Page 1 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

1

CORA

"AV at nine. Florals confirm by ten. Table linens arrive whenever the universe decides to be kind to me."

Nobody answered, because nobody was there yet.

The Ambrose still smelled like sawdust and wet paint the morning I walked in to save my career, which felt about right, since career-saving has never come with flattering overhead lighting.

Three chandeliers hung under dust sheets like ghosts waiting for a reason to haunt the place properly. Scaffolding leaned against the far wall in a stack that looked one sneeze away from collapse. Somewhere above me a single work light buzzed, flickered, and gave up entirely. I stood in the doorway with my bag digging a groove into my shoulder and ran the list out loud, low enough that only the empty room could judge me for it.

That was the problem. AV should have already had risers going up along the east wall, and instead the only sound in the whole cavernous space was my own voice bouncing off plaster and gold leaf like it was auditioning for the part of my last remaining shred of sanity.

I pulled out my phone and refreshed my inbox for the fourth time in six minutes. There were no new messages from the crew and no missed calls, only a folder of vendor confirmations I had already read so many times the words had stopped meaning anything, the way any sentence falls apart if you stare at it long enough. Reading things four times was cheaper than therapy and worked almost as well, most days.

This contract was the biggest my company had ever signed, and I had exactly nine weeks to turn a half-gutted ballroom into the kind of event that got written up in the sections of magazines nobody admits to reading. My mother's signature was on the loan that kept the lights on at my office. My own name was on the line for everything else. I had learned a long time ago that the only cure for that particular kind of fear was motion, so I kept moving, checking angles, picturing where four hundred chairs would eventually sit.

My shoes echoed against the marble floor as I walked the perimeter, running my palm along a stretch of gold molding that would need cleaning before anyone photographed it. Dust caught the light coming through the tall windows and turned the whole room into something almost pretty, if you squinted past the plastic sheeting and the exposed wiring dangling from one corner of the ceiling. I made a note about the wiring, and then about almost everything else, because notes were the only thing standing between me and the specific kind of disaster that ended careers.

Then I saw him.

He was over by the north wall, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hauling a folding table by himself as if it weighed nothing. It did not. I had wrestled with those tables myself and lost more than once. He was broad through the shoulders in a way that would have made an off-the-rack shirt look tailored, and his dark blond hair had gone silver at the temples. He wore no name tag and carried no clipboard, no walkie clipped to a belt, no lanyard, nothing at all that said he belonged to any vendor I had hired and vetted and made sign three separate contracts with.

That meant only one thing. Catering had sent someone new again without briefing him properly, the same way they had done twice before on other jobs, and I had opinions about caterers who sent bodies into a room without paperwork.

I had even stronger opinions about the table itself, which was heading at a determined clip straight toward the exact spot where the dance floor was supposed to go. If there is one hill I will die on, it is that furniture does not belong where four hundred guests are meant to be dancing.

I crossed the room with my spare clipboard already coming off my bag strap.

"Hi. Hey. That table's actually supposed to go against the east wall, not the middle, we're doing risers there for the band." I held the clipboard out like a peace offering nobody had asked for. "I know today's been chaos, I promise it gets better once the rest of the crew actually shows up, but could you grab the round tables from the loading dock while I work out sightlines?"

He looked at the clipboard, then at me. Something moved behind his expression, quick and private, vanishing before I could name it.

"East wall," he said.

His voice was low, even, the kind that did not need volume to fill a room. He set the table down exactly where I had pointed, no argument, no attitude, and took the clipboard from my hand as though he were accepting a job he found quietly entertaining.

"Thank you," I said, already three thoughts ahead in my own head. "Seriously, today has been a disaster and it's barely mid-morning. The last caterer we used organized like it was a personality flaw, everything had to be perfectly symmetrical or the whole crew would just stand there having a collective breakdown, so if you can work with me on layout, I'll make sure you get fed something better than the sad little sandwiches setup crews usually get."

"Symmetrical." He tested the word slowly, like it was something he'd never had a use for.

"To the millimeter. Borderline concerning."

"And you prefer?"

"Functional chaos. Organized enough that nobody dies, loose enough that I'm not having a breakdown over a centerpiece sitting two inches off center."

He looked around the ballroom, at the dust sheets and the scaffolding and the general devastation of a room that had nine weeks to become somewhere four hundred people would wear their best clothes. Something that might have been the start of a smile settled into the corner of his mouth.

"This room isn't winning yet," he said.

"Understatement of the year. Sightlines first, though, before anything else moves. I need to figure out where the head table blocks the stage. I keep standing in different spots and I still can't tell if the quartet's visible from the back corner."

He walked with me to the opposite end of the room without being asked twice, which I appreciated more than I probably should have, since half the crews I had worked with acted insulted by every request. He stood where I told him to stand, moved when I told him to move, and answered every question with a dry precision that made me forget, for a solid stretch of minutes, that I was supposed to be panicking on a professional schedule.

"There," I said, pointing at an invisible line only I could see. "Right there. If the head table's even a foot further left, nobody in the back three rows sees a thing, and then I've got four hundred people staring at the back of somebody's head instead of the ceremony."

"Move it a foot right instead."