The Celebrity CEO's Secret Wife

The elevator doors slid open, and Emma's breath caught in her throat.

He stood there—tall, impossibly still, dressed in black that fit him the way expensive things fit people who never had to check a price tag. His eyes were the gray of a sky right before it splits open. When they landed on her, something crackled in the small space between them, quick and wordless.

She didn't know it yet. This man would become her husband.

She had no idea he owned the building she was about to walk into.

Emma stepped inside, keeping her eyes on the numbers above the door instead of on him, though every nerve in her body seemed to know exactly where he was standing. Her fingers tightened around the strap of her bag. Breathe. In for four. Out for four. The trick her therapist taught her at seventeen still worked, mostly.

The man reached past her and pressed 85 without asking.

"Forty-two, please," Emma said, and hated how small her voice sounded.

He glanced at the panel, then at her. Not a long look. Just enough to make her feel catalogued.

"You're new."

"Is it that obvious?"

"Everyone else on this floor looks like they're being marched to their execution." A pause, so brief she almost missed it. "You look curious."

Emma allowed herself a small breath of relief—curious, not terrified, she could work with curious. "Is that a bad thing? In this building?"

"Depends who's watching."

The elevator chimed. Eighty-five. He stepped out without another word, without a name, without so much as a nod, and the doors closed on the space where he'd been standing like nothing had happened at all.

Emma exhaled and caught her own reflection in the brushed steel wall. Flushed cheeks. Wide eyes. Get it together, Sterling. Except she wasn't Sterling here. Not anymore.

She was Emma Ross, intern, badge number 4471, and she had exactly one job: survive long enough inside Vortex Industries to find out what really happened to her father.

The forty-second floor smelled like burnt coffee and ambition. Rows of desks, glass walls, a low hum of phone calls and keyboard clatter that reminded Emma of a beehive built entirely out of Excel spreadsheets. She found her cubicle wedged between a supply closet and a window that looked out over half of Manhattan, and for one second, staring down at the toy-sized taxis crawling along the avenue, she let herself remember why she was here.

Dad didn't launder anything. I know it. I just have to prove it.

Two years since the scandal broke. Two years since Sterling Heritage's stock had gone from legacy luxury empire to punchline on cable news overnight. Two years since her mother stopped sleeping through the night, and Emma had learned to disappear a little—cut her hair, drop her last name, apply for an internship under a fake identity at the one company with the resources and the reach to have actually been involved.

"You must be Ross."

Emma turned. A man in his fifties with tired eyes and a lanyard that said MARCUS – TALENT DEVELOPMENT held out a manila folder like it was a live grenade.

"Marcus, right? Nice to meet you."

"Save the nice for someone with time for it." He wasn't unkind, just efficient, the way people got after twenty years in a building that ran on quarterly earnings. "First assignment. This needs to go to the CEO's office. Eighty-fifth floor. He's got a board call in twenty minutes, so don't dawdle, and for God's sake, don't make small talk."

Emma's stomach dropped an inch. "The CEO?"

"Yeah." Marcus was already turning back to his monitor, half his attention gone. "Damian Blackwood."

The name landed like a dropped glass, shattering something in the quiet part of her mind. Damian. She'd heard it a hundred times in board memos and news clippings, always attached to words like ruthless and visionary and the Ice King of Wall Street, never once attached to a face, because the man was famous for not having his photo taken.

"And Ross?" Marcus added, not looking up. "Don't stare. He hates that."

Emma's mouth had gone dry. "Why would I stare?"

"Because everybody does. First time they see him, anyway." He waved a hand toward the elevator bank, already bored of the conversation. "Go on. Eighty-five. He doesn't like waiting."

Emma stood there for one full second too long, the folder pressed to her chest like a shield, her pulse loud enough that she was sure Marcus could hear it from three feet away.

Tall. Gray eyes. Black suit. Didn't ask which floor because he already knew he owned all of them.

The elevator in her memory replayed itself with sickening clarity—the way he'd looked at her like she was a puzzle he intended to solve before lunch, the low, unbothered certainty in his voice.

You're new.

He'd known. Somehow, in five seconds and twelve floors, he'd already clocked her as someone who didn't belong—and she'd told herself it was nothing, just some executive killing time, when the entire time she'd been standing three feet from the one man in Manhattan she could not, under any circumstances, afford to be noticed by.

Emma's fingers curled around the folder's edge until the paper creased.

If he already saw me—if he's already looking—what are the odds this is just a coincidence?

She didn't believe in coincidences. Not anymore. Not since the day her father's name became a headline.

The elevator doors opened again, waiting.

Eighty-five floors up, the Ice King was expecting a delivery.

He had no idea what he was about to let into his office.

Emma stared at the folder in her hands and felt her stomach fold in on itself.

Through the gap where the seal had loosened, she could see the corner of a page stamped CONFIDENTIAL in red block letters. Beneath it, half-hidden, a name she knew better than her own heartbeat.

Sterling Heritage Group.

Why would Vortex Industries have a file on her family's company? And why was she the one carrying it?

She stood frozen by the supply closet for a full ten seconds, folder pressed flat against her chest like it might combust. Then she made herself walk. One foot. Then the other. You're an intern delivering paperwork. That's all this is.

It wasn't all this was, and she knew it.

The elevator ride to eighty-five felt longer this time, though the numbers climbed at the same speed as before. Emma watched them tick upward and practiced her breathing, in for four, out for four, until the doors opened onto a floor so quiet