Page 26 of Breaking the Ice Queen
She thought about Monday morning, when she would walk into the conference room on the thirty-first floor and Adriana would be there, two coffees on the table, the day’s files already organized, and the space between them would be measured in inches and the inches would not be enough.
She gripped the steering wheel and drove home and did not sleep well, and the reason she did not sleep well was not a problem Dani could help her solve.
10
ADRIANA
Adriana arrived at the conference room at 7:45 on Monday morning, which was fifteen minutes earlier than her already-early standard, and the reason she arrived early was not the case.
The reason was that Sienna’s coffee preference was oat milk, no sugar, and the oat milk that Sienna preferred was from a brand that the firm’s kitchen didn’t stock, and Adriana had brought a carton from home and was now standing in the thirty-first floor kitchenette at 7:45 in the morning making a coffee she could not drink for a woman she should not be thinking about, and she understood that both the behavior and the recognition of it constituted a problem she had not prepared for.
She carried the two coffees to the conference room, set them in their usual positions, hers on the left, Sienna’s on the right, the distance between them approximately eighteen inches, which was the width of the documents they would spread between them and nothing more, and opened her laptop.
She had reviewed the next batch of financial records last night. At home. In her study. At eleven o’clock. The review had taken forty minutes. The additional two hours she had spent sitting in the study afterward had been occupied not by the financial records but by the memory of Sienna’s voice saying, “You’re not the villain of this story,” in a tone so certain it made Adriana want to believe it.
She was looking forward to this morning. She had been looking forward to it since Friday, when Sienna had left the conference room at 7:30 in the evening and the room had immediately felt larger, emptier, and significantly less interesting. Adriana had sat in the empty room for twelve minutes before Andrew appeared in the doorway with his jacket over his arm and his briefcase in his hand.
“You’re still here,” he had said.
“I’m reviewing documents.”
“Your laptop is closed.”
Adriana looked down at it. He had a point.
“I was about to open it.”
Andrew had given her a look that was the conversational equivalent of a raised eyebrow, which he accomplished without raising his eyebrow, and said, “Have a good weekend, Adriana.”
Now it was Monday, and Sienna would arrive at approximately 8:15. She was consistent about her timing, arriving within a five-minute window every morning with her laptop bag over her shoulder and her dark curls loosely gathered and an energy that changed the room’s temperature the moment she walked in.
Adriana opened a new document and began typing notes about the financial records. She typed two paragraphs. She read them back. They were competent, accurate, and completely devoid of the analytical sharpness that usually characterized her work.
She deleted both paragraphs and stared at the blank screen and the cursor blinked with the patient indifference of technology that did not care about the emotional state of its user.
Sienna was 29. Adriana was 44. The age gap was not the problem. Adriana had never found age differences meaningful in themselves. But it was a variable, and Adriana’s mind processed variables the way other people’s minds processed anxieties—exhaustively and with an attention to worst-case scenarios that was professionally useful and personally devastating.
Sienna had been an adversary three weeks ago. She was now an ally, a source, a collaborator on the most legally complex project of Adriana’s career. Any personal involvement would compromise the integrity of the alliance, the documentary, and the case against Burty Howarth. It would also compromise Adriana’s reputation, which was already under strain from the alliance itself.
Sienna was everything Adriana had trained herself not to want. Open where Adriana was guarded, passionate where she was restrained, direct where she was strategic, warm where she was locked tight. Every quality that had made Adriana successful—the control, the discipline, the emotional distance—was exactly the opposite of what Sienna embodied, and the opposition was magnetic, and it made Adriana’s carefully maintained distance feel less like protection and more like imprisonment.
She pressed her palms flat against the conference table and breathed. The surface was cool beneath her hands, solid, real. She counted to three and released the breath and straightened in her chair and resolved, for approximately the fourth time that morning, to treat this situation with the discipline it required.
Fifteen years ago, she had loved someone completely. Had opened herself completely, her fears, her ambitions, the private landscape of her inner life, and had it turned against her in ways she had not imagined possible.
The lesson had been searing and permanent; vulnerability was a liability. Closeness was a weapon waiting to be turned. The only safe position was control, and control required distance.
For fifteen years, the lesson had held. Adriana had dated sparingly, ended things before they could deepen, maintained a romantic life that looked normal from the outside and felt hollow from the inside. She had called this self-protection and sometimes even believed it.
Now she was sitting in a conference room at 7:45 in the morning with oat milk she had bought for someone else, and the fifteen-year lesson was crumbling because of brown eyes and quiet conviction and a woman who saidyou’re not the villainlike she meant it with her whole body.
The door opened. Sienna walked in.
“Morning,” Sienna said. She set her bag on the chair, picked up the coffee, and took a sip without checking what was in it, trust that had been building since the first week and that Adriana found simultaneously warming and terrifying. “You’re here early.”
“I’m always here early.” She straightened the stack of folders beside her laptop.
Sienna dropped into the chair across from her, pulling one knee up.
