reached Eclipse, the sky had gone the deep blue-black of early evening, and Rhys realized, walking toward the entrance instead of the private hallway he usually used, that he was looking forward to something that had nothing to do with the company at all.
He took a table near the edge of the floor instead of waiting backstage, telling himself it was curiosity and nothing more. He’d never once done this before, arrived early enough to watch the actual set instead of going straight to the private room, and he wasn’t entirely sure yet what had changed his mind about it tonight.
The lights dropped low and gold. The bass rolled up through the floor into his chest. Then she was there, and every plan he’d had for staying detached about it lasted exactly as long as it took her to cross the stage.
She moved like she owned the air around her. Unhurried. Deliberate. Silver catching the light with every turn, her spine arched back and then folding forward in one clean line, heels striking the stage in time with a beat that seemed to move through her rather than around her. The whole room tilted toward her without seeming to notice it was doing it.
Rhys had sat across boardroom tables from men who controlled billions of dollars and watched them lose their nerve the moment real leverage showed up. He knew command when he saw it. His father had spent thirty years teaching him to recognize exactly that kind of control, usually as a warning, usually followed by the same lecture: never let anyone see what you actually want, because the moment they know, they own you. Rhys had built his entire life around that rule.
He hadn’t expected to recognize the same quality here, under lights this cheap, set to music this loud, in a woman his father would consider beneath even acknowledging.
A man two tables over leaned forward and tucked a bill into the edge of her wrap, fingers lingering a beat too long against her hip.
Rhys’s hand tightened around his glass.
Isla didn’t flinch. She angled away with a small, practiced smile, gave the man exactly enough to feel like he’d gotten something, and moved on without losing a single beat of the song. Rhys watched the man sit back, satisfied, oblivious, and felt his jaw lock so hard it ached.
He set the glass down before he could do something stupid with it.
Somewhere behind her, a different man called something up at her, and she laughed, bright and easy, tossing her head back just enough to make his whole table roar with approval. Rhys knew that laugh wasn’t the real one. He’d heard the real one exactly twice, both times across a table with no one else in the room, and this wasn’t it. That didn’t make it easier to watch strangers buy the fake one by the fistful.
A few songs later, a heavier man near the front, clearly a few drinks past good judgment, reached out and closed his hand around her ankle as she passed.
Rhys was half out of his seat before he’d decided to move at all, weight already shifting forward, hand flat against the table the only thing keeping him in it.
He didn’t need to intervene. Isla stepped neatly out of the man’s grip without breaking stride, caught his wrist with a firm, practiced twist that looked almost gentle from a distance, and steered his hand back into his own lap before he’d fully understood what had just happened. She didn’t so much as glance at him again. The whole thing took four seconds and cost her nothing.
Rhys sat back down slowly, jaw still tight.
She didn’t need rescuing. She’d been doing this long before he ever walked into that private room, and she’d clearly gotten very good at it. Knowing that didn’t loosen the grip in his chest even slightly. He wanted to protect her anyway, uselessly, from a seat forty feet away where she hadn’t asked for anything from him at all.
The song shifted, slower now, and her eyes swept the crowd the way they always did during a set, cataloguing the room out of habit.
They found him.
She didn’t stop dancing. Didn’t miss a beat. But something in her expression flickered, quick and unguarded, gone almost before he could be sure he’d seen it at all. Rhys held still, aware suddenly of exactly how exposed it felt to be caught watching her, and didn’t look away.
Neither did she. Not for the two full seconds it took the choreography to carry her attention elsewhere.
It was nothing. A glance, in a room built entirely around being looked at.
It didn’t feel like nothing.
The set drew to a close, the last notes fading into applause, and Isla crossed toward the backstage curtain the way she always did, unhurried, professional, giving nothing away to the room at large.
At the edge of the curtain, she stopped.
She didn’t smile. Didn’t tilt her head, didn’t do any of the small performed things she’d done all night for every other man in the building. She simply looked at him, steady and direct, for one full heartbeat longer than the moment required.
I know you’re here.
Then she turned and disappeared through the curtain, and Rhys sat there with the whole rest of the room fading out around the edges of that look.
When the house lights came back up half a shade brighter, Rhys was still staring at the curtain, his drink gone warm, his hand still faintly aching from how hard he’d gripped the glass.
He caught Denny’s eye across the floor and lifted two fingers, the signal for the private room, and Denny nodded and headed for the booking board without asking any questions Rhys wasn’t ready to answer yet anyway. Rhys watched him go, grateful, not for the first time, that Denny had never once been the type to ask more than the job required.
He’d come here for curiosity.
He was leaving with something considerably harder to put back in its box, and he wasn’t leaving at all, not yet. He stood, straightened his jacket, and made his way toward the curtain at the back, already working to steady himself enough to sit across from her in ten minutes, jealous of men whose names he’d never bother learning, over a woman he had absolutely no right to feel this way about.
He went anyway, jaw still tight, telling himself the whole walk across the floor that he had this under control.
