CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Aria’s POV

I hadn’t expected to see him again so soon.

The second monthly visit had been scheduled for a Tuesday, same as the first, same sign-in protocol, same service schedule from Helen at reception. I had prepared myself in the days leading up to it to be professional and nothing more. And to treat the Beaumont Group Tower as exactly what it was on paper, a contracted job, and Xavier Beaumont as exactly what he was on paper, the building’s owner whose name appeared on a service agreement and nothing else.

The preparation lasted until the elevator doors opened on the third floor and he was standing in the corridor.

He wasn’t waiting, but he was positioned with the self-consciousness of someone who had planned deliberately to be there. He was in a mid-conversation with a woman holding a tablet, pointing at something on the screen she was showing him, entirely absorbed. But the moment the elevator opened he looked up, his expression shifted slightly when he saw me, a small setting, like a room adjusting to a temperature it preferred.

“Ms. Ashford,” he said.

“Mr. Beaumont,” I returned.

The woman with the tablet glanced between us with the polite blankness of someone filing information without commenting on it. Xavier told her something briefly, a dismissal gently delivered. She nodded and moved off down the corridor without looking back.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said.

I was honestly flattered, to be in the eyes of such a man feels foreign to me, but I hesitated politely. “You have a building to run,” I said.

“The building can run itself for twenty minutes,” he said jokingly, falling into step beside me with a little smile on his face.

**********

It became a pattern I hadn’t agreed to and didn’t quite refuse.

Each time I arrived, he will be there, not always on the same floor, but consistently enough that the word coincidence had worn through and stopped being useful. He would be by my side with the unhurried ease of a man who had decided this was simply part of his morning, and we would move through the service areas together while he pointed things out that needed no pointing out and I pretended to find the commentary useful.

We talked and that was the part I hadn’t anticipated. Not the small, managed exchanges of professional courtesy but actual conversation, the kind that moved between subjects without requiring permission.

On one of my work visits, he asked about my work at the accounting firm with genuine curiosity, listened to the answers without the glaze that usually settled over people’s eyes when I described data entry and bookkeeping. He asked about Bryan too, careful at first like he understood the territory was delicate and didn’t want to misread the boundaries, I on the other hand answered in the way I answered everyone who asked about my son, giving enough to be honest without giving everything.

And somewhere around the third month, I have gotten so acquainted to him, that I started feeling so free with him.

Though, I was careful enough not to cross the line. He was a client, a special one at that, and I had too much riding on the Greenfield contract to blur that line carelessly.

“Your family?” I asked him one morning, out of curiosity.

“Three generations,” he said, glancing at the wall. “My great-grandfather started the company. My grandfather built it into what it is now.” A brief pause. “My father was supposed to take it from there.”

The past tense landed heavily.

“Was supposed to,” I repeated.

“Yes, but he died when I was fifteen,” he said calmly. “In a car accident.”

I looked at him. “I’m sorry to hear that”

He glanced at me sideways, a little smile curved at the corner of his lips. “You don’t need to be sorry.”

“I lost my mother at nineteen.” I said. It doesn’t matter how old you are when it happens. What it takes from you cannot be added back.”

He looked at me with a consoling look, his dark eyes twinkled like a star in the dark sky.

“You’re right,” he said. “It can’t be added back.”

We walked the rest of that corridor without talking, and the silence was the most honest moment that had passed between us yet.

***********

It was on the fourth visit that I noticed an elegant young woman. I later learnt her name was Ivanna.

I was finishing the last area on the third floor schedule, Xavier was standing somewhere near the window at the end of the corridor, close enough to hear a conversation made between the both of us.

Ivanna stepped in like she owned the floor.

I noticed her in pieces the way you notice someone who demanded to be noticed. She’s tall, ivory-tone skinned, hair dark and immaculately styled, wearing the kind of dress that communicated wealth through confidence of perfect tailoring. She was beautiful and entirely aware of it. Perfectly in control of what she did with the awareness.

Her eyes swept the corridor and they found Xavier first, warm and immediately proprietary, the look of a woman who had long ago established her claim on her belonging and felt no need to hide the fact.

Then her eyes moved to me briefly, landing me a comprehensive look. Then they moved back to Xavier.

“Baby,” she said, walking toward him with the unhurried grace of someone who had never needed to hurry for anything. “I thought I’d surprise you for lunch.” Her eyes cut to me once again, cooler this time. “I didn’t realize you were busy.”

“This is Aria Ashford, from our facilities contractor.” Xavier said, gesturing toward me.

“Lovely,” Ivanna said, in the tone of someone for whom lovely meant the precise opposite, sweeping her eyes all over me once again.

She looked at me with a smile that had nothing warm in it, the kind that existed purely as social performance and in less than half a second, she returned her full attention to Xavier.

I could see the mild displeasure underneath her face, like that of a fiancée finding her partner in an unexpected conversation with a service contractor. Something that looked, in its briefest and most unguarded form, like the first thread of a suspicion she hadn’t yet decided what to do with.

“Ready for lunch?” she said to Xavier, slipping her hand through his arm with the smooth ease of someone marking her territory without raising her voice.

Xavier’s eyes moved to mine once before he turned to Ivanna with the composure he never fully dropped.

“Give me five minutes,” he said.

Ivanna smiled. “Of course.”

Then her eyes came back to me one more time before she looked away, and what lived in them in that final second was not a question.

It was warning!