Page 33 of Hostile

There was a heartbeat’s worth of silence on Charlie’s end. “You’re going?”

“He wants to discuss options.” I reached for my coffee. “I have options to discuss.”

“Megan—”

“Ten o’clock, Charlie.”

Aldridge Commercial occupied the top three floors of a Midtown high-rise, with a lobby that announced itself immediately—marble floors, high ceilings, the kind of space designed to tell you, before you’d spoken to a single person, exactly how much the company thought of itself.

I’d been inside this building twice before, each time under the cover of a different name. Today I signed in at the security desk as Megan Hale, Hale Capital, and watched the guard’s eyes flick to his screen and back to me with the look of recognition that meant my name had been added to a list.

Good.

Marcus Webb met me at the elevator bank on the forty-fifth floor. He was Wyatt’s CFO, silver-haired and watchful, the kind of man who had seen enough to be cautious about most things. He shook my hand with professional warmth and led me down a corridor lined with framed aerial photographs of Aldridge commercial properties, spanning decades.

I recognized several of them. I’d studied this portfolio the way other people studied scripture.

“Miss Hale.” He pushed open the glass-walled conference room and gestured inside. “Mr. Aldridge will be right with you. Can I get you anything?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

He left me alone in the room, with the city spread out below the windows and the Aldridge name etched discreetly into the glass above the door. I didn’t sit. I stood at the window with my hands loose at my sides, looking at the skyline and running through the numbers one more time in my head, as I always did before a negotiation.

Twenty-two percent of the parent company. Twelve percent of the Charleston project. Board meeting on Thursday. Wyatt has forty-eight hours.

The door opened behind me.

I turned around.

He was dressed differently than at the gala—dark trousers, a blue dress shirt with sleeves rolled to the forearms, no jacket. He looked like a man who had come to work rather than to perform, which was either a deliberate choice or simply who he was when the room was small enough to be honest. Knowing Wyatt, it was both.

He stopped just inside the door.

“You came,” he said.

“You asked.”

Something crossed his face—not quite a smile, not quite not one. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“I always show up when there’s something worth showing up for.” I tilted my head slightly. “You wanted to discuss options.”

He crossed to the conference table but didn’t sit. He just rested his hands on the back of a chair and looked at me across the table. Direct. Steady. The same way he’d always looked at me—like looking was a decision, and he’d made it and wasn’t reconsidering.

It still did the same inconvenient things to my pulse that it always had done.

Irrelevant, I told myself.

“How long?” he asked.

“How long what?”

“How long have you been building the position?”

I held his gaze. “Six years.”

He absorbed it without flinching, as he did most things—quietly, turning it over and looking at all its sides. “Six years,” he repeated. “Before I even took over the company.”

“Long before.”