health as if it’s an accessory to a dinner jacket.”

Victoria studied him with that infuriatingly clear gaze of hers.

“People will make assumptions.”

“They always do.”

“And if I go, I’m walking into your world.”

He almost laughed at that.

“No.

You’d be walking into a room full of people who think they own the world.

There’s a difference.”

She said she needed time to think.

He told her to take it.

That same afternoon, Damian met Jonathan Pierce and Richard Hawthorne at the Emerald City Club for tennis, a ritual left over from years when they had all been younger and less honest with themselves.

Jonathan and Richard had inherited their wealth.

Neither had ever needed to build anything with his own hands, but both were experts at moving through expensive rooms as though they had personally invented them.

After the match, they sat in the private lounge with drinks sweating on the table between them.

“Who’s the date for the gala?” Jonathan asked.

“Please say Catherine finally wore you down.”

Damian dried his hands with a towel.

“I’m taking Victoria Hayes.”

Richard stared at him.

“Your assistant?”

“Yes.”

Jonathan laughed outright.

“You cannot be serious.”

Damian’s patience thinned.

“I’m completely serious.”

Richard shook his head with the solemnity of a man delivering wisdom he had not earned.

“Damian, every influential person in the Northwest is going to be there.

That room is built on old money, politics, and donor etiquette.

You don’t bring your assistant to a night like that unless you want people talking for the next year.”

“They talk now,” Damian said.

“Not like this,” Jonathan replied.

“Take Catherine Blackwood.

Her father owns half the commercial real estate in the city, she knows every trustee by first name, and she belongs in that room.”

Damian looked at him for a long moment.

“That is exactly why I’m not taking her.”

Jonathan leaned back.

“Your assistant is probably lovely.

But being intelligent at work doesn’t mean she knows how to handle donors, senators, and women who were trained for these events since birth.”

Richard added, “You’ll spend the whole evening protecting her from embarrassment.”

Damian set down his glass.

“She’s more intelligent than most of the people who will be there, including a few of the ones on the guest list you’re so impressed by.”

Jonathan gave him a knowing smile.

“Intelligence is not the same as class.”

The conversation ended there, but the sentence followed Damian back to his office like a bad smell.

That evening, Victoria stayed late at her desk and tried to convince herself she was considering the invitation rationally.

She reviewed donor summaries.

She answered emails.

She confirmed Monday travel schedules.

None of it kept her mind from circling back to the same question.

Why her?

She opened the company’s annual report and looked at photographs from the previous gala.

Men in tuxedos.

Women in gowns that probably cost more than her rent for a year.

Smiles perfected for magazines.

Wealth polished into performance.

Her phone buzzed with a message from her younger sister, Emma.

How was work? Any billionaire chaos?

Victoria smiled despite herself and typed back: He asked me to attend a gala with him.

Emma called immediately.

“Tell me you said yes,” she said.

“I said I’d think