LOVE ME OR HATE ME

Daniel's POV

I arrived at Cole Enterprises at exactly 10AM.

Not because I was late. I was never late. The CEO. But because I had spent the first two hours of my morning in a meeting across town that could have been an email and I had sat through every unnecessary minute of it with the particular patience of a man who had learned that controlling his expression was sometimes the most powerful thing in the room.

I stepped off the elevator onto the 34th floor and the floor responded the way it always did. Backs straightened. Conversations dropped to appropriate volumes. Eyes found suddenly urgent things to focus on. I had grown used to this. The way a room rearranged itself around my arrival. The way people became their most professional selves the moment they heard my footsteps in the hallway.

I did not find it flattering anymore.

I found it efficient.

I walked toward my office with my jacket folded over one arm and my phone in my hand, scanning the overnight messages from the Singapore team. There was a contract adjustment that needed my attention before noon and two board members who had sent opinions I had not requested about the Meridian deal. I filed both of those away under things I would address with appropriate directness later.

I pushed open the door to the outer office.

She was at her desk.

Aria Blackwood sat with her back straight and her eyes on her screen, fingers moving across her keyboard with that quiet focused energy that I had noticed long before I had allowed myself to admit I was noticing anything at all. She was dressed simply today. Professional. Her hair was pulled back and there was something about the way the morning light from the window landed on her that I chose not to think about for longer than half a second.

I cleared my throat.

"Miss Blackwood."

What happened next was something I had not seen before.

She looked up and she stood, the way she always did when I entered, straightening immediately with that instinctive professionalism that I had come to expect from her. But then she stopped. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes met mine and she simply stood there for a moment that stretched just long enough to become something I could not categorize under normal office behavior.

She forgot to greet me.

Aria Blackwood, who had never once in eight months failed to deliver a good morning with quiet efficiency, stood in front of me and said absolutely nothing.

I looked at her.

I was not a man who missed details. I had built everything I owned on the ability to read a room, read a situation, read the thing underneath the thing that people were trying to hide. It was not a gift. It was a discipline. Sharpened by years of boardrooms and negotiations and one devastating lesson in trusting the wrong person that had cost me everything I had at the time.

So I read her.

And what I saw in Aria's eyes in that unguarded moment was not something I could dismiss as a trick of the light or the imagination of a man who had been alone too long. It was loyalty. It was warmth. It was something that looked dangerously close to the one thing I had decided two years ago that I would never allow myself to receive from anyone again.

I had seen women look at me before.

Every day in this building some version of this happened. Female colleagues who laughed too loudly at things I said that were not jokes. Workers who found unnecessary reasons to appear in my line of sight. It had become background noise. An inconvenience I managed with professional distance and the kind of cold consistency that eventually communicated what words would have made awkward.

I knew I was handsome. I was not blind and I was not foolish. But beauty had stopped meaning anything to me the day I realized it could be used as a weapon. Vivienne had been beautiful. Vivienne had smiled at me the way women smile when they want something and I had been young enough and foolish enough to believe that what she wanted was me.

She had wanted fifty thousand dollars and a comfortable exit.

She had gotten both.

So yes. I knew what it meant when a woman looked at me that way. And I had trained myself to feel nothing about it.

But standing here watching Aria Blackwood, something moved in the back of my chest that I did not immediately have a name for and did not particularly want to find one.

I cleared my throat again.

She blinked. Color rose in her face just slightly and she straightened further if that was even possible.

"Good morning Mr. Cole," she said, her voice composed and professional as if the last thirty seconds had not happened at all. "Your schedule is clear of any new notifications. The Singapore call is confirmed for 11AM and the Meridian files are on your desk."

"Good," I said.

I walked into my office.

I sat down. Opened the Meridian file. Read the same first sentence four times.

I stood and walked back to the hallway toward the boardroom to clear my head and that was when I saw her.

A junior staff member from the third row, carrying a tower of files, walking in my direction. She looked up, saw me, and the files went sideways in her arms. She grabbed at them desperately, her face going the particular shade of red that I had seen too many times on too many faces in this building.

I kept walking.

I shook my head slowly and thought about all these women in this office and the way they looked at me like I was something to be won.

How exactly was this going to end.