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Her laugh is short and humorless. "A heads-up would've been nice."

"Should I remind you that you're seeing someone else?"

She folds her arms. "That isn't the point."

"Then what is the point, Sienna? Because we both have a lot of work to do and I'd like to get back to mine."

She looks at me for a long moment. A crack in the composure—there and gone—the same eyes that I used to think I understood, back when I believed that two people who didn't need anything from each other was the same as two people who had everything.

"I didn't expect this," she says.

Neither did I.

"I didn't ask for your expectations."

"No." Her gaze hardens. "You never do."

Silence settles between us. Familiar and old and not nearly as comfortable as it used to be.

"I know we were casual," she says finally. "I know that. But casual for four years starts to feel like maybe there's a chance the man in question will eventually wake up and realize the obvious."

"The obvious," I repeat.

"That we fit."

On paper, maybe. Two people too busy for intimacy. Two people content with distance. Two people polished enough to make detachment look elegant.

But cold matched with cold doesn't make warmth.

It makes frostbite.

"We didn't fit," I say. "We functioned."

A flicker of hurt crosses her face before she smooths it away. Sienna has always been good at that—the quick recovery, the composed mask sliding back into place. I used to admire it. Now I recognize it for what it is. It's the same thing I do. The same armor. The same refusal to be seen in a moment of weakness.

The difference is that Aria doesn't do that. Aria's face shows everything like she never learned that vulnerability was supposed to be a liability.

"One day you swear you'll never get married, the next… you’re engaged to your assistant. You really are impossible to get a read on," Sienna says softly.

"I never tried to hide that."

"No. You didn't."

She made sense in all the ways that should have mattered. She was intelligent, self-contained, and never asked me for more than I was willing to give. The occasional gala. A night together when it suited us both. And not once in four years did she make me want to lose control.

Not once did I sit in a board meeting half-listening because I was too busy thinking about the last thing she said to me. Not once did I notice the way she held a pen, or the shape of her mouth around a laugh, or whether she took her coffee with sugar.

Aria is different.

I've spent the last six months noticing things about her without meaning to—how she presses the cap of her pen to her lip when she's thinking, how she talks with her hands when she’s nervous or excited, the way she…

And once I started noticing, it didn't stop there.

It became too easy to imagine crossing lines I had no business crossing. Walking out to her desk. Hauling her over my knee for that almond milk stunt. Stripping her down and laying her across the desk to find out exactly how loudly she'd moan my name if I put my mouth between her thighs.

That would have created an entirely different category of problem. The kind HR gets involved in. The kind that forced me to put distance between us before I did something neither of us could take back.

And now she's about to be my wife.