“I didn’t anticipate paparazzi,” Monroe apologized. He could still picture the terror on her face when the lights began to flash. The elevator ride was too quick for the apology she truly deserved. The weight of the future, or lack thereof, was starting to crush him. Aria deserved better than this place. She deserved a future. He could give it to her but wasn’t certain he could be part of it. That would be an important distinction.

“All I could think was my face would be plastered all over different magazines or whatever and someone would realize who I really am. I’m glad you were able to fix it. Now I need to crawl into bed and forget this insane day.”

“What was your read on the two of them? James and Libby West. What did you think?” Monroe asked as the elevator doors popped open, and they made their way back to his room.

“My weird little meter that I measure people by is now of interest to you? I thought it was nonsense and silly.” She looked up at him from under her long fluttering eyelashes, and all of James’s words came flooding back to him. Maybe this was love. Maybe he was screwed.

“Your people-reading voodoo skills might be nonsense. But if they aren’t, I’d be a fool not to at least hear you out.” They moved into the room as though they’d been doing it for months. Aria was easy to be comfortable around. It didn’t feel intrusive or strange to have her in his space. Some women never got the hint it was time for them to go. For Aria, he hoped she never had the inclination to leave.

“My voodoo tells me they’re loyal people. They’re a bit cloudy with love and that honeymoon phase Libby mentioned. They look at each other more than they look at what’s going on around them. I’d say if I had to find a negative, they’re distracted. That can sometimes be a red flag for bad judgement or shortsightedness. It’s a little funny that he thinks he’s the dominant one between them; she has the power.”

“Don’t you all,” Monroe laughed.

“I don’t have any power,” she replied coolly, and it cut at him.

“Aria, you can do more than just—” he began, but she cut him off quickly.

“My voodoo tells me they’re good people. In spite of their research of you, they still came. All that interesting past James was speaking of.” Aria slipped out of her dress and hung it thoughtfully in the closet, handling it with the utmost care.

“You caught that,” Monroe grunted as he kicked off his shoes and started on the buttons of his shirt. Watching Aria stand in her skimpy lacey underwear was driving him mad. But her day had been long, and her mind had been whirling. Even if he wanted to pounce on her, he’d show some restraint. For now. “It’s not as exciting as people make it out to be.”

“I guess I never thought to ask.” Aria shrugged as she took one of his soft cotton undershirts and slipped it over her head. “It’s not like I’m your girlfriend.”

Another calculated fishing expedition for the wise Aria. “Yeah, I did call you that at dinner. I figured it would be easier than explaining the crazy way we actually met.”

“Do I get to hear about this not-as-exciting-as-people-think past of yours?” She sank onto the bed with a deep sigh. She snapped an elastic off her wrist and spun her hair into a beautiful messy bun. “I heard tonight you’re quite the businessman. That’s not how I had you pegged.”

“I’m very unassuming.” Monroe snickered. “That’s how I ended up in the business I’m in. I was nineteen years old, working in a coffee shop. No college plans. No plans at all.”

“You worked in a coffee shop?” Aria burst out in a laugh. “I can’t picture you as a barista. Was there an apron?”

He raced toward the bed, and the look on her face showed she knew he was coming to get her. His tickling fingers started at her knees and had Aria trying to wiggle away. “There was no apron,” he snarled. When she begged for the tickling to stop, he finally obliged. “There was no apron. But it was in the city, the business district, and some very important people passed through there every day. Sometimes when I tell this story, I make it sound like I was always looking for a big opportunity. The truth is I was a punk kid who stumbled onto a conversation and did some eavesdropping.”

“I feel lucky to get the unfiltered version,” Aria teased as she curled up to his side and rested her head on his chest.

“I was bringing a couple of scones over to these two guys in fancy suits, and I heard one of them say something about a getting rid of a guy. I was always looking for a good time, so I made myself look busy bussing some tables next to them. In my mind, I thought maybe they were talking about killing someone. In my defense, my life was boring. I passed the time by saying very little and listening a lot.”

“Were they going to kill someone?” Aria asked, as she circled her finger on his bare chest.

“Not quite. They worked at some huge trading firm. I didn’t know much about that stuff at the time. I figured after a few minutes they were trying to topple the CEO. Closest thing I could compare it to was a mutiny. They were going to get the guy at the top who they deemed incompetent, like mentally.”

“How would they do that?” Aria asked, cooing as he took a few locks of her hair and spun them around his fingers.

“I don’t know really. But I could tell what they were doing wasn’t on the up and up. They never said the CEO was actually mentally incompetent. It was more like they felt they were entitled to more.”

“More?”

“More of what everyone in this business world wants. More money. More power. More titles. Most people I meet, whatever they have is never enough. These guys went on for almost an hour, laying their plans out, assuming the moron barista wouldn’t be smart enough to even comprehend their conversation. I got it all. Every single thing they said. I memorized the information.”

“What could you do with that kind of information?” Aria asked. “If I heard something like that today, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“I started simple.” Monroe shrugged, trying to minimize the enormous task he’d taken on that day. “I called the company. I tried to set up a meeting with the CEO. Looking back, it’s no surprise that went nowhere. It doesn’t work like that. So I had to get creative. The two guys came in a few more times, and I considered blackmailing them. I’d tell them I knew their plan, and if they didn’t pay me I’d expose them. But that wasn’t the right path either.”

“Why?”

“Because even if they paid me,” Monroe explained, his voice quiet and calculated as he chose his words. Lowering his defenses was like cranking open the drawbridge on a castle. One turn at a time, it lowered a bit more leaving him feeling exposed. “They’d just go on and do what they were planning. Who would that help?”

“You.” Aria laughed. “You’d get paid.”

“This was back in the day before I realized self-preservation was paramount to success. I had an idea that if I could get to the CEO and tell him what I knew he’d reward me. I’d kill two birds with one stone. I’d get paid, and he’d be protected. So I had to get creative. I researched and found out he played golf at the same place every Tuesday afternoon.”

“You played golf there and hoped to run into him?” Aria guessed, sounding excited that she’d gotten it figured out.

“I didn’t have a membership or an extra five hundred dollars lying around. Instead I got a job caddying. I knew about golf. I’d golfed some growing up, and I just faked the rest. They were shorthanded, and I got the gig.”

“I’d never have thought to do something like that,” Aria said, tipping her head back and looking at him with admiration. “Did it work?”

“Surprisingly, yes. I didn’t catch him out on the course, but back in the club house I saw him sitting alone drinking and smoking a cigar. He looked lonely. Distracted. I sat down next to him and blurted everything out. I had it planned much differently, but my adrenaline was pumping. I was just a kid. I panicked.”

“I can’t picture you like that. Nineteen. Stuttering around. I bet you were adorable.”

“I don’t know what it was, but Joshua Smith Elliston thought I was at the very least believable. He sat there, leaning in and listening. He never said a word. I sat there two or three minutes after I was done talking, watching him puff on his cigar. Then he looked at me and said, ‘thanks.’ That was it. It was like he was dismissing me. I stood up and started to walk away.”

“Without getting anything in return?” Aria asked, enthralled by the story.

“I turned to him and said I wanted a job. I’d helped him out, and I wanted a job in return. He looked me square in the face and said, ‘You gave away your leverage boy. You told me everything before you asked for anything. There’s no incentive for me to hire you.’ I couldn’t believe it. I’d been an idiot.”

“Ouch,” she groaned, seeming to feel his pain. “I guess you weren’t always so strategic and brilliant.”

“Yeah. But I tipped my head back and puffed out my chest and told him, yes, I had screwed up, but I would only want to work for a man who’d do the right thing anyway. If he couldn’t see that I deserved a job, and that I could be an asset to him, then he wasn’t worth my time.”

“You didn’t,” she gasped, slapping her hand to his chest in disbelief.

“I was always pretty quick on my feet. It worked. He burst out laughing and told me to sit back down. He asked what kind of job I wanted, and I pitched him my idea.”

“Which was?”

“I knew nothing about the finance world at the time. I didn’t deserve any job of consequence in his company, and I would have been setting myself up for failure. But I also didn’t want some entry-level job that would take me nowhere. I told him I’d go undercover in exchange for his mentorship. He could put me wherever he wanted. I’d caddy for people, or bartend at an event. I’d be his eyes and ears. I’d gather information in exchange for him teaching me a marketable skill I could build a future on. It was a win/win.”

“How long did you do that?” Aria asked, wide-eyed. “That was so incredibly brilliant and ballsy.”

“Four years. For four long years, my version of college, I was his apprentice. I saw every single aspect of the business. And in exchange I stayed in the shadows. I listened. I reported. I saved his ass a dozen times.”

“How did you get from there to here? The way Libby was talking about you and your success tonight, you may as well have been Mr. Elliston yourself.”

“At some point,” Monroe said, not realizing how much the memory would gnaw at his mind when he finally let it out of the cage, “the competency issue became real. Maybe there had been hints of it years before, something those two men were trying to exploit. But four years later, it was unavoidably apparent. He was into his seventies by then and suffering from the early stages of dementia. By this time, I was the closest person in his life. He’d brought me onto his executive team.”

“Full circle,” she sighed. “You were going to have to stand there and do the exact thing those two men in the coffee shop were talking about doing years earlier.”

“But I didn’t,” Monroe admitted, shame forming a lump in his throat. “I covered for him. He asked me to, and I did.”

“That’s admirable,” Aria chimed in, squeezing him a little tighter. “It sounds like you cared about him.”

“I did,” Monroe whispered, grateful the room was dark, and she couldn’t see his face. “He was like a father to me. I thought I was helping him, but in the end I destroyed everything.”

“I’m sure you—” Aria began, but he cut her off, not remotely worthy of her pardon for his failures.

“We made it seven months. I was telling him which contracts to sign, which deals to make, and which to avoid. I was running the company as he fell apart. It all came crashing down one day in a meeting. He’d been on some medication that seemed to be helping. He’d been lucid for weeks with only a few spells when he was tired. That morning, I should have seen something was off. When the meeting with the board members began, he lost it. He was confused and furious, yelling and tossing things around. Then suddenly he was terrified. The board of directors launched an investigation and discovered I’d been pulling the strings for months. None of them liked me in the first place. I was this uneducated kid who didn’t deserve all I’d been given. They were probably right.”

“You were trying to help him.”

“Intentions don’t matter. It’s outcome. That’s all that matters. He was immediately released from his responsibilities, escorted from the property like a criminal. When he lost control of the company, he lost his purpose. From that point he faded quickly.”

“Didn’t he have family?”

“Just a step-daughter who lived in Europe. She was young. I wouldn’t have expected her to saddle herself with the responsibility of caring for Joshua.”

“And what happened to you? I don’t expect a bunch of board members who hated you and discovered you’d duped them were eager to keep you employed.”

“Oh hell, no. They tossed me out on my ass and made sure every person of significance in the industry heard what I’d done. The problem with their strategy was when I left, the company folded six months later. They tried to outsource all the customer service and accounting. They cut corners Joshua and I had fought to ensure they couldn’t. It was a poorly executed strategy, and it cost them half of their loyal employees and many of their customers. Without Joshua’s friendly presence and me at the helm, everything crumbled. Nothing sold me quicker to the next company than the idea that they couldn’t survive without me. So I went on to the next company and the next until I was ready to launch a startup of my own.”

“And Mr. Elliston?” Aria asked, back to drawing tiny circles on his chest. “How is he now?”

“Dead,” Monroe forced out. “About three years now. I’ll admit it sent me off the deep end. My company went global. My success skyrocketed. But I knocked quite a few people off the ladder on my way up. The lessons of compassion Elliston taught me, they were gone. I was angry at the world.”

“I have found you to be plenty compassionate,” Aria offered. “I told you all the things I observed when I met you, and I don’t think you were some gifted actor trying to fool me.”

“Business is different. I was strolling down the street with you. Eating a meal. Had we been hammering out a deal you wouldn’t have found me so endearing. Trust me, people don’t. Those early days of undercover work for Joshua stuck with me. I have skills, and in order for them to work, I can’t let emotions into the equation.”

“I understand that.” She sighed. “I tucked those pesky emotion things away a long time ago. I don’t think I’d have made it here this long if I hadn’t. But I can let them out long enough to say thank you for what you did tonight. I hope you don’t get in trouble for smashing that camera.”

“No trouble,” he assured her, and this time he was the one giving her a tighter squeeze. He knew the only real trouble coming was from the way he felt with her lying curled against him. Sex was on his mind. That was a given. You couldn’t have a woman like Aria near and not have it affect you. But tonight as her breaths became slow and deliberate and her eyes fluttered with the approaching burden of sleep, he found it enough to hold her. That was new. That was trouble.