Five years ago, he left me with a single text: “Let’s take some time apart.” Now he’s back—billion-dollar tycoon, empty-handed, begging me to open the door. But I’m no longer the girl who waited. I built my own empire. And this time, the only thing he can offer me is the truth. My name is Summer Blake. I’m thirty-two, single, and I run a crisis PR firm on the top floors of the financial district. If you want the flattering version, I’m a public relations strategist. If you want the truth, I clean up the messes rich people and powerful companies leave behind. That day, I was sitting in a glass conference room high above the city. My client was a fast-rising new energy startup. Their cash chain had snapped. A hostile acquisition was closing in. My job was to keep the public narrative from collapsing and squeeze out the last scraps of leverage they had left. The atmosphere in the room was suffocating. The acquisition team across from us acted like a pack of sharks. They tossed one clause after another onto the table, sharp and merciless. I sat beside my client, flipping through the documents in my hand with an impeccable professional smile. That was part of the job. No matter how badly I wanted to curse every person on the other side of the table, my face still had to look calm and refined. “Our boss will be here shortly. He’ll make the final call himself.” The man across from me checked his watch, every bit as arrogant as his money allowed him to be. That’s how the capital world works. Whoever has the money gets to control the room. The heavy double doors opened. A man walked in surrounded by assistants and senior executives. My hand stopped over the page for half a second. No longer. I turned the page as if nothing had happened and lifted my eyes. My heart, however, had already been seized by an invisible hand. Marcus Holt. What was he doing here? Five years. He looked older now. More composed. Colder. His suit fit him perfectly. He looked like everything he had always been built to become—untouchable, immaculate, high above everyone else. Only now there was something sharper in him. The hard authority of a man used to being obeyed. He was thirty-four now. No longer the young man who had once held me beneath a streetlamp and said in a hoarse voice, “Let’s give each other some space.” Now he was the man in charge of Apex Capital. The man behind this hostile takeover. The one my client had to bow to. The irony was almost funny. He took the main seat and flipped open the file in front of him. Then his gaze moved across the room and collided with mine. I didn’t look away. I met his stare, gave him a polite nod, and smiled at him with the same distant professionalism I would have used on any cold-blooded capitalist I’d never met before. His hand froze over the page. Real shock flashed in his dark eyes. Good. I wanted him shocked. I spent the entire negotiation cornering his team. I used reputation risk as a bargaining chip and forced them to give us three points on the acquisition price. Marcus said almost nothing. He only sat back and watched me. There was too much in his eyes for me to name. Curiosity. Disbelief. Something else I didn’t care to understand. I just wanted the meeting over. At last, the first round of agreement was reached. My client and I stood to shake hands. When it was Marcus’s turn, my client nervously stretched out a hand. “Mr. Holt, thank you for showing mercy.” Marcus didn’t look at him. He looked at me. Then he held out his hand. “Summer,” he said, his voice lower than it had been five years ago, roughened by something that sounded dangerously close to memory. “Long time no see.” I lowered my gaze to his hand. Then I gave him the smallest smile, touched his fingertips for the briefest second, and withdrew. “Mr. Holt, you’re being too polite. Have we met before?” All the blood drained from his face. The rush of satisfaction that hit me was ugly and immediate. Then I turned and walked out without looking back. By the time I got into the elevator, my palms were drenched in sweat. That night, I soaked in the bathtub for an hour and still couldn’t calm down. A financial news push alert popped up on my phone. **Marcus Holt of Apex Capital: the ruthless investor with five scandal-free years and no room for romance?** I laughed coldly and tossed the phone aside. Ruthless investor, my ass. If he had understood any of that five years ago, I wouldn’t have had to claw my own life together from the ground up. Just as I was thinking it, my phone vibrated. An unknown number. I didn’t answer. A text came through instead. Only two words. **I’m sorry.** I stared at the message for a long time. Then deleted it. Blocked the number. Reported it as spam for good measure. That night, lying in bed, I stared at the ceiling and found myself dragged back to another stormy night five years earlier. He had texted me then too. **Let’s take some time apart.** And after that, there had been nothing. I had just closed my eyes when my phone buzzed again. This time it was my client. They had sent over a document and a message. **Summer, this is the post-acquisition PR integration checklist Mr. Holt’s side just sent. It’s unbelievably strict, and they insisted you handle it personally. Let’s start prepping tonight.** I opened the file. It was packed with over a hundred detailed, impossible PR demands. Professional. Precise. And nasty in all the right places. At the very bottom, the file metadata listed the creator’s name. Marcus Holt. I scrolled to the final page. In the notes section, there was one line that didn’t belong in any formal business document. **The oat latte at that café nearby is still worth ordering. You used to like it with less sugar. I don’t know if you still do.**
The next morning I showed up at the office looking like I hadn’t slept, because I hadn’t. My company wasn’t large. It occupied half a floor in a sleek building near the fashion district. Every inch of it had been paid for one ugly project at a time. By me and Sophie Bennett. My college roommate. My only real friend. My business partner. Beautiful, viciously sharp, impossible to fool. Back in college, she had been the one person who never believed Marcus and I would last. She had told me, “That man has too much buried behind his eyes. The water around him is deep, and you don’t know how to swim in deep water.” I hadn’t listened. Eventually, I nearly drowned. That morning, I threw my bag onto my desk and collapsed into my chair. “You look awful,” Sophie said from the break room, handing me a cup of coffee. “So. Which capitalist drained the life out of you this time?” “Don’t ask,” I muttered. “I saw a ghost.” “Male ghost or female ghost?” “Male.” “Hot?” “Hot enough to make me want to twist his head off and kick it down the street.” Sophie sat across from me and looked me over. “Marcus Holt?” I drank my coffee in silence. That was answer enough. “Unbelievable,” she said flatly. “Five years later and he climbs out of your graveyard like this?” I told her about the negotiation. About the way I looked him in the eye and asked if we’d ever met. Sophie slapped her thigh and grinned. “Good. He deserved it.” Then she sobered. “But this isn’t random. He sends you a file, insists you handle the account personally, and starts acting sentimental? He’s after something.” “I don’t care what he’s after,” I said. “It’s a project. I’ll handle it like any other.” Sophie leaned forward. “Summer. Stay away from him.” “I know.” “No, you don’t.” Her tone sharpened. “Don’t let some expired version of your past blow up everything you built over the last five years.” I didn’t answer. Because I remembered those five years too clearly. The days spent cleaning up other people’s disasters. The nights crying into my pillow until I threw up. The months when I could barely pay staff on time. The long, humiliating climb back to a life that belonged to me. By then, my company had a name. I had a home, a car, a reputation. I had built a life so solid I no longer needed anyone. Especially not him. That afternoon, while we were in a team meeting going through the integration checklist, the receptionist knocked and leaned in nervously. “Miss Blake? Mr. Holt from Apex Capital is downstairs. He doesn’t have an appointment, but he says he’ll wait.” The marker slipped in my hand and left a black streak across the whiteboard. I stared at it for a second. Then I said, “Tell him I’m busy.” “He said–” “I said I’m busy.” Her expression tightened. She nodded and left. The entire meeting room went quiet. I took a breath and forced my voice flat. “Why are you all staring? Keep going.” The meeting ended near seven. On my way past reception, I asked casually, “Did he leave?” “About two hours ago,” the receptionist said. I nodded as if it meant nothing. Then I went back into my office, stood by the window, and stared down at the street where his black Maybach was no longer parked. I felt relief. And then, against my will, something colder and hollower right behind it. I told myself to stop being pathetic. Then sent my assistant a message. **Push every meeting next week related to Apex Capital onto the deputy director. Make up whatever reason you want.** I put the phone down facedown and told myself that was the end of it. The next morning, the receptionist texted me before nine. **Something was dropped off for you. No name.** She attached a photo. Two oat lattes. Less sugar. A sticky note. **You still take it light, right?**
For the next few days, Marcus seemed to disappear. The silence should have made things easier. Instead, it only sharpened my temper. I buried myself in a luxury jewelry rebranding project for the North American market. It was high-budget, brutally competitive, and exactly the kind of account that changed a firm’s standing for years. Then one afternoon, in the middle of preparing our final proposal, Sophie walked into my office with a tablet and a look I didn’t like. “Check your email.” There was an anonymous message in the inbox. No subject line. Just an encrypted archive. Inside was a PDF. And inside the PDF was everything. The decision-making preferences of each board member overseeing the bid. Their professional histories. Their favored strategies. Even notes on personal habits and personality weaknesses. On top of that, it contained the rival bidder’s internal pricing floor. It was a cheat sheet. With something like that, our odds of winning would jump by half. At the bottom right corner of the file was a watermark from one of the top commercial intelligence firms in the country. I already knew what my gut was going to tell me. But I called an old contact at that firm anyway. After a little money and pressure, he finally admitted it. “A major client commissioned it directly from the top,” he said. “Who?” “Apex Capital. Marcus Holt.” For a second, all I could hear was blood rushing in my ears. Of course it was him. I felt sick. What did he think I was? Someone who needed him to rig the playing field because I wasn’t capable of winning on my own? Hadn’t he humiliated me enough with that same logic five years ago? Back then, he had called it protecting me. Now he was trying again. I looked at the PDF, then dragged both it and the email into the trash. Then deleted them permanently. Still not enough. Ignoring him felt too generous. So I called my lawyer. “I need a cease-and-desist sent,” I said. “Today.” The next morning, my law firm sent a sharply worded letter to the intelligence company, accusing them of obtaining non-public competitive information by improper means and attempting commercial bribery. I copied nearly every major PR head in the industry on it. Then, before anyone else could frame the story for me, I called Diana, the British executive leading the North American division of the jewelry brand. “Diana, I need to disclose something,” I told her plainly. “We received an anonymous document containing material that could compromise the fairness of the bidding process.” “I can’t verify who sent it or whether every detail inside is accurate. But I can tell you this: my firm will not use non-public material to win your business.” “To make that clear, we’re scrapping every previous version of our pitch and resubmitting a new proposal next week.” She was silent for a long time. Then she laughed softly. “That was the right decision, darling. Brave too. I’m looking forward to your new proposal.” We won the account two weeks later. And I won it clean.
By then, the gossip around what had happened with the anonymous file had already spread through the industry. The intelligence company tried to send its boss to my office to apologize. I didn’t see him. Their panic wasn’t my problem. Later, a friend from inside that same firm called me, nearly in tears. “You have no idea what kind of mess you made. Marcus Holt’s side is trying to pay anything to make this disappear.” “Then let him come talk to me himself.” Not through assistants. Not through money. Him. He sent his executive assistant in the end. The message was polished, professional, and empty. Marcus hoped to speak with me in person and explain the misunderstanding. I replied with two words. **Not available.** When they tried again the following week, I had my own assistant respond. **Miss Blake hopes Mr. Holt can learn to respect both commercial rules and her boundaries.** After that, everything finally went quiet. Too quiet, really. I told myself I had won. I had used his own methods against him and pinned him to the board. So why did it feel like throwing a punch into cotton? Like nothing had landed at all.
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