Chapter 6 — The Photoshoot

The magazine cover shoot was scheduled for a Tuesday, in a penthouse studio that overlooked the river, with a team of forty and a photographer who'd shot four presidents.

Evelyn had done covers before. She'd never done a couple cover. She'd never done anything where the assignment was: look at this man like you love him.

The styling team put her in a gown the color of deep water. They put Kaelen in a midnight suit with the collar open—someone in PR had decided "unbuttoned CEO" was the look of the season. Evelyn watched him get styled with the same detached horror she'd once felt watching a glacier calve.

The photographer, a tiny woman with a voice like a whip, was delighted. "Chemistry! Give me chemistry! Mr. Valerius, hand on her waist. Ms. Shaw, look up at him. Like you mean it."

Evelyn looked up at him. Kaelen's hand settled at her waist, exactly on the line between professional and intimate. His thumb was a fraction of an inch inside the boundary.

"Closer," the photographer said. "Tighter. Lean into each other. I want to feel the scandal."

They leaned. Kaelen's chest was a wall of warmth against her shoulder—warmth, she noted numbly, that was somehow still cooler than human.

"Ms. Shaw, smile. No—the small smile. The one that's a lie."

"The one that's a lie is my professional smile," Evelyn said, and the crew laughed, which broke the tension, which made the photographer cackle with delight. "Perfect. That's the one. Hold it."

They held it. Kaelen looked down at her, and in the split second between flashes, something happened that Evelyn couldn't file away: his hand tightened a fraction at her waist, and his eyes went from "acting" to "looking"—like a man who'd spent five years cataloguing a thing from a distance and was now, at last, being allowed to touch it.

The flash died. His hand loosened. The mask came back.

"Again," the photographer said. "And this time, Ms. Shaw, put your hand on his chest. Right here. Like you're checking his heartbeat."

Evelyn's hand came up. His heartbeat, under her palm: slow. Steady. A metronome set to a tempo the human body didn't run.

"Too slow," she murmured, for his ears only. "A hundred years of practice?"

Kaelen looked down at her. "Something like that."

The crew moved around them—lights, reflectors, a stylist fixing a strap. Evelyn's hand stayed on his chest. His hand stayed at her waist. The air between them had turned into a live wire, and neither of them was stepping back from it.

"Look at each other," the photographer ordered. "No, look. You two are supposed to be the scandal of the season. Give me desire, not a merger."

Evelyn looked up at him. She tried to summon her acting face. What she actually summoned, she couldn't say—but something in Kaelen's expression changed. His jaw tightened. His thumb pressed, a bare fraction, into her waist.

"Ms. Shaw." His voice was low, sandpaper-quiet. "Careful."

"Careful of what?" she asked, and heard her own voice come out wrong.

He didn't answer. He looked at her for one long second, and then he stepped back, breaking the contact, and said, to the room: "Break."

The crew scattered. Evelyn stood in the middle of the set, her hand still warm from his chest, and watched him walk to the window and stand there with his back to everyone, hands in his pockets, shoulders locked.

Leah materialized at her elbow. "Sis. You okay?"

"I'm fine." Evelyn said. "Why wouldn't I be fine?"

"Because you're blushing," Leah said, "and your 'professional smile' has been gone for four minutes."

Evelyn touched her own cheek. It was, in fact, hot.

"…Prohibition One," she said faintly. "Do not fall in love."

"Prohibition One is his contract clause too," Leah pointed out. "You two are about to be the first couple in history to break a contract neither of you signed for real."

That night, alone in her apartment, Evelyn did what she'd been avoiding for a week: she opened the file on VH Media Solutions and started digging into its parent company.

She found the ownership chain in two hours. It was clean, opaque, professional—the work of a very good lawyer. And at the end of the chain, filed with a Nevada corporation, sat a single signature on a single document.

A signature she'd seen before. On a contract, forty floors up.

Evelyn stared at the signature for a long time. Then she closed the laptop, lay back on the couch, and stared at the ceiling.

The paparazzo who "accidentally" photographed us. VH Media Solutions. The pass that put a photographer on that mezzanine.

It wasn't Selena's platform pass. It was his.

The scandal that had almost destroyed her career had been built, from the ground up, by the man who signed the contract to "save" it.

She thought about the lighthouse. About the ten-million-dollar auction. About "I control everything… except her."

And she whispered, to the dark ceiling: "Kaelen Valerius. You magnificent liar. What exactly are you trying to win?"

(End of Chapter 6)