Sweet Romance15 min read
The Pocket Watch and the Spy: My Contract with a Cold CEO
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I remember the first time I walked into Geoffrey Calhoun's life like a storm that smelled faintly of citrus and ink.
"Geoffrey?" I said, sliding into the VIP alcove as if I belonged there, smiling the way I was trained to smile.
He glanced up from his coffee, expression flat as slate. "Pleasure."
"Pleasure," I echoed, because manners are props and I can use props. "I'm Mia Wallin."
"Nice to meet you," he said, and his voice could have turned a room colder. He stirred his cup without looking at me. He was exactly as the papers described: the young, immaculate CEO, a man whose face was a brand.
"Don't you have somewhere else to be?" a thin voice snapped from my left. Genesis Clement, all prim bows and twin ponytails, sniffed like she could smell textiles.
"This is my table," Geoffrey said, closing his eyes for a heartbeat.
"Oh, please," Genesis said, holding up her nose. "He wouldn't want someone like you. He needs someone pure."
I laughed softly. "And what precisely is 'someone like me' to you?"
Genesis flared her nostrils, hand on hip. "A man like Geoffrey deserves a woman who makes him—"
"—less lonely?" I supplied, eyes bright.
Geoffrey's eyebrow twitched. "I'd prefer someone clean," he said.
"Clean?" Genesis's voice dropped to a whisper that carried like a spark. "You look like a—"
"Enough," Geoffrey cut in, decisive. He set his coffee down and stood. "Mia, I'm sorry. This isn't working."
I let him say it. The room turned its head, hungry for spectacle. Genesis smiled like she'd won. People love that.
"Wait," I said, casually. "Open my bag."
She frowned and obliged, not because her curiosity was pure but because she had to be seen taking a victory lap. She found a neatly folded receipt—Hermès, limited edition—and her face shifted from smirk to something else.
"What the—this is real." She blinked, then louder: "Fake!"
"You can check it," I said, calm as a pond. "You're quick with labels."
Her fingers trembled. The receipt was printed correctly, an embossed card tucked inside. For a moment she wanted to flee. The dining room watched, mouths parted, the kind of little crowd that builds myths from crumbs. Geoffrey looked at the receipt with annoyance rubbing at his jaw.
"Excuse me," he said, polite but cold, and left as if he'd been spat out of the place. Genesis hissed at me—"You tramp!"—and people turned their phones to capture the retreating figure.
I watched him go and the smile in my chest flattened. I crumpled the photo of him, the one I'd slipped into my wallet earlier, until it hurt my palm.
"A hunt isn't a love story," I told the crushed paper. "He's prey, nothing more."
"You're dramatic," said a small voice. An old man in a silk robe was watching from across the room. "Give the girl a break. She paints quite well."
"Mr. Calhoun?" Geoffrey's grandfather—Landon Dorsey—had a fondness for ink and oddities. I bowed as politely as the situation demanded and let the old man guide me toward the estate.
"You must help me with my calligraphy," Landon said, beaming. "I've been practicing."
"Of course." I made a show of being pliant, a dutiful companion for a beloved elder. They never suspect the hands that offer comfort.
Genesis tried a follow-up assault at the house, but she met a wall.
"Out," she sputtered, then had the sense to stop when Landon took her side, disputed like an amused judge.
"Children's tempers," Landon chuckled. "You should learn patience."
I kept to the routine: practice calligraphy, pour tea, say the right words at the right volume. But there were edges to the calm.
"Why are you here?" Geoffrey demanded when he cornered me in the study.
"You told your grandfather I could help," I said. "I like ink."
"You lied."
"I told a story."
He snorted. "Marriage is beneath me." He sank into a chair like a blade folding away. "I have no intention of marrying."
"That won't stop me," I said, and the words carried the weight of a promise built for reasons other than heart.
He watched me, suddenly interested, and then annoyed. "If you want anything, it comes at a cost."
"Name it," I said.
He threw a copy of The Book of Songs at me. "Copy it," he said. "Neat, exact, over and over."
"You're asking me to be your maid?" I smiled. "How quaint."
He didn't smile back. "Write. And then we'll talk about what you want."
I sat down and began to copy. I don't copy for art—I copy to learn, to see the joints of emotion a man hides behind his jaw. After hours of ink and the staccato scratching of my pen, Geoffrey came and opened the notebook.
"You didn't look at it," he accused.
"Because I already know it," I said. "Now let me go."
"Not yet," he said. "Rewrite."
I wrote, again and again, and in a small way the walls between us became less imaginary.
One night, when he pushed a photo frame and glass shattered, we fell into one another's space. He hit me with the force of a man who dislikes disorder. He trapped me. And I let him.
"You wanted to climb into my bed," he muttered later, checking the blood on his fingers.
"Perhaps I did," I said. "Perhaps I wanted to sleep closer to the watch."
He didn't understand. He never would if I did not tell him.
"Do you know what you stole?" I asked him once, when he was drunk enough to be honest and sober enough to care. "It's not a watch. It's the key."
"What key?"
"The one that opens the Goblin vault."
He tightened. "Don't you dare—"
"I dare," I said. "I will marry you, if that's what it takes."
"To take what?" he snapped.
"Everything you have," I said. "Your secrets, your pride, your armor."
He laughed like a blade dragged across glass and then let it go. "You could never do it."
Then, mercifully, he fell ill.
"You're ridiculous," he said when I sat up beside his bed, whispering remedies. "Get out of here."
"You're feverish," I said. "You talk like a broken radio."
He coughed. "Don't pretend your touch means anything."
"You're wrong," I said, soft, and for the first time his expression broke.
When the household tragedy of a near-fainting princess and a jealous younger woman played out on the balcony—Genesis, halfway to catastrophe—I caught her fall.
"Help!" she cried, voice high.
"Don't be dramatic," I said, because drama is the first weapon of small-hearted girls.
I set her bone. "Stop trying to tarnish yourself over a man," I told her, as if she could hear a speech designed like a plumb line.
Later, in the office under fluorescent light, I took the city by the pulse. Geoffrey's company, Smarle, was fighting for a hotel contract. A rival firm, run by Jagger Ellison—equal parts predatory and polished—wanted our property.
"The documents are wrong," Geoffrey said in the conference room, grim. "Our bid has been leaked."
"Of course it has," I said. "You sit on something the world wants."
"Do you want to help or to play? Because either way, be useful."
"All right." I pulled up files on my laptop, a small flash drive tucked stealthily into an inner seam. The Goblin project—Smarle's chip—was supposed to be proprietary. I had to prove someone inside had sold copies of the plan to Jagger Ellison.
"You're in over your head," Geoffrey muttered.
"Maybe," I said. "But I know how to bait rats."
I became his bride-in-waiting in public while I pulled puppets behind curtains. I coaxed weaknesses out of staff. I flirted and lied and, when necessary, I smashed the trust of a drunken programmer with my own hands.
"Who put the truth in your mouth?" I asked him, the night I had him tied down in a basement room, straps around his wrists. His name was Kyle Buckley, and his threshold for pain was astonishingly low. He called me a madwoman. I called him thorough.
"In Geoffrey's watch," he whimpered. "The watch... the watch carries the calibration files. I swear!"
"That's not all," I said. "Who else?" But he had only murmurs and the scent of regret on his breath when Geoffrey barged in.
"No more," Geoffrey told me later. "Not like this."
"I did what I had to," I said.
"You could have been lawfully discreet," he said.
"Discretion is for people without orders," I said. "You think I enjoy hurting people?"
"Sometimes you don't notice the harm you cause," he replied, and for the first time I saw the stranger beneath the immaculate suits.
"You think I enjoy it?" I asked. "If I did, I wouldn't be trembling now."
He was silent, and then—insanely kind—he held out his palm. "Stay," he said. "This is about family."
The mission pulled me in other directions. Brennan Bowen, my handler at Eden Group, wired a message. "We've got movement," he said. "Jagger's not just greedy; he's stealing R&D. Stop him."
"How?" I texted.
"At the gala," Brennan replied. "Make it public. Make him pay."
A plan is a hard thing: a spider web you set for the sparkle of a fly's last breath. I rewired the gala to be a stage, a trap disguised with chandeliers.
"You're sure?" Geoffrey asked as we stepped into the ballroom, his hands formal on my waist.
"I'll make it hurt," I promised. "In the right way."
We signed the pretense contract. I learned to act as his fiancée in front of cameras and older men with too much interest in legacies. It was exhausting to be sweet when I had a ledger of lies stacked up like plates in my chest.
"Don't let them go after you," Geoffrey murmured as we entered the room.
"I know," I said. "Don't let them go after you either."
The gala streamed live. I saw Jagger Ellison in the crowd, his smile a barbed thing. He raised a glass and, for a moment, the world seemed to tilt.
"Fools," I whispered.
"Who?" Geoffrey asked.
"People who forget money makes a neat enemy," I said.
I played the piano, slow and lulling, letting the keys be a lullaby for a night full of knives. Then, when Jagger leaned forward to comment on the art piece Geoffrey supposedly "bought," the screen behind me flickered.
"Watch this," I told Brennan through the green headset tucked behind my ear.
A montage filled the LED. It showed transactions, secret emails, bank transfers to shell companies. The livestream captured the faces of board members. Jagger's smile faltered. He swallowed.
"This cannot be," Jagger hissed. He rose. "This is slander!"
"Is it slander?" I asked, voice ringing in the ballroom. "Or is it evidence?"
Security moved, and the private hush of millionaires was replaced by the public roar of cameras. The flashing DSLR lights were a court without a judge. People crowded by the stage, phones aloft.
"Jagger Ellison of Ellison-Lori," I announced, "you have been purchasing Smarle's confidential plans. You have engineered contracts and transferred funds to ghost foundations. You've hidden the names behind charities that buy land. Tonight we return them to the light."
He strode toward me, red-faced, thrown off-balance. A man like him has a thousand lies prepared; he forgot how to act when the light touched the wound.
"This is a fabrication!" he spat, hands trembling. "You women—"
"Stop," Geoffrey commanded, cold as a blade. "You will sit. You will let them speak. Or we will let the market speak for us."
He was cut open by the sentence as if someone used a scalpel. "You will let them speak," Geoffrey repeated. "Tell us everything, Jagger."
They called Jagger's people, the board members, the man who cleared the contracts. They called witnesses. One by one, papers were produced: receipts, wire transfers, the signatures that betrayed him. The audience turned as the evidence stacked like plates. Jagger's face flushed from bright to purple to an ashy grey like paint peeling under heat.
"I didn't—" he started, and his voice cracked.
"You bought influence and sold theft," I said. "You thought our systems were weak. You thought you could buy your way into public conscience. You were wrong."
"You're slandering—" he started again, eyes frantic.
"Be quiet," someone behind him said. "Look at your phone."
The live feed had hit trending. Reporters shouted questions. "Are you guilty?" "Do you accept responsibility?" "What was the amount transferred?"
He turned to the crowd, to the cameras, and for once he was not the predator. He was prey, stripped of protocol and clean script. The board took him down. Contracts were frozen. His name crawled across the news banners: "Ellison-Lori Under Investigation."
You could have seen the life leaving him through his eyes—the arrogance peeling into a small, frightened man.
"How do you plead?" the lead investigator asked.
"I—" He stammered. "I misjudged. I—"
"You're admitting guilt now?" a reporter shouted.
"No!" he said, and then the denial cracked. "I didn't—"
"Then what?" the investigator asked.
"Then—" Jagger's mouth opened and closed. "I was cornered."
The room laughed, in the way the earth laughs when a trap closes. People who once smiled at him now took pictures, tweeted, laughed. Jagger's empire shrank in the space of a single sentence.
"Public humiliation," I had told Brennan. "Make it burn."
He did. Papers were posted on the hall monitors. Evidence streamed. Lawyers approached with clenched teeth. Board members began to distance themselves. The crowd that once bowed became a chorus of condemnation.
Jagger's face changed in a way I later described to Brennan as a dying animal's. First, confusion; then fury; then denial; finally, a crumpling. He tore at his tie as if it were a leash.
"I will sue," he hissed, but the sound of his own voice seemed to surprise him.
"You can," I said. "We'll be waiting."
By the time the press had left, they had recorded every expression: the way his fingers twitched, the feverish denial in his throat, the ultimate collapse when the board publicly removed him as CEO. People in the room clapped—not for him, but for the spectacle. I watched him go pale as a ghost and for one fleeting second, I saw the bottom of him. The audience took photos. "He deserves this," someone breathed.
This had been the big one. Jagger's fall was public, precise, and searing. It was a punishment that fit: he had used the market like a weapon; the market, in turn, turned on him in full view.
But there were other villains.
"Quinn Fang," I told Geoffrey later, "is a hothead. She'll try petty things."
"Quinn?" He frowned. "Who's that?"
"HR. She's been organizing smear campaigns about me. She locked me in an elevator, staged rumors. Little tyrants."
"You're sure?" Geoffrey asked, suspicion like an undercurrent.
"Yes," I said. "Her courage isn't matched by her intelligence."
We set a different trap: a work meeting, a public HR panel. I arranged for Kyle to testify—calm, honest, still scarred from my interrogation. I arranged for witnesses, for contract evidence, for a microphone.
The room was full. Employees whispered. A webcam streamed the event to the company's intranet. For once I wanted them to see: to know that petty cruelty has a price.
"Quinn Fang," Geoffrey said into the mic, "you have allegations against Ms. Wallin. Let's hear them here."
Quinn, who had expected to corner me in private, went pale. She had taken small malicious steps—emails, gossip, a locked elevator—but such things unspool in a public place.
"It was a joke!" she tried.
"Was it?" Geoffrey asked coldly. "We have messages. We have testimony."
She began with the familiar pattern: "I was trying to protect the company—"
"You are not protection," Geoffrey said. "You are a hazard."
The camera zoomed in as she shifted; the room leaned forward like a single organism hungry for truth.
"Quinn," I said gently, because cruelty deserves dignity and cruelty stripped of privacy tastes like ash, "do you enjoy hurting people?"
She looked at me as if I had asked an impertinent question. "I—no. I'm only—"
"Only what?" I pressed. "Only jealous?"
She sputtered. "They were flirting with him! They used you!"
"Us?" Geoffrey said. "Who 'used' me?"
She faltered. The murmurs rose. People in the room shook their heads. I produced a file with her messages and the logs of that elevator incident.
"Here," I said. "You see this?" The screen showed the chat logs. "You see this? You arranged the elevator stunt."
She attempted to laugh and failed. "I was protecting company reputation," she said, but no one bought it. The board member's face was stony.
"Why?" Geoffrey asked.
"I... I thought if she looked bad, the... the family would—"
"Would what?" Geoffrey asked.
"Not pick her!" she blurted, a child's confession. "I—"
"Do you realize the weight of your actions?" Geoffrey asked. The camera hung on his face. He was not shouting. He was presenting facts.
"I—I... I'm sorry," she mouthed, and the group held its breath like a held note.
I didn't need to speak; the evidence did. Her messages, her posts, the elevator video—compiled and reviewed—left her exposed. The crowd's reaction was precise and merciless. A wave of shame washed over her. Someone in the back began to clap, slowly. Others joined, at first awkward, then with increasing volume. People who had been hurt by works of petty cruelty stood and told their own stories. A chorus of "We saw this" filled the room.
Quinn's face crumpled. She tried denial—then rage—then panic. She was asked to step down. HR could not retain someone who weaponized policy to humiliate another employee. Her dismissal was swift and public. She tried to plead with the board; they listened and then ushered her out. People filmed. Her humiliation was different from Jagger's: not financial ruin but community repudiation. She went from being a minor tyrant to an object of pity. The employees, some of whom had been her closest allies, turned away.
"Control," Geoffrey said after the room had emptied. "We cannot have people acting like judges."
"Exactly," I said. "We can't be made into private punishments."
He looked at me—softened, maybe farther than in public. "You did well."
"I did what was needed," I said.
We needed the watch still. I had snagged the smallest thing that held the biggest secret: his pocket watch. In the watch lay more than a mechanism; it held the algorithm keys, the calibration, the traces of the Goblin project. I had to extract them without giving myself away.
"Do not touch the watch for now," I told myself when Geoffrey turned his back. "Not until the screen is down."
I learned things about him none of the tabloids would ever print: the way he hummed poetry under his breath, the way he searched for a face that had once saved him in a black room that smelled of oil and fear. He muttered a name in sleep—"Ruei"—and I watched his jaw relax.
One night, when the city's lights held their breath, he kissed me.
"Who are you?" he asked afterward, as if we had not already danced on the edge of discovery.
"A woman who knows how to take," I answered.
"Don't you love?" he asked.
"It depends," I said. "What do you give?"
"A chance," he said. "To be honest."
I considered it. The mission was my measure. Eden had set a price and I had a code. I had promised to be number one. I had taken pride in the precision of my actions. But standing there with his breath on my face, his hand a strange, warm anchor, I felt something like a fissure open.
"All of it," I answered, because sometimes the truth is the quickest way forward.
He stared at me as if the word hurt him. "You can't be both," he said. "You can't keep a heart and hide a hand in people's pockets."
"Watch me," I whispered, and he laughed—an awkward little sound—and the next morning he signed a contract that would legally tie our entangled fates as fiancés.
"Sign here," he said, putting a pen into my hand.
I signed.
The watch had hummed in my pocket like a captive and now it sat on the table, innocent and gleaming. Weeks later the servers were pulled; Jagger's investigations morphed into indictments. Quinn was gone from Smarle's halls. The Goblin pieces were accounted for.
And yet the company liked the spectacle. People rewrote their loyalties with fingers and tweets. I slept like a woman who had done what she could and worried like a woman who had done too much.
"Are you staying?" Geoffrey asked one night, when the house was only the two of us and the hum of the city felt like a memory.
"For the mission?" I said.
"Yes."
"For now," I said. "But one day you will know."
He placed his hands over mine, and for a sliver of time—less than a breath—I thought that perhaps the truth would find me as gently as a hand on my head.
When they came to arrest Jagger, he clutched at his dignity like a drowning man. He was dragged into the light, pleading first with anger, then with bald fear. People lined up to point. He slumped as the press snapped images. He tried to bargain with the board, with lawyers, with me. "You will regret this," he hissed.
"Maybe," I said. "But you made a choice."
People in the crowd spat at him. One woman—someone he'd once ordered to be fired—came forward and slapped him hard across the face.
"How does it feel," she asked, "to be the one needing mercy?"
He flinched as if someone had struck his very name.
"You're finished," a reporter intoned. "No more deals. No more fund transfers."
He begged. "I have children—"
"Think of them," the judge said, but the judge is a mirror and the mirror is cold. He was hauled away, handcuffed, his last glance a broken thing for the cameras.
I watched all this unfold from the wings, my hand on Geoffrey's sleeve. For a moment I felt nothing and then a slow wash of something—relief, maybe, or guilt—rising.
"Did you expect this?" Geoffrey asked.
"Some of it," I admitted. "Not the way people reacted. Humans can be merciless."
"Justice," he said. "It tastes the same."
We moved forward. The Goblin project was safe, the watch was in a padded box now in a vault, and the company had a face to rally behind. The elderly man with inked fingers clapped at dinner, and even Genesis—who tried to humiliate me in the restaurant—became an uneasy ally at family gatherings.
I sat at the desk in Geoffrey's study once and took out the pocket watch. It was warm from his palm. "You kept secrets inside," I told it.
"You were going to take them," Geoffrey said at my shoulder, his voice soft.
"I did," I said. "But not everything was mine to keep."
He leaned over me then, as if to read my handwriting. "Who are you now?" he asked.
"A spy," I replied. "But spies can be tired."
"And lovers?"
"Maybe," I said, and the watch clicked in my hand like a small, steady heart.
In the end, he let me go on one condition.
"Do not leave me blind," he said. "Tell me when you leave."
"I will," I promised.
I disappeared that night into the city's back alleys, and then into Eden's deeper files. I handed over the U-disk and the photographs. I watched men like Jagger get the fall that suits the greedy. I watched the office rattle with the absence of a petty tyrant like Quinn. I did what I was paid to do.
But later, at breakfast, when Geoffrey's grandpa kissed my forehead and called me "family," everything got complicated.
"You saved the company today," Landon said, beaming.
"We saved the company," Geoffrey corrected.
I smiled, but there was a certain hollow. "We did," I said. "Same thing."
Some nights I still wake up and the watch's ticking is a rhythm behind my ribs. I tuck it away, a relic and a weapon. When I see Geoffrey across a conference room, he glances at me in a way that is not quite question and not quite accusation. There are moments—three bright ones that live underneath the rough edges:
"I closed the elevator door and thought you had died," he told me once, voice raw. "When you returned, I—" He stopped. I saw the fear, the confession like a stone tossed into a still pond.
"Do you remember that night in the alley?" he asked another time, when the moon glowed like a coin. "You drove like a devil."
"I told you the watch was mine," I said.
"You could have left me," he said. "You didn't."
And once, in the quiet after the gala's lights, when I had gone too far and he forgave me anyway, he smiled—a quick, private thing. "Stop being reckless," he warned, and I felt seen.
Those moments were the bedrock. I built myself around them.
"You will tell me the truth," Geoffrey said one night, touching the watch in my palm.
"I thought I already had," I said.
"You still hide things," he replied.
"Everyone hides," I said. "Even you."
He laughed, an almost-privileged sound. "Then we'll share secrets."
We never did, not exactly. Some wonders keep their privacy. But the pocket watch—the small, stubborn thing—remained on my dresser, a proof of how a thief and a king can make a bargain: to keep their watch ticking and to remember the place where the heart is kept.
I tucked the watch back into its soft leather and, for once, I let the ticking lull me to sleep.
The End
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