LOVE ME OR HATE ME

Aria's POV

Eight months.

Eight months of walking through these glass doors every morning telling myself the same lie. That today would be different. That today I would stop feeling what I had been feeling since the very first morning Daniel Cole walked past my desk without looking at me and somehow still managed to take up every single thought I had for the rest of that day.

I was still telling myself that lie.

I set my bag down at my desk and smoothed my skirt before pulling up the morning schedule. The 34th floor of Cole Enterprises was already alive with the quiet focused energy that I had grown to love. Keyboards clicking. Phones humming. The smell of fresh coffee threading through the cool conditioned air. I loved this place. I loved this job. I was also painfully aware that loving this job and loving the man who owned this building were two very different things and I had somehow managed to confuse them completely.

I opened his calendar.

Board debrief. Singapore call. Meridian contract review. Lunch that he would skip unless I reminded him twice. I added my usual note beside the lunch slot the way I always did, the way that had become less of a professional habit and more of something I did because taking care of him had quietly become the most natural thing in my day.

I stared at what I had typed.

Then I deleted it and rewrote it three times before settling on something that sounded less like a woman in love and more like a competent secretary.

The truth was I was both and only one of those things was acceptable here.

I picked up the morning report and stood from my desk. His office door was closed. It was always closed before he arrived. But I crossed the floor toward it anyway because there was always something to check, always a reason to step inside, always some professional justification for standing in the space that smelled like his cologne even when he wasn't in it yet.

I was not proud of this either.

I straightened the files on his desk. Adjusted the blinds two inches. Moved his pen holder one centimeter to the left and then back again. I stood in the middle of that office for a moment longer than I needed to and felt the particular ache that had become so familiar it almost felt like company.

Daniel Cole did not know I existed beyond the boundaries of this job.

And still I waited.

I walked back out into the hallway and that was when I heard it. That easy familiar sound that meant my morning was about to become slightly more complicated.

"Aria."

Marcus Reed was walking toward me from the direction of the finance department, tall and unhurried, with that smile already arranged on his face. The smile that arrived the moment he saw me and never quite left until we parted ways. It was a good smile. Warm and genuine and completely uncomplicated in a way that should have felt like relief.

It did not feel like relief.

"Good morning Marcus," I said, keeping my voice even and my expression professionally pleasant.

He fell into step beside me as I walked back toward my desk. "You look tired," he said, and the concern in his voice was so sincere it almost made me feel guilty.

"I slept fine," I told him.

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true."

He laughed softly and I felt the weight of everything he wasn't saying pressing against the space between us. Marcus Reed had never been difficult to read. He wore his feelings the way he wore his suits, cleanly and without apology. And what he felt about me had been written clearly across every conversation we had shared for the past three months.

I knew what he wanted.

I also knew I could not give it to him.

Not because Marcus was not worthy. He was good and steady and the kind of man that women in books described as husband material without hesitation. Not because the timing was wrong or the circumstances were complicated.

But because my heart had already gone somewhere it had no business going and it had gone there so completely that there was simply no room left for anything else.

I thought about Daniel Cole's office. The way his presence filled every corner of it. The way he sometimes paused in the middle of a sentence and looked at me and I felt it all the way down to my feet.

"I should get back to my desk," I said to Marcus. "He'll be in soon."

Marcus nodded slowly. That particular nod that said he understood more than I was saying. "Of course," he replied. "Have a good morning Aria."

I watched him walk away and then I sat down at my desk and pressed my fingers flat against the cool surface and asked myself the question that had been sitting quietly at the back of my throat for eight long months.

My boss did not see me. Not the way I needed to be seen. Not the way a woman waits to be seen by the one person her heart had chosen without permission.

But must I continue waiting for a man who may never look up, while someone else who already sees me stands right in front of me?

I did not have an answer.

I opened his calendar again instead.

Daniel's POV

I arrived at Cole Enterprises at exactly 10AM.

Not because I was late. I was never late. The CEO. But because I had spent the first two hours of my morning in a meeting across town that could have been an email and I had sat through every unnecessary minute of it with the particular patience of a man who had learned that controlling his expression was sometimes the most powerful thing in the room.

I stepped off the elevator onto the 34th floor and the floor responded the way it always did. Backs straightened. Conversations dropped to appropriate volumes. Eyes found suddenly urgent things to focus on. I had grown used to this. The way a room rearranged itself around my arrival. The way people became their most professional selves the moment they heard my footsteps in the hallway.

I did not find it flattering anymore.

I found it efficient.

I walked toward my office with my jacket folded over one arm and my phone in my hand, scanning the overnight messages from the Singapore team. There was a contract adjustment that needed my attention before noon and two board members who had sent opinions I had not requested about the Meridian deal. I filed both of those away under things I would address with appropriate directness later.

I pushed open the door to the outer office.

She was at her desk.

Aria Blackwood sat with her back straight and her eyes on her screen, fingers moving across her keyboard with that quiet focused energy that I had noticed long before I had allowed myself to admit I was noticing anything at all. She was dressed simply today. Professional. Her hair was pulled back and there was something about the way the morning light from the window landed on her that I chose not to think about for longer than half a second.

I cleared my throat.

"Miss Blackwood."

What happened next was something I had not seen before.

She looked up and she stood, the way she always did when I entered, straightening immediately with that instinctive professionalism that I had come to expect from her. But then she stopped. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes met mine and she simply stood there for a moment that stretched just long enough to become something I could not categorize under normal office behavior.

She forgot to greet me.

Aria Blackwood, who had never once in eight months failed to deliver a good morning with quiet efficiency, stood in front of me and said absolutely nothing.

I looked at her.

I was not a man who missed details. I had built everything I owned on the ability to read a room, read a situation, read the thing underneath the thing that people were trying to hide. It was not a gift. It was a discipline. Sharpened by years of boardrooms and negotiations and one devastating lesson in trusting the wrong person that had cost me everything I had at the time.

So I read her.

And what I saw in Aria's eyes in that unguarded moment was not something I could dismiss as a trick of the light or the imagination of a man who had been alone too long. It was loyalty. It was warmth. It was something that looked dangerously close to the one thing I had decided two years ago that I would never allow myself to receive from anyone again.

I had seen women look at me before.

Every day in this building some version of this happened. Female colleagues who laughed too loudly at things I said that were not jokes. Workers who found unnecessary reasons to appear in my line of sight. It had become background noise. An inconvenience I managed with professional distance and the kind of cold consistency that eventually communicated what words would have made awkward.

I knew I was handsome. I was not blind and I was not foolish. But beauty had stopped meaning anything to me the day I realized it could be used as a weapon. Vivienne had been beautiful. Vivienne had smiled at me the way women smile when they want something and I had been young enough and foolish enough to believe that what she wanted was me.

She had wanted fifty thousand dollars and a comfortable exit.

She had gotten both.

So yes. I knew what it meant when a woman looked at me that way. And I had trained myself to feel nothing about it.

But standing here watching Aria Blackwood, something moved in the back of my chest that I did not immediately have a name for and did not particularly want to find one.

I cleared my throat again.

She blinked. Color rose in her face just slightly and she straightened further if that was even possible.

"Good morning Mr. Cole," she said, her voice composed and professional as if the last thirty seconds had not happened at all. "Your schedule is clear of any new notifications. The Singapore call is confirmed for 11AM and the Meridian files are on your desk."

"Good," I said.

I walked into my office.

I sat down. Opened the Meridian file. Read the same first sentence four times.

I stood and walked back to the hallway toward the boardroom to clear my head and that was when I saw her.

A junior staff member from the third row, carrying a tower of files, walking in my direction. She looked up, saw me, and the files went sideways in her arms. She grabbed at them desperately, her face going the particular shade of red that I had seen too many times on too many faces in this building.

I kept walking.

I shook my head slowly and thought about all these women in this office and the way they looked at me like I was something to be won.

How exactly was this going to end.

Aria's POV

The break room at noon was always the loudest part of the day.

Laughter spilling over lunch containers. Conversations overlapping. The smell of heated food mixing with fresh coffee and the particular energy of people who had been holding their professional faces in place since morning and were finally allowed to exhale. I usually loved this part of the day. The few minutes where the 34th floor stopped being a machine and remembered it was made of human beings.

Today I walked into that noise and felt nothing but the dull familiar ache that had been sitting in my chest since morning.

I had thought about what happened at my desk all day. The way I had stood in front of Daniel Cole and forgotten every word in the English language. The way he had looked at me in that moment with those dark focused eyes that missed absolutely nothing and I had felt completely and terrifyingly exposed. Like every feeling I had spent eight months carefully folding and hiding behind professionalism had chosen that exact moment to rise to the surface and announce itself without my permission.

I had spent the rest of the morning overcompensating. Answering every call before the second ring. Delivering files with military precision. Keeping my eyes on my screen every single time I heard his footsteps near his office door.

It had not helped.

I was pouring coffee at the break room counter when the noise shifted.

Not dramatically. Just a subtle change in the energy of the room. The way conversations slow when something unexpected enters the space. I turned around with my cup in my hand and found Marcus Reed standing in the center of the break room with a bouquet of roses so large and so red that several people had already stopped eating just to look at them.

He was looking directly at me.

My stomach dropped.

"Aria," he said.

His voice was clear and unhurried and loud enough for the entire room to hear and I understood immediately with the particular dread of a woman who has no exit strategy that this was not a private conversation. This was a declaration. Phone screens were already rising. Eyes were already bright with the anticipation of witnessing something they would talk about for weeks.

My mouth went dry.

"Marcus," I said carefully. "What are you doing."

He smiled and it was the most sincere smile I had ever seen on a man about to make my life extraordinarily complicated. He crossed the room toward me slowly and the crowd parted for him the way crowds do when they sense something significant is happening and want the best possible view of it.

He stopped in front of me and held out the roses.

I took them because refusing them in front of forty people felt cruel and I was not a cruel person even when I desperately needed to be.

Then he reached into his jacket pocket and my heart stopped functioning correctly.

"I have watched you for a long time," Marcus said and his voice was steady and genuine and completely serious. "I have watched you work harder than anyone on this floor. I have watched you give everything to this job and still have warmth left over for every person around you. I have never met a woman like you Aria Blackwood and I am not willing to let more time pass without telling you that."

The room was so quiet I could hear my own breathing.

He opened the small box in his hand.

The ring caught the light and several people made sounds that I could not process because my brain had stopped receiving information properly. My eyes went wide and my chest tightened and I looked down at that ring and felt the most overwhelming urge to disappear completely.

I could not say yes.

That truth sat in my body like stone. Solid and immovable and completely indifferent to how good Marcus Reed was or how sincerely he meant every word he had just said. I could not say yes because my heart was not mine to give him. It had not been mine for a long time.

But I could not say no like this. Not here. Not in front of all these cameras and all these watching eyes and all these people who would carry this moment back to every corner of the building before the afternoon was over.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

My eyes moved without my permission. Scanning the room the way they always did when I was overwhelmed and looking for something I could not name out loud. Past the crowd. Past the phones. Past the faces bright with curiosity and excitement.

I was looking for him.

I knew I was looking for him and I could not stop.

And then the room changed again.

The energy shifted the way it always did when Daniel Cole entered a space. Backs straightened automatically. Voices dropped. And the crowd between me and the door parted slowly to reveal my boss standing at the entrance of the break room in his full composed authority, eyes moving across the scene with the quiet efficiency of a man who assessed everything before he responded to anything.

His eyes found mine.

Everything in the room fell completely away.

"Miss Blackwood," Daniel said. His voice was calm and even and final in a way that closed every other sound in the room like a door shutting. "My office. Now."

Marcus straightened slowly. "Sir, I was just"

"I know what you were doing Reed," Daniel said without looking at him. "Miss Blackwood. Now."

Nobody spoke.

I set the roses down on the counter behind me and followed my boss out of that break room with forty pairs of eyes burning into my back and a heart beating so loudly I was certain he could hear it walking beside me.

We entered his office.

He closed the door.

And for two full minutes neither of us said a single word. We simply stood on opposite sides of his desk and looked at each other and the silence between us was so loaded and so heavy and so full of everything we had never said that breathing inside it felt like an act of courage.

His eyes searched mine.

Mine searched his.

Then he spoke.

"Do you love Marcus?"