LOVE ME OR HATE ME

Daniel's POV

The question left my mouth before I had fully decided to ask it.

I was not a man who spoke before thinking. Every word I had ever used in a boardroom, in a negotiation, in any room that mattered had been measured and deliberate and chosen with the precision of someone who understood that words were not just sounds. They were commitments. They were revelations. They were the kind of thing that once released could not be recalled no matter how badly you needed them back.

And yet I had just asked Blackwood if she loved another man.

In my own office.

With the door closed.

I stood behind my desk and kept my face completely still the way I had trained myself to do in every situation that threatened to show me for what I actually was underneath all of this. Composed. Unreachable. The man who had rebuilt himself from nothing and made sure the foundation this time was concrete instead of trust.

But my heart was not behaving like concrete right now.

My heart was doing something I had not given it permission to do. It was waiting. Suspended somewhere between my last breath and the next one, holding itself in complete stillness for the answer of a woman who did not know that her response was about to determine something I had not even admitted to myself yet.

Aria stood across from me and for a moment she simply looked at me.

I watched her face move through something. Not panic. Not embarrassment. Something quieter and more complicated than either of those things. Her hands were still at her sides and her chin was lifted with that particular dignity she carried everywhere and her eyes were doing that thing again. That thing they had done this morning at her desk when she had forgotten to greet me and I had stood there reading everything she was trying so hard not to show.

She was showing it again now.

All of it.

"No," she said.

One word.

She said it simply and clearly and without hesitation and it landed in the center of my chest with a weight that I felt in places I had specifically closed off for the past two years.

No.

She did not love Marcus Reed.

I held her gaze for a moment longer than I should have. I was aware of this. I was aware of every single thing happening in this office right now including the fact that the air between us had shifted into something that had nothing to do with Singapore contracts or Meridian files or anything that justified the two of us standing this close to each other with the door closed.

I thought about Vivienne.

I always thought about Vivienne in moments like this. It was automatic. Involuntary. The way a body flinches from heat before the mind has time to process the danger. Vivienne had stood in a room very much like this one two years ago and looked at me with eyes that I had believed completely and she had said things I had written into my future and built plans around and she had meant none of it. Not one single word.

Fifty thousand dollars.

A pregnancy that had never existed.

A bankruptcy that had stripped me down to nothing but fury and the stubborn refusal to stay down.

I had not let anyone close since. I had not allowed anyone to matter since. I had built Cole Enterprises back into something that made people lower their voices when they said my name and I had done it without love and without trust and without ever once making the mistake of believing that a woman's eyes told the truth.

But Aria Blackwood had been sitting outside my office for eight months.

And I had been watching her without meaning to.

The coffee that was always exactly right. The notes she left beside my lunch slot that I read every single time even when I pretended they were unnecessary. The way she handled every difficult situation with a quiet steadiness that made the entire floor function better simply because she was in it. The way she had never once tried to make herself noticed by me. She had simply shown up. Every single day. Consistently and completely.

And that consistency had done something to me that I did not have a clean word for.

I pulled back.

I straightened and reached for the file on my desk and opened it to a page I was not reading and let my voice return to the register I used when I needed to close a conversation that was becoming something I could not afford.

"That will be all Miss Blackwood," I said. "You can return to your desk."

She did not move immediately.

I kept my eyes on the file.

"Mr. Cole," she said and her voice was softer than her professional tone. Lower. Like she was reaching for something with it. "What just happened in there. In the break room. I want to make sure it does not affect my position here or my..."

"It won't," I said. Clean and simple and final.

"Are you sure?"

I looked up then because she deserved that much.

"It's okay Aria," I said.

Something moved across her face. Relief maybe. Or something more fragile than relief. She nodded once and then she turned and walked to the door and opened it and left.

I watched the door close behind her.

I set the file down.

I stood in the complete silence of my office and stared at the door she had just walked through and felt the truth of something settle over me with the particular heaviness of a thing that has been true for a long time but has only just been acknowledged.

It's okay.

That was what I had told her.

I pressed two fingers against my desk and looked at nothing.

That was not enough.