The morning sunlight hit the Master Suite with a clarity that felt almost aggressive.
I woke up not to the sound of my cracked phone alarm or the smell of industrial coffee, but to the silence of the Sterling townhouse and the weight of a silk duvet. For a second, I forgot where I was. Then, I shifted, and the memory of the boardroom—the confetti of the ten-million-dollar check, the heat of Reid's hand, the kiss in the elevator—rushed back with enough force to make my head spin.
I sat up, pushing my messy hair out of my face. The other side of the bed was empty. It was cold.
"Rule number two," I whispered to the empty room. "No feelings."
It was a lie. We both knew it. You don't rip up ten million dollars for a man you don't have "feelings" for. You do it for a partner. You do it for someone you've started to see as a home rather than a paycheck.
I pulled on my old Queens Architecture t-shirt and made my way downstairs. I expected to find Reid gone—buried in his office, rebuilding the wreckage his uncle had left behind.
Instead, I found him in the kitchen.
He wasn't wearing a suit. He was in a pair of dark jeans and a plain white t-shirt, standing over the stove with a spatula in his hand. The "Ice King" was currently engaged in a life-or-death struggle with a frying pan.
"Is that... are you making eggs?" I asked, leaning against the doorframe.
Reid jumped, nearly dropping the spatula. He turned, a smudge of flour on his cheek that made my chest tighten in a way it definitely shouldn't have. "Mrs. Gable has the morning off. I thought I'd... contribute."
I walked closer, peering into the pan. "Reid, those aren't eggs. Those are rubberized yellow shingles. You're over-cooking them."
"I followed the instructions on the internet," he muttered, looking genuinely offended. "Heat, oil, eggs. It's a logical process."
"Cooking isn't logic, Sterling. It's intuition." I reached out, gently taking the spatula from his hand. Our fingers brushed, and the spark from the elevator was still there, buzzing under my skin. "Go sit down. Before you burn the house down and void the insurance."
Reid didn't sit. He stayed right where he was, watching me as I deftly seasoned the eggs and pulled them off the heat. The silence was different this morning—not a battle, but a conversation.
"Why didn't you go?" he asked suddenly.
I didn't look up from the plates. "I told you. I don't betray people."
"It was ten million, Maya. You could have taken your mother to Switzerland. You could have built your own architecture firm from the ground up without ever having to answer to someone like me." He stepped closer, his shadow falling over the counter. "Why stay for five million and a man who called you a liability?"
I set the plates down and finally looked at him. Up close, without the suit and the boardroom lights, he looked younger. Vulnerable. "Because five million is what I need to save my mom. Ten million was what I would have needed to save my soul after I sold yours."
I reached up, my thumb grazing the flour on his cheek. "And besides... who else is going to keep you from eating rubber shingles for breakfast?"
Reid didn't laugh. He grabbed my wrist, his thumb pressing into the pulse point that was already betraying me. "The board is in chaos, Maya. Marcus is gone, but the vultures are circling. They're going to be watching us even closer now. They'll want to see us at events. They'll want to see 'marital bliss.'"
"I can do bliss," I said, my voice dropping an octave. "I'm an actress, remember?"
"Is that what yesterday was?" Reid asked, stepping into my personal space until I was backed against the marble counter. "Acting?"
My heart hammered against my ribs. "The script was very well written."
"And this?" he whispered, leaning down, his lips inches from mine. "Is this part of the script, too?"
"This," I breathed, reaching up to tangle my fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, "is the improvised part."
The kiss was slow, tasting of coffee and the quiet promise of a Sunday morning. It wasn't the desperate collision of the elevator; it was a choice. A truce.
When we finally pulled apart, Reid rested his forehead against mine. "The contract ends in ten months, Maya."
"I know."
"If we do this... if we make this real... there's no exit sign. There's no check that can fix it if we break each other."
I looked at him—the billionaire who had everything and the girl who had nothing but her grit. We were a disaster waiting to happen. We were a structural failure in the making.
"I've never been much for exit signs anyway," I said, a small, genuine smile finally reaching my eyes. "I prefer building things that last."
Reid pulled me back into his arms, and for the first time in a long time, the silence in the Sterling townhouse felt like peace.
But as we sat at the table, eating the "intuition" eggs, a phone buzzed on the counter. It was Reid's private line.
He answered it, his expression hardening back into the Ice King mask within seconds.
"When?" he asked, his voice cold. He listened for a moment, then hung up.
"What is it?" I asked, the peace shattering.
"Cassandra," Reid said, looking at me with a look of profound dread. "She didn't go home last night. She went to the hospital."
My stomach dropped. "The hospice? My mom?"
"No," Reid said, his jaw tightening. "She went to a private clinic. She's claiming she was 'distressed' by the events at the boardroom. And she's leaked a story to the New York Post."
He turned the phone toward me. The headline was already trending.
STERLING SCANDAL: The Billionaire's Fiancée and the 'Secret Debt' — Was the Marriage Proposal a Payoff?
Underneath was a photo of the torn ten-million-dollar check on the floor of the boardroom. Someone—likely Marcus's lawyers—had taken a picture before we left.
The world knew about the money. And they were going to turn our "romance" into a crime.
"The war isn't over, Maya," Reid said, his eyes turning back to flint. "It's just moved to the front page."