The CEO's Contract

Eleven thousand, four hundred and eight dollars. That is the entire operating balance of a company her mother founded thirty-two years ago, and it has to cover payroll next Friday, the rent on the storefront, an insurance premium due in twelve days, and a linen order for a November wedding that was postponed this morning. Indefinitely. The paperweight on the desk is a chipped ceramic blob her mother glazed at twenty-three, the year she started the business. It has sat in the same spot ever since. Viv picked it up this morning without thinking and now it is sweating in her palm while she stares at a screen whose numbers have not changed in twenty minutes. The office phone receiver is wedged between her ear and her shoulder, playing the dial tone of a call she should have made an hour ago. *Still there, Viv?* Maya asks from the doorway, grey-streaked bob tucked behind one ear. The letter that changes everything is signed at the bottom by a name she has to read three times. Lucas Sterling. That Lucas Sterling. He would like to meet at her earliest convenience to discuss the details. There is an ex-fiancée who runs a competing company and may well be at these events. There is a mother with opinions. There is an arrangement that looks straightforward on paper and stops being straightforward somewhere around the second dinner. What follows: a man who hates her shoes on principle, a dinner where she wears the wrong thing deliberately, a lie hidden in the margins of a document, an ex in white, a bottle she did not want opened, a dance that means considerably more than either party intends, and a kiss that costs nothing at all, which is precisely what makes it dangerous. *I watched my mother die while I lied to her about the cost of her treatments.* *I didn't say it back. Not yet. But I kissed him again, and I let myself believe that I could.* What she signed up for was a contract to save a family business. What she learns about the man on the other side of it may permanently change what she believes about why her mother never sold.