One Night With The Ruthless CEO

The morning rush of the subway carried Caitlin away from the night before like a current pulling debris out to sea.

The press of anonymous bodies was a strange comfort.

The train spat her out in Midtown Manhattan. She walked the final block to her design firm, a small, struggling company housed in a nondescript office building. After clocking in, she sank into her cubicle chair and powered on her computer.

Her department manager, Walter Price, clapped his hands loudly to get everyone's attention. "Alright, people, listen up! We're bidding for the new Zenith Corporation development project. This is the big one."

He strode over to Caitlin's desk and dropped a thick binder with a heavy thud. The cover read: Project Proposal: Zenith Tower.

"Knight," he barked, not even bothering to look at her. "Get this over to Zenith headquarters. Now."

Caitlin sighed. It was a glorified messenger job—the kind of task handed to the junior designer when no one else wanted to deal with traffic and receptionists. But she couldn't refuse. Not with her mother's bills piling up and her credit card hovering near its limit. She packed the binder into her bag and left the office.

On the street, she hailed a yellow cab and gave the driver the address for the Zenith Tower.

The taxi pulled up in front of a gleaming skyscraper that pierced the clouds. It was a monument of glass and steel, exuding power. After paying the driver, she pushed through the revolving glass doors into a lobby that was vast, white, and cold.

She explained her purpose to the receptionist, who directed her to wait on a low leather sofa in the visitor's area. Caitlin sat, nervously flipping through the proposal, checking for any mistakes.

A nervous flutter stirred in her chest. She had told herself that Isaac Harrell was just a coincidence—a common name, a different man. But as she sat in the shadow of this towering glass monolith, the hope that she had been wrong began to feel fragile and thin.

A soft ding announced the arrival of a private elevator. The doors slid open, and a group of executives in expensive suits emerged, all of them clustered around one man.

Caitlin looked up.

Her breath caught in her throat. The man at the center of the storm, the one everyone was deferring to, was Isaac.

He wore a deep blue, double-breasted suit, his expression impassive as he listened to a subordinate's report. He looked like he owned the building. Maybe he did.

An involuntary instinct made her stand up, the heavy binder nearly slipping from her grasp.

His gaze swept across the lobby, a king surveying his domain. For a split second, it landed on her. There was no recognition. No flicker of warmth. Nothing. His eyes, the same gray eyes that had looked at her with such intensity just hours before, were now as cold and hard as the marble floor.

He looked right through her, as if she were a piece of furniture—or worse, a mistake he had already decided to forget. He continued walking, his entourage trailing in his wake as they swept out the front doors.

Caitlin sank back onto the sofa. A cold, tight fist squeezed her heart. The chasm between his world and hers had never felt so vast, so brutally real.