Chapter 8: Jonathan - Forced Marriage to the CEO

Jonathan

I don’t know the full scope of what she’s done until I walk through the doors at seven-thirty and stop.

I catch sight of her only once before I lose her again to the crowd, murmuring something to a coordinator, gone before I can cross the distance between us. I take my time getting there instead, letting the room do what she built it to do.

Jessica’s one condition for the reception was that she planned it herself.

She has taken the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s courtyard and turned it into another world. Venetian masks are on practically every face and candlelight is moving across the Renaissance stonework. An orchestra somewhere beyond the courtyard arch, is playing a soothing Renaissance piece that takes you back to an earlier time. The flowers are not a blush of the rainbow, but contained to white and deep gold, which is simple but rich and lush, conveying an understated elegance. They are arranged the way the building itself seems to want them, as if they grew here.

But it is the guest list that stops me. All the expected guests are here. Harlan, the board members, the family names that come attached to any event in my orbit. But as I walk around the room, the numbers don’t add up. It is nearly double the number that attend a gala event. I recognize some people I did not expect: Anchor Point’s staff and many from OncoNova. There are also several people I can only assume are veterans and first responders who probably have never been in a room like this. With that said, in most cases, I cannot tell which man served three tours and which one manages a hedge fund. That is, I realize, exactly the point.

I look across the space and find Gerald near the far wall. He’s one of the few not wearing a mask and the expression on his face is that of a man who has arrived at a card table and discovered the game has changed. Every person he would approach for a strategic conversation is behind a mask. Every introduction he would engineer is impossible. The room gives him nothing to work with.

She did this. She has put four hundred people in the same candlelit room and made them equal. She built this entire world tonight and made it impenetrable to him using candlelight, silk ribbons, masks and the principle that everyone gets the same face. Gerald Shaw wanted a room he could work. She gave him a room where no one has a legible name. That understanding hits with unexpected force. I take the mask I’ve been holding in my hand and put it on.

* * *

Damian Holt, recognizable even behind his mask, materializes at my elbow, already reading the room faster than anyone else in it. There is no man in Boston with more quiet power than him.

“Your wife built something remarkable tonight.”

“She tends to.”

Damian starts to say something, but his attention has snagged on something across the courtyard. I follow his line of sight to a woman near the fountain dressed in a deep red gown and a dark mask against her skin. She looks like a painting come to life.

“Who is she?” he asks.

“I don’t know. But that’s kind of the idea, isn’t it?”

Damian makes a sound that is not quite an answer. He sets his glass on a passing tray without looking at it, straightens his jacket, and moves toward the fountain with the quiet focus of a man who has just made a conscious decision to alter the trajectory of his life. I watch him go. The most socially fluent person in any room in Boston, is undone by a captivating woman in a seductive red dress.

I understand the feeling. I find Jessica near the courtyard arch twenty minutes later.

* * *

She is in a black dress and a black mask with intricate gold around the edges. She sees me and holds my gaze. I feel a fierce pride at how capable and quietly defiant she is.

“He’s going to be furious,” she says with a mischievous grin on her face.

“He already is. He just can’t show it, because he can’t tell which person he’s furious at.”

Her smile fades a little. “I had this concept ready over a year ago. Everything was arranged. My father refused to fund it when he realized it wouldn’t be useful for networking.”

I don’t fill the silence. Instead, I ask, “Dance with me?”

She tilts her head, considering. “All right,” she says.

* * *

The orchestra is playing another velvet-smooth melody. The warmth of her comes through the fabric of her dress. Her hand settles at my shoulder without hesitation. She has stopped watching the room. For the first time all evening she is simply here.

We don’t speak for a while. Instead, I take in the warmth of her hand and the way she moves with me without thinking about time or place. Somewhere behind us a glass clinks; a low laugh rises and fades. None of it reaches me.

Then Gerald Shaw crosses into my peripheral vision, moving towards us with purposeful strides. I feel it before I see it. Her hand tightens slightly at my shoulder, but not enough that anyone else would notice. I turn us, smoothly, so my back is to Gerald’s approach. I’m not confrontational with the move, just enough to keep Gerald away from Jessica’s direct line of sight.

She looks up at me surprised that I quickly shielded her from her father.

“He’s behind you,” she says quietly.

“I know.”

“He’ll just wait.”

“He can do that.”

The song moves into another beautiful, soulful refrain and neither of us misses a beat. I look at her and see the shift: the woman who has been managing a room all evening, just for this song, has put every weight down. I look at her and realize I would step in front of her without thinking twice, that she could mean something far beyond a convenient contract. Somewhere between the courthouse and this courtyard, the terms stopped being the only point.

I pull the ribbon holding her mask, then remove my own. With the ribbons from both masks dangling in my hand, I lean down and kiss her.

My other hand moves from her waist to the curve of her jaw, and she doesn’t pull back or hesitate or step away. She presses into it, just slightly, and makes a sound low in her throat that undoes something I have been holding shut for a long time.

I pull back first. We’re both breathing a little more erratic. Her eyes are open and dark and for once entirely uncomposed.

“That wasn’t in the terms either,” she says.

“No.”

Her father leaves, for once understanding he won’t get Jessica’s time right now.

She looks at me for one unguarded moment, then takes a breath and steps back. “I need to check the arrangements in the east room.”

“Of course.”

I release her and she moves away through the crowd. Then she stops, turns, and crosses back to me in three steps, rises onto her toes, and presses a brief, deliberate kiss to the corner of my mouth. Then she takes her mask back from my hand, steps back and walks away.

I am watching her the whole time when, at the edge of the crowd, she glances back over her shoulder. Her smile has changed from the rehearsed public persona to something else entirely. It’s a little wicked, small knowing grin that promises there is more of her still hidden. She’s still wearing that sinful little grin as she puts her mask back on.

She disappears into the crowd. I stand there for a moment in the middle of the room she built and think that I am in a great deal of trouble.

* * *

A little before midnight, my driver brings the car around.

In the car both our masks are off, and she is looking out the window at the Boston night, the streetlights moving across her face in slow intervals, and I let myself look for longer than I usually allow.

In the car, the air between us has changed. The kiss is part of it, yes, but so is the evening itself. The way we moved through that room together, the way I stepped in front of Gerald without thinking, and the way she came back across the crowd to find me.

There is a tension in the quiet, that comes from anticipation rather than distance. And underneath it something warmer, something that didn’t exist this morning when we stood in a kitchen for coffee before heading out for the day.

She doesn’t speak and neither do I.

I am not thinking about the clause. I am not thinking of business outcomes or any of the eleven things that should be occupying the part of my mind that is instead entirely, unhelpfully full of the sound she made when I kissed her.

The penthouse is dark when we arrive. I am right behind her in the entryway, too close for the space, close enough that when she turns, she is almost against my chest. She looks up at me, and the mask is gone and the room is gone and Gerald is four miles away and there is nothing between us now.