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I pick it up, open the folder and dial my accountant, Peter.

He picks up on the second ring, which he always does, because Peter has been managing Douglas Corp liquid assets for nine years and has learned that when I call, it isn’t a conversation that benefits from a delay.

“Grayson,” he says.

“Peter,” I say, and I pull the first transfer document toward me and find the signature line. “I need fifty million liquidated by tomorrow morning.”

I sign.

“Personal or corporate?” Peter asks.

“Personal,” I say, moving the first page and finding the second. I sign that one too.

“Designation?” he asks.

“I’ll wire details in the morning,” I say, turning to the third page. The pen moves the way my father’s pen always moved across paper, sure and without hesitation, with the Douglas signature that I’ve been practicing since I was twelve years old and learning what it meant to put your name on something and mean it.

I mean it.

Every page. Every line. I go through the stack without stopping because there is no reason to stop, because I knew I was going to do this the morning Maggie put the papers on the kitchen table and I couldn’t pick up the pen. He has handed the company over to me now. Down the hall with his hand on the back of my head and his voice rougher than it used to be, telling me that love is a blessing and to give it everything, and I am.

“Done,” Peter says, which means the liquidation is as good as complete.

I set the pen back in the tray.

I look at the stack of signed pages in front of me. Douglas Corp is mine.

I sit in his chair for a moment with my hand flat on the signed papers and my phone on the desk and the lamp throwing its yellow light across everything the way it has thrown its yellow light across this desk my entire life, and I think about what he said.

Don’t waste a single moment.

Sienna is not going back to that contract.

Not because I’m buying her. Not because I’m solving her problem the way I solve every problem. But because she sang in a choir room today and cried on the drive home because she remembered why she loved music, and I will not watch the machine eat any more of that. Because my father poured every moment he had into the people he loved and will die with a zero next to the only regret that matters, and I want the same zero.

Because she is the only dream I have left.

23

SIENNA

I’ve been behaving for an hour and a half and that is my absolute limit.

My mind is racing with all the naughty possibilities of us being alone in the middle of a very fancy restaurant and our main course just arrived.

The candles are doing something deeply unfair to Grayson’s jawline, and the wine is doing something equally unfair to my patience. He is sitting across from me in a black suit with the top button of his shirt open like he dressed to make my life difficult, and I’ve been sitting here with my hands in my lap making conversation about the restaurant’s scallop sourcing and the Portland waterfront, and I am done with that.

I slide my foot out of my heel under the table.

His eyes flick up from his wine glass.

“Sienna,” he says.

“What?” I rest my chin in my hand and look at him through my lashes.

His eyes move over me briefly, the black lace catching the candlelight, the gold hoops at my ears, the leather corset, and then come back to my face with the expression of a man exercising a significant amount of self-control.

“Don’t,” he says.