She Wants My Fortune, Not My Heart

Clause Fourteen

TOM POV

Matthew barks out a laugh, looking around Selene’s office like he’s waiting for an invisible audience to join in.

"You’re going to pull the plug on us?" He shakes his head, adjusting his silk tie with a condescending sigh. "Listen to yourself, man. For five years you’ve been sitting in Vivian’s guest room writing backend patches and boiling soup.

Who the hell do you think you are without her

checkbook?"

"Someone who doesn't need to hide behind a woman to get into a boardroom," I reply evenly.

The smirk vanishes from Matthew’s face. He takes half a step toward me, his shoulders squaring like he wants to swing, before Vivian catches his sleeve.

"Don't waste your breath on him, Matt," Vivian says, though her eyes haven't left mine. Up close, I can see the concealer dabbed hastily over the dark circles under her eyes—and the faint crimson mark on the side of her throat that her trench coat collar keeps slipping off. "Wait for me by the elevator. I have one more thing to say to my husband in private."

Matthew hesitates, shooting me a venomous glare before leaning down to brush his lips against Vivian’s temple—a deliberate, theatrical move meant to make me lose my temper.

I don't even blink. Honestly, watching the two of them together feels like watching two thieves argue over an empty vault.

The moment Matthew and Noah step out into the corridor, the room falls dead silent.

Vivian turns slowly to Selene, looking her up and down with undisguised hostility. "Do you mind giving us the room, Selene? Or do you make a habit of listening in on other people’s marriages?"

Selene doesn't budge from behind her desk. She crosses her ankles, leaning back against the glass edge with her arms folded. "Last I checked, Vivian, you’re standing in my office. And Tom is my business partner. If you have something to say to him, you have sixty seconds before my security team escorts you to the curb."

Vivian’s nostrils flare, her pride stinging at being spoken to like a trespasser. Ignoring Selene, she stalks across the carpet until her heels stop inches from my shoes. She lowers her voice so only I can hear.

"What is wrong with you?" she hisses, her fingers twitching at her side like she wants to grab my lapel the way she always does, before thinking better of it. "I gave you what you wanted last night, Tom! Five years you waited for me, and the second we finally shared a bed, you left your wedding ring on the dresser and blocked my number? Are you trying to humiliate me?"

There it is. Not a single word about love. Just her bruised ego because the dog she kept on a leash for five years bit her hand and walked out the gate.

"You didn't give me anything last night, Vivian," I say quietly, looking down into her furious eyes. "You tried to buy a patent without paying market price. It didn't work."

Her breath catches, a flash of raw panic breaking through her anger. "I’m your wife! Whatever you write belongs to Baudelaire Tech—"

"Check the founding paperwork again," I cut in. "Monroe Systems was transferred to you five years ago. My personal intellectual property never was. Now get out of here before you make yourself look even more desperate than you already do."

Color slams into Vivian’s cheeks. For a second, she looks like she’s going to slap me. Instead, she spins on her heel, her white trench coat flaring behind her as she marches out the door and slams it shut.

In the quiet that follows, the low hum of the building’s air conditioning sounds loud as a jet engine.

Selene lets out a slow breath, uncrossing her arms as she picks up the blue NorthStar Cloud buyout notice Matthew tossed onto her desk. She stares at the stamped seal at the bottom, her thumb rubbing tensely against the edge of the cardstock.

"I hate to give that arrogant prick credit," Selene mutters, tossing the folder down, "but he wasn't bluffing.

NorthStar holds seventy percent of the tier-one nodes in the state, and Cortech holds the other thirty. If Vanguard locked both of them into exclusivity agreements this morning, we can't run the live five-million-user simulation

Apex Global requires for Monday’s tender submission."

"When is the hardware verification deadline?" I ask.

"Five o’clock today," she says, dragging a hand through her loose dark waves. "If we don't file a verified server host by five, our bid gets automatically tossed by Apex Global’s procurement system."

She walks around the desk, stopping a few feet from me. She looks up, and I can see the question sitting right on the tip of her tongue—not about the servers, but about Vivian’s outburst.

After what we did last night.

Selene swallows it back, squaring her shoulders. "I don't care what happened between you and Vivian after you left Mercer’s last night, Tom. That’s your business. My business is winning this tender. Tell me you actually had a plan when you told Matthew you were going to pull the plug on them, and that wasn't just testosterone talking."

"Give me twenty minutes and the password to your server lab," I say, unbuttoning my suit jacket and draping it over the back of a conference chair. "And have your lead engineer meet me downstairs."

Selene arches a brow as I roll my shirt sleeves up to my forearms. "What about NorthStar?"

"Don't worry about NorthStar," I tell her, picking up my phone on the way to the door. "By four-thirty, their CEO is going to be begging to carry your briefcase."

I take the private stairwell between the fourteenth and thirteenth floors instead of the elevator.

The concrete steps echo under my shoes as I pull up an encrypted number that doesn't have a name attached to it

in my contacts. It rings once before clicking open.

"Young Master Monroe," Jayden’s crisp, measured voice comes through the line. "I take it you finally decided to put on the charcoal suit I had tailored for you last autumn?"

"You have too many informants, Jayden," I say, leaning against the cool iron railing on the landing. "I need you to pull the subsidiary lease files for NorthStar Cloud."

"Already on my screen," Jayden replies over the faint clack of a mechanical keyboard. "Actually, NorthStar doesn't own the physical fiber-optic trunk lines they use in the tri-state area. They lease them from Aegis Infrastructure—which Apex Global acquired eighty percent of three years ago."

A cold smile tugs at my mouth. "And what does Aegis Infrastructure’s master lease say about anti-competitive hoarding during an Apex Global tender?"

"Clause Fourteen," Jayden says smoothly, and I can hear the amusement in his voice. "Any sub-lessor engaging in artificial market lockouts to manipulate an Apex Global tender forfeits their tier-one certification immediately, along with a fifty-million-dollar breach penalty."

"Call NorthStar’s president," I say, checking my watch.

"Tell him he has until four o’clock to void Vanguard’s exclusivity buyout and allocate his top-tier nodes to Brooks Systems or Aegis cuts his fiber trunk lines at four-oh-one."

"And if he asks who gave the order?"

"Tell him he doesn't make enough money to know my name," I say, and end the call.

For the next five hours, I don't think about Vivian, Matthew, or Apex Global.

Down in Brooks Systems’ glass-walled server lab, the air is kept at a brisk sixty degrees, smelling faintly of ozone and warm silicon. Selene pulls up a rolling stool right beside mine at the central terminal, her navy dress traded for an oversized gray cable-knit sweater she keeps pushed up to her elbows as we feed Patent 409-X’s core routing tables into her gateway.

She’s fast. Most CEOs I’ve met in the tech sector—Vivian included—couldn't read a raw C++ memory dump if you held a gun to their head. Selene not only reads it, she catches a recursive loop in her own team’s legacy firewall before my compiler even flags it.

"Here," she mutters, leaning across my shoulder to highlight three lines on my left monitor.

Her hair brushes against my forearm, soft as silk, and the warmth of her body cuts right through the chill of the cooling fans. "If we route your packet-recovery protocol through node four, we shave six milliseconds off the handshake."

I glance sideways at her. At this distance, I can see the tiny flecks of amber around her pupils and the way she bites the inside of her lower lip when she’s concentrating.

"You wrote Brooks Systems’ original kernel yourself, didn't you?" I ask quietly.

Selene’s eyes flick to mine, a faint flush rising on her cheekbones before she leans back an inch. "In a studio apartment with a leaking radiator and three maxed-out credit cards. Why? Surprised I’m not just a pretty face in stilettos?"

"No," I say honestly, turning back to the keyboard and typing in her fix. "Just wondering what it’s like to work with someone who actually builds what they put their name on."

Selene goes quiet beside me. When I look back at her, the defensive guard she’s had up since Vivian stormed into her office this morning softens.

"She really did a number on you, didn't she?" Selene murmurs.

"I did it to myself," I say, hitting Enter and watching the simulation metrics turn solid green across all four screens.

"I mistook being useful for being loved. I won't make the same mistake twice."

Before Selene can answer, the heavy security doors at the end of the lab fly open.

Noah practically sprints down the aisle between the server racks, his glasses sliding down his nose. "Ms. Brooks! Mr. Monroe! You need to come up to the lobby right now."

Selene stands up fast, her chair rolling back against the wall. "Is it Matthew again?"

"No," Noah gasps, bracing his hands on his knees to catch his breath. "It’s Arthur Vance—the President of NorthStar Cloud. He’s standing at reception soaking wet from the rain, white as a sheet, and he’s begging to see you.

He just voided Vanguard’s contract in front of the press and said if you don't sign his free server allocation before four-thirty, his entire company is going to be wiped off the map!"

Selene’s jaw drops. Slowly, she turns her head to stare at me, her hazel eyes wide with shock and sudden, sharp suspicion.

"Tom," she whispers. "What the hell did you do?"

Before I can give her an answer, my phone buzzes sharply against the metal desk.

It’s not Jayden.

It’s an automated motion-alert from the hidden security camera built into the smoke detector of my study back at the townhouse—a feed Vivian never knew existed.

I tap the notification, and the live video opens on my screen. Vivian is standing in the center of my study with Matthew Badnor’s arm around her shoulders, watching a locksmith drill straight into the steel door of my wall safe.