Trapped In The Wrong Arms

The television had been on for three hours before anyone actually watched it.

That was how it usually went at the warehouse on thursday evenings, or even most evenings generally. Someone would flip it on for noise, for the weather, for the football scores that nobody really cared about, and it would sit in the corner doing its job while the real business of the evening happened around it. Drinks. Laughter. Bants, and lots of loud discussions..

Cade was at the far end of the table with a beer he hadn't touched and a report he was pretending to read. Juno sat across from him, doing something on her tablet that she would describe as winding down and he would describe as working. Two of his logistics coordinators were arguing about something near the window. Someone had ordered food. The warehouse smelled like engine oil and takeaway curry and it smelled, as it always did, exactly like what it was.

His.

He'd built it from a garage and a bad attitude and five years of channelling something he refused to name into something he could actually hold. Mercer Logistics now ran freight across twelve cities. His couriers wore his jackets. His name was on contracts he once wouldn't have been allowed to touch.

He was, by any reasonable measure, exactly where he'd wanted to be.

He picked up his beer. Put it down without drinking.

"You're doing it again," Juno said without looking up from her tablet.

"Doing what."

"The thing where you stare at the table like it owes you money."

"I'm reading."

"You haven't turned the page in forty minutes."

He turned the page. She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and returned to her screen. Five years of working alongside each other had produced a shorthand so efficient it barely needed words. Juno knew when to push and when to leave it. Tonight she was leaving it.

The television changed channels.

One of the coordinators had found the remote and was cycling through different channels. News. A cooking programme. More news. A property show. A gala; some charity event, chandeliers and champagne flutes and women in expensive dresses.....

Cade's eyes moved to the screen before he told them to.

The camera was doing what cameras at these events always did, sweeping the room in slow approval, pausing on recognisable faces, on generous cheekbones and generous donors. A man was at the podium, Silver-templed, and has a commanding aura. He was speaking, the closed captions were off but Cade could read the shape of the speech from the posture alone. Gratitude. Generosity. He looked like a man who wanted to be admired and had arranged the entire evening around making that happen.

Marcus Hale.

Cade knew the name the way you knew weather. Unavoidably. From a distance.

And then the camera found her.

She was standing slightly behind and to the right of her husband. Green dress. Dark hair swept up. Diamonds at her throat