Chapter 4 UNDER HIS SKIN

By 8:30 the morning has changed its mind about me. Sunlight floods the corner office, my hair is pinned, the ivory silk is pressed, and the woman who smiled at a concrete wall has been filed away where she belongs.

On my desk lies the instrument of war: a leather-bound planner, three months of Liam Knox's life in color-coded ink. I built it at midnight, between my mother's call and the moment I gave up on sleep. Sky blue for media, green for the hospital, gold for sponsors.

No red anywhere. Red is for emergencies, and I don't schedule those.

He arrives at 8:34, four minutes late and freshly showered, in a gray polo and dark trousers someone at the agency must have talked him into. He drops into the chair opposite my desk with the loose ease of a man who has never been uncomfortable in his own body. He has eaten, I notice.

There is color back in his face. I do not mention that I told him to.

"Morning, manager. Get much work done after our little chat?"

"How was media training?" I ask, because the schedule says I should.

"The trainer says I look at a camera like it owes me money."

"Does it?"

"Everything does."

"I reviewed your contract." True, if you count reading the same clause six times. I slide the planner across the desk. "This is your life for the next three months. Every hour is accounted for."

He opens it. His eyebrows climb as the colors accumulate. "What the hell is this?"

"Your image strategy. Mondays and Wednesdays, media training at seven. Tuesdays at noon, you read to children at the hospital, on camera. Thursdays are sponsor luncheons, starting with Apex's CEO. Friday evenings you attend the agency gala."

"Children's hospital. Gala dinners." He turns to Friday and looks up. "Does it come with a date?"

"You'll arrive alone."

"Shame. I clean up well." Then, before I can answer: "I'm a professional hockey player, Scarlett, not a pageant contestant."

"Your ice time is untouched. You train, and then you appear, on time, correctly dressed, and polite."

He laughs, one short, humorless note, and shuts the planner. Leather slaps mahogany. "Polite. Charming. Dance for your society friends so your stock doesn't dip."

"So you stay employable." I keep my voice level. "Apex has given us ninety days. That is twelve weeks of mornings. You have a reputation as an unhinged brawler, and no sponsor in the world signs a liability."

"And what do you get out of it?"

"Another year."

"Another year of what?"

"Of being allowed to do my job." It comes out flatter than I meant, and I watch him hear everything underneath it.

He stands. He doesn't circle the desk. He rests both hands on the back of the chair instead, and the stillness is somehow harder to bear than motion would be. "You don't want to manage me. You want to sand me down into something that photographs well and never says anything true."

"I want to keep you in the league. Everyone in this building wants something from you, Knox. I'm the only one who has told you what."

"You want a leash." He tips his head. "And you can't see it, can you? You talk about my image like weather. Like it just happens to people. Meanwhile you've built a life where nothing can happen to you."

I rise. That's the decision I make, and I want it on the record that I made it: I stand, I step around my chair, and I walk to where he is, because nobody in this building gets to say that to me from the other side of a desk.

"That is none of your business."

"It's what I see."

We are closer than the furniture intended. Close enough that I can see the cut through his eyebrow healing pink, the pulse ticking at his throat, the way his jaw has gone tight not with anger but with something more complicated. The edge of the desk presses against the backs of my thighs, because I didn't leave myself room to retreat. I didn't want any.

"You wear this like a uniform," he says, quieter now. His gaze doesn't leave mine. "The suits. The voice. You think if you control every variable, nobody gets to hurt you again."

It lands like a key in a lock I've changed three times. I feel the hot, awful flush of being read correctly by the one person I never authorized to try.

"I'm trying to save your career," I say.

"You're trying to save yourself." There's no smirk in it, no triumph. Just the sentence, laid between us like a card he'd rather not have played.

My breath isn't steady. I decide that matters less than what I do with it.

"Step back," I say.

He does. At once, without comment, two full steps, until the corner of the desk is between us again. His hands come up, open. "Okay."

The speed of it startles me. No argument, no make me, no testing how far he can lean. A man who has just told me I'm afraid has taken my word on the matter in under a second.

It is more disarming than anything he could have done with his hands.

"Thank you," I say, because it's an agreement and not a surrender. He nods once, the way he must nod to a referee.

"Don't thank me for the minimum." He picks the planner back up. For a moment I think he might throw it. Instead he turns to Tuesday and sighs. "Hospital reading. What book?"

"Whatever the children choose."

"God help me." He tucks it under his arm. "Fine. I'll show up. All of it. Not for you, and not for your father. For the deal."

"That's all I ask."

"It isn't." He says it without cruelty, almost to himself, and goes to the door. "Rule seven's still holding, by the way. In case you were counting."

"I wasn't."

"Sure."

The door clicks shut behind him. I stay where I am, one hand flat on the desk, the carpet still holding the places where he stood. Then I sit, square the contract, and make myself read clause nine.

I read it four times, and it still means exactly what it meant the first.

When my phone chimes, it's my father's assistant: Mr. DuBois would like a status on Knox by noon. I type Day one: compliant, look at the word, and delete it.

On schedule, I write instead, and send it before I can choose a third answer.