Chapter 5 Eleven

Rosa’s dress was red.

Not a subtle red. Not a bordeaux or a wine or any of those sophisticated shades that fashion magazines invented to make bold colors sound more acceptable. It was red the way fire was red, the way stop signs were red, the way your face went red when someone caught you thinking about something you had no business thinking about.

“Absolutely not,” I said, standing in Rosa’s bedroom doorway looking at the dress laid out on her bed like it was daring me.

“It’s the only clean one I have that fits you,” Rosa said from her closet, her voice muffled behind a row of hanging fabric.

“Rosa I’m going to a business meeting. With a billionaire. I cannot show up looking like I’m competing for his attention.”

Rosa emerged from the closet holding a pair of black heels and looked at me with the patience of a woman who had long ago accepted that I was going to argue about everything before eventually doing exactly what she suggested.

“You’re going to a restaurant that has a three month waiting list,” she said. “In a dress that cost me four hundred dollars on a payment plan I’m still finishing. You are going to look like you belong there even if every single cell in your body is telling you that you don’t.” She held out the heels. “Now put these on before I change my mind about lending them.”

I put them on.

The taxi Rosa insisted on calling because she said showing up to Eleven on the subway was not an option dropped me on West 53rd Street at six fifty eight and I sat in the back seat for a moment after it stopped, looking through the window at the restaurant entrance.

It was understated in the way that only truly expensive places could afford to be. No flashy signage. No velvet rope with a bouncer built like a refrigerator. Just a clean black awning with the single word Eleven in small gold letters, and a doorman in a dark suit who stood beside the entrance with his hands clasped behind his back like he had been stationed there since the beginning of time.

I got out of the cab.

The doorman looked at me as I approached and something in his expression shifted almost imperceptibly, that microscopic recalibration that people who worked in places like this did when they were trying to determine whether you belonged or whether you were about to be politely redirected.

“Miss Santos,” I said, before he could speak. “I believe my name is at the door.”

He checked his list. Whatever he found there rearranged his expression completely.

“Of course Miss Santos,” he said, and pulled the door open with a small respectful nod. “Right this way.”

Inside, the restaurant was warm and low lit in the golden unhurried way of places that understood that people who spent this kind of money on a meal needed to feel that time itself had slowed down for them. The ceilings were high. The tables were spaced wide apart from each other the way tables were only ever spaced when the people sitting at them were accustomed to privacy. Soft music moved underneath the quiet hum of conversation without ever announcing itself.

I followed the host through the room and tried very hard to look like I had been inside places like this a hundred times before.

I had not been inside a place like this once before.

We stopped at a table near the far window that looked out over the city lights below, and I looked up from smoothing the front of Rosa’s red dress and found him already watching me from across the table.

Damien Cole in the rain had been striking. Damien Cole in the controlled golden light of Eleven was something else entirely. He was wearing a dark suit with no tie, the collar of his shirt open just enough to suggest that the formality was a choice rather than a requirement, and he was watching me walk toward him with those calm unreadable eyes and an expression that gave away precisely nothing.

He stood when I reached the table.

I had not expected that.

“Miss Santos,” he said.

“Mr. Cole,” I said back, because two could play at the last name game.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, perhaps. The suggestion that somewhere behind all that composure there was a person capable of finding things amusing.

He waited until I sat before he sat back down, and I filed that small detail away without entirely meaning to.

For a long moment neither of us said anything. A server appeared and poured water into crystal glasses and disappeared again with the seamless invisibility that only very well trained staff ever managed.

“You came,” he said finally.

“I said I would,” I answered.

“People say a lot of things.”

I looked at him across the table. “I’m not most people.”

This time the corner of his mouth moved a fraction further. Still not a smile. But closer.

“No,” he said, studying me in that way he had, like he was reading something beneath the surface of everything I said. “I’m beginning to understand that.”

I folded my hands in my lap to stop them from doing anything that would reveal how loudly my heart was currently behaving and looked at him directly because the one thing I had promised myself in the taxi was that I would not spend this evening looking like I was intimidated. Even if I was. Especially because I was.

“You said you had a proposition,” I said. “A professional one.”

“I did.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

He reached beside him and placed a thin folder on the table between us. Cream colored. No logo. He slid it toward me but did not open it.

“I’m hosting a series of private events over the next three months,” he said. “Dinners, galas, a charity auction. The kind of events that require a certain kind of presence beside me.”

I looked at the folder. Then back at him. “A presence.”

“A companion,” he said. “Someone who can hold a conversation, move through a room with ease, and appear convincingly comfortable in environments like this one.”

I stared at him.

“You want to hire me,” I said slowly. “To pretend to be your girlfriend.”

“I want to hire you,” he said, “to attend eight events over twelve weeks. What other people choose to assume about the nature of your presence is their business and not something I intend to correct.”

The city glittered silently through the window beside us. Somewhere in the restaurant a woman laughed softly at something and the sound floated over the music and dissolved.

I looked down at the folder.

“Open it,” he said quietly.

I did.

The number on the first page was not what I expected. It was not close to what I expected. It was so far beyond what I expected that I had to read it twice to make sure I was understanding it correctly, and even after the second reading my brain was refusing to process it as a real thing that existed in the real world and was being offered to a real person who was me.

I raised my eyes to his face.

He was watching me with that same composed expression, patient and still, like a man who had made many offers in many rooms and had learned long ago that the most powerful thing you could do after putting a number on a table was simply to say nothing and wait.

“Why me?” I asked. My voice came out quieter than I intended.

For the first time since I had sat down something shifted behind his eyes. Something real and brief that he pulled back almost immediately, like a curtain moved by wind and then quickly straightened by a careful hand.

“Because you looked at me last night on that pavement,” he said, “like I was a person and not a headline.”

The restaurant hummed softly around us. The city glittered. The number on the page sat between us like a living thing.

And then his phone on the table lit up with a message and he glanced at it and something in his entire body changed. The composure was still there but something underneath it went tight and controlled in a way that had not been there a second before.

He turned the phone face down.

But not before I saw the name on the screen.

One word. A woman’s name. And beneath it, four words in the preview of the message that made absolutely no sense to me in that moment but would make devastating and complete sense very soon.

The four words were:

Tell her the truth.