CHAPTER 4: The Man Who Never Forgets

Caspian’s POV

I knew her the second I walked through that door.

I had told myself I wouldn't. I had told myself a man doesn't remember one face out of a crowded club, one night out of a hundred forgettable nights, one woman he left before the sun came up. I had told myself a lot of things on the flight over.

But every one of them was a lie.

It was her. The slope of her shoulders. The way she held her chin like the world had tried to take it from her and failed. I had spent weeks trying to drink that night out of my head and here it was, standing at the front of my conference room in a gray suit, about to sell me my own company's strategy.

Anastasia Voss.

I sat down before my legs gave me away because I don't stumble. Not in a boardroom, not anywhere. But the sight of her had reached into my chest and closed a fist around something I didn't know was still beating.

She started her presentation. I heard maybe half of it.

The other half of me was in that dark room again, her hands in my hair, the small sound she made when I pulled her under me. I had left cash on the table like a coward, because leaving money was easier than leaving a number, and a number meant I wanted to see her again, and wanting things is how my mother taught me to lose.

I made myself listen.

And then I couldn't stop listening.

She was good. Not pretty-girl good, not lucky good. Sharp. She tore the market apart slide by slide and rebuilt it in our favor, and she did it with a calm that most men twice her age couldn't fake. Every objection I might have raised, she answered before I opened my mouth.

This is not the woman I left in that bed. That woman had been soft and drunk and breaking. This one was steel in a quiet voice.

"I would be happy to hear the boss's opinion on my proposals," she said.

The room turned to me.

I had been somewhere else entirely. I looked at her, and for one dangerous second I almost said the wrong thing. I almost said her name like I had earned it.

"Implement all of it," I said instead.

She nodded, professional, and moved on.

That was when the doubt set in. She had looked me in the eye twice now and given me nothing. No flush. No flinch. No flicker of I know you. A woman doesn't forget a night like that. So either she was the finest actress I had ever met, or she truly didn't remember my face.

The thought should have hurt.

Instead it spread through me slowly and warm, like a plan forming. Good. That makes everything easier.

I went back to my office and couldn't work.

I sat behind a desk that had closed billion-dollar deals and stared at the wall like a teenager. Did she take the money? I kept circling it. If she took it, she was one kind of woman. If she didn't, she was another, and the second kind was far more dangerous to a man like me.

I was reaching for my coat when the knock came.

She walked in without waiting long, a folder in her hand, and the air changed the way it does before a storm.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said. "I need your signature on these."

I didn't move toward the folder. "That is my secretary's job."

"She stepped away from her desk." Ana crossed the room and set the papers down in front of me. "And I would rather get things done than wait."

Of course you would.

I picked up the pen, but I didn't sign. I looked at her instead. In the club she had been all dim light and want. Here, in the daylight, in that severe gray suit with her hair pinned back, she was something worse. She was real. The kind of beautiful that doesn't wash off in the morning. I let my eyes move over her longer than a man should, and a thought rose up in me, low and sure, about all the ways I could keep her exactly here, in this office, in my life, where I could see her.

She felt it because her chin lifted.

"Is something wrong, sir?"

I held her gaze. This was the moment. One question would tell me everything.

"Perhaps we have met before," I muttered.

I watched her face for the crack. The recognition. The fear or the want or the shame, any of it.

There was nothing.

"None that I know of," she said.

And I couldn't read her. That was the thing that undid me. In ten years of boardrooms and rivals and men trying to take what was mine, I had always been able to read the person across the table. I knew when they lied. I knew when they bluffed. I knew the exact weight of every word before it landed.

Hers told me nothing at all.

Is she pretending? Or is she telling the truth?

I signed the papers without reading them and slid them back. "Thank you, Miss Voss. That will be all."

She left. The door clicked. I sat in the quiet and realized my heart was going like I had run a mile.

The next few days, she lived in my head like a tenant who wouldn't pay rent and wouldn't leave.

I thought about her in meetings I don't remember attending. I thought about her over dinners I didn't taste. I thought about the way she said none that I know of, turning it over like a stone, looking for the lie underneath, and never finding one.

I don't do this. I don't lose nights of sleep over a woman. My mother burned that softness out of me before I was ten years old, with locked doors and long nights and a hand that never stayed still when I came second. I learned the lesson she taught me. Wanting makes you weak. Winning is the only thing that keeps you safe.

But I wanted this.

I wanted to know her. To unfold her one piece at a time until I understood every quiet thing behind those steady eyes. And I have never in my life walked away from something I wanted.

I came into the building the next morning already decided, though I hadn't let myself say it yet.

"Good morning, sir." My secretary fell into step beside me, tablet ready. "Your jet is fueled and waiting. Headquarters confirmed your meetings for the afternoon. The car will take you straight to the airfield."

Headquarters. Another city. My real desk, my real life, three hundred miles from here.

Three hundred miles from her.

"Cancel it," I said.

She stopped walking. "Sir?"

"Cancel the flight. Cancel the meetings. All of them." I kept walking, my voice even, like I was discussing the weather. "I will be running operations from this office until further notice."

"From... here?" She hurried to catch up, lost. "But you have never based yourself out of a satellite branch. Headquarters will need a reason. Everyone will ask why."

I stopped at the glass that looked out over the open floor. Down below, the staff moved between desks, and there, near the far window, a woman in gray bent over her work, a pen tucked behind her ear, unaware that the whole world had just shifted on its hinges for her.

"Tell them the truth," I said. "Tell them I want to get to know my employees."