Sebastian's POV
He had made a mistake.
Sebastian knew it by 9 AM, forty minutes after Olivia walked onto his executive floor and the entire atmosphere of the building shifted like something that had been holding its breath finally exhaled.
He had told himself he could handle this. He had spent three months convincing himself that whatever he felt for Olivia Grant was something a disciplined man could manage with enough distance and enough work and enough cold reasoning. He had built walls his entire life. He was very good at walls.
Then she walked into his conference room and started dismantling his company's problems with the calm focused efficiency of someone defusing a bomb and he realized his walls had been built specifically to keep her out and they had never actually worked.
Not once.
Not ever.
He was standing at the back of the conference room pretending to review documents on his tablet while Olivia stood at the head of his table and questioned his senior operations director about internal communication protocols.
His operations director was a man named Gordon Reeves who had twenty years of industry experience and who Sebastian had watched make grown men uncomfortable in negotiations without raising his voice once.
Olivia had him leaning back in his chair within six minutes.
"Walk me through the client notification process," she said. Not asked. Said. Like the answer was already somewhere in the room and she just needed Gordon to locate it.
"We notify account managers first, then they relay to clients within twenty four hours."
"So there's a gap."
Gordon frowned. "A standard gap, yes. Industry practice."
"A gap is a gap regardless of what the industry calls it." She made a note without looking up. "Who has access to account manager communications during that window?"
"Department heads. Legal. Senior board."
"That's fourteen people minimum with access to information before clients receive it." She looked up then, directly at Gordon, and Gordon straightened slightly like a student caught not paying attention. "Fourteen people is not a tight circle. Fourteen people is a crowd."
Sebastian watched Gordon open his mouth and close it again.
He had sat in rooms with Gordon for four years. He had never once seen the man lose a verbal exchange.
This was the thing about Olivia that people who had never worked with her always underestimated. She was not loud. She was not aggressive. She did not perform confidence the way so many people in his world did, all volume and posture and rehearsed authority. She was simply so completely certain of what she was doing that uncertainty didn't have space to exist anywhere near her.
It was the most attractive thing he had ever seen in his life and it was currently destroying his ability to function.
He looked back at his tablet.
He had read the same paragraph six times.
By midmorning Olivia had moved through three departments and left each one slightly reorganized in ways Sebastian could already see would matter. She identified a redundancy in the financial reporting chain that his team had flagged eighteen months ago and never fixed. She found a contract clause with a mid-tier client that, properly renegotiated, would lock that client in for two more years regardless of the current crisis.
She did all of this without asking him a single question.
During their marriage she used to ask him questions constantly. About his day. About his thoughts. About whether he wanted dinner at home or out. He had answered briefly and moved on because that was what he did, he moved on, he kept distance, he stayed in control.
Now she didn't ask him anything and somehow that was worse.
She was treating him like a client. Politely. Professionally. With the particular careful courtesy you used with someone you needed to cooperate with rather than someone you actually knew.
He had wanted professional distance. He had agreed to it. He had thought it would be easier.
He had been spectacularly wrong.
They broke for lunch and Olivia stayed at the conference table with a sandwich David's assistant had brought up, working through printed reports while everyone else left. Sebastian should have left too. He had three calls to make and his own crisis to manage from his private office.
He got coffee instead and came back.
She didn't look up when he came in. "Your CFO is hiding something."
Sebastian stopped. "Which CFO."
"The only one you have. Harrison." She turned a page. "He answered every question I asked directly except two. When I asked about the timeline of the debt disclosure and when I asked who first flagged the anomaly internally, he redirected both times. Smooth enough that most people wouldn't catch it but not smooth enough."
Sebastian felt something cold move through him. Marcus Webb. The name surfaced in his mind like something breaking through ice. Harrison had been with the company for six years. His father had hired him.
His father had hired a lot of people.
"I'll look into it," he said carefully.
"Don't look into it," Olivia said. "Not yet. If he's feeding information somewhere, alerting him that you're suspicious just closes the channel. Let him keep talking to whoever he's talking to while I trace the communication patterns."
Sebastian stared at her. "You can do that."
"David can do that. I just need three days of Harrison's internal email access and a reason to be in the system that doesn't raise flags." She finally looked up at him. "Can you manufacture a reason?"
"Yes."
"Then we're good." She went back to her report.
Sebastian sat down across from her because his legs needed a moment. This woman, this same woman who had sat across from him at quiet dinners for five years watching him with sad careful eyes while he kept every wall in place, was sitting in his conference room routing out his traitors and protecting his company and she was doing it because she was being paid to and that was the only reason.
He needed to remember that.
He was not remembering it particularly well.
He got through the afternoon by staying in motion. Calls. Meetings. A tense video conference with two investors his team had been managing carefully for days. He kept one eye on the conference room where Olivia was working and told himself he was monitoring her progress.
He was not monitoring her progress.
At four thirty she stood and stretched and pulled her hair up with a pen, a habit she had always had, reaching for whatever was nearby when she needed both hands, and Sebastian was mid-sentence in a conversation with his assistant when he stopped talking completely.
His assistant waited.
Sebastian said he would finish the thought in a minute and walked to the window and stood there until he had his face under control again.
When he turned back, the conference room was visible through the glass wall and Olivia was at the whiteboard writing out a communication chain diagram, her back to him, completely absorbed, not performing or presenting, just working, and she was so completely herself in that moment that it hit him like something physical.
He had missed her every single day for three months.
Not the idea of her. Not the convenience of having her around. Her. The specific way she thought. The specific way she worked. The specific way she made a room feel like something was actually happening in it.
He had divorced her to protect her and spent ninety days realizing that protection without presence was just another word for loss.
He was still at the window when she turned around from the whiteboard and their eyes met through the glass.
He didn't look away fast enough. He knew he didn't because he saw the exact moment she registered that he had been watching her, not just glancing, watching, and for one unguarded second something moved across her face that wasn't professional and wasn't distant and wasn't the careful composure she had been wearing all day like armor.
Then she looked down at her whiteboard marker.
Then she turned back to the board.
Sebastian walked back to his desk and sat down and put his hands flat on the surface and breathed.
She had felt it too. Whatever that moment was, she had felt it. He was certain. He had spent five years learning to read the small things she tried not to show and that was not a nothing look. That was a woman reminding herself of something important.
Which meant she was fighting the same thing he was.
Which meant he was in a great deal more trouble than he had calculated when he showed up at her office door looking for a business solution.
His phone buzzed. A message from Rachel.
How's day one?
He typed back. Complicated.
I told you, Rachel responded immediately, followed by a small emoji that was laughing at him.
He set the phone down.
From his desk he could see Olivia through the conference room glass, back at the table now, head bent over her work. She had been in his building for eight hours. She had done more in eight hours than his entire crisis team had managed in ten days.
And in eight hours she had looked at him exactly once.
He was going to need a much better plan for the next eighty two days.
His computer pinged with an internal alert from the security system. A door access log, flagged automatically for after-hours entry in the server room.
The timestamp was from last night. After midnight.
The access card that opened the door belonged to one person.
Harrison.
Sebastian picked up his phone. He did not call security. He did not call his legal team. He called the one number he trusted completely right now even though he had no right to trust anything about this situation.
Olivia picked up on the second ring.
"Harrison accessed the server room last night," Sebastian said quietly. "After midnight. Alone."
A pause. He could hear her thinking.
"Don't touch anything," she said. "Don't let him know. Tomorrow morning act completely normal." Another pause. "And Sebastian?"
"Yes."
"Whatever he took out of that server room, I'm going to find it." Her voice was steady and certain and it settled something in his chest that had been unsteady all day. "We have him."
She hung up.
Sebastian looked through the glass wall at the empty conference room. Her whiteboard diagram was still there, neat and precise, already three steps ahead of everyone else in the building.
He had made a mistake bringing her back into his world.
He just wasn't sure anymore that it was the kind of mistake he wanted to fix.