Page 1 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

Chapter 1

KNOX

Knox Knightly had a system for everything, and the system was failing.

The quarterly projections on his screen were flawless. Revenue was up nine percent. Operating costs had been trimmed by the four percent Ronan had demanded eighteen months ago, back when Ronan still demanded things instead of humming show tunes in the elevator. The numbers were clean and correct. They were also entirely incapable of holding his attention.

She had grabbed his tie.

That was three weeks, four days, and eleven hours ago. Knox could, on principle, account for every variable, all of them—the pastry-fine flour on her wrists, the lemon glaze on her lower lip, and the silk of his Hermès tie, which had cost nine hundred dollars and had just been employed as a handle by a woman whose clothes and self appeared to come pre-stained.

She’d kissed him like someone settling a debt. Efficient, certain, no apology in it and no performance either.

He’d kissed her back.

He kept going back to that data point. He’d kissed her back, which meant the tie wasn’t the only thing he’d misjudged.

“Consider me shut up,” he’d said when she finally released him. His voice had come out lower than intended, stripped of the register he used for boardrooms. He had walked out of the kitchen. She didn’t get to see his face.

She had only needed a fraction of a second to dismantle him. A baker with flour on her wrists and a direct gaze had gotten further in one introduction than he’d allowed anyone in years. The half-second where his brain had gone offline was the most reliable data point in his possession.

He closed the projection file and opened his calendar. He had eight meetings today, the first in fifteen minutes. He could survive fifteen minutes without thinking about Lucy Wang if he focused on something constructive, something grounded in numbers and reason.

His desk drawer was open. Inside, beneath a slim leather case and two fountain pens he never used, sat a folded piece of paper, the Oath, signed at Harvard, bearing three signatures, with two of them crossed out.

Ronan’s had been the first to go, obliterated by a woman who brought him terrible coffee and bought him a coloring book about unicorns. Gabriel’s own copy followed, torn to confetti on Fifth Avenue after he’d held up a sign reading “WILLING TO STARVE FOR LOVE” while strangers filmed him on their phones.

His own signature remained intact, the sole survivor of a pact that once felt like bedrock and now felt like something he was gripping with both hands while the ground eroded beneath him.

Love had made Ronan more human and Gabriel more brave, and Knox could acknowledge both without following them off the cliff. The Oath had never been about avoiding women. It was about finishing what you started. His father had been a man who broke promises the way other men broke bread, casually and often. Knox had spent his adult life becoming the opposite. If he couldn’t keep a promise he’d made to himself at twenty-one, what did that say about every promise he’d made since?

He had four years left. He could hold on for four years.

The intercom buzzed.

“Mr. Knightly, your nine o’clock is in the conference room.”

“I’m on my way.”

He closed the drawer, adjusted his glasses, and straightened the cuffs of his shirt, checking for any rogue thread or misalignment, because if the exterior was in order, the interior would follow. That was the theory. The theory had worked for thirty-six years.

The conference room was glass and chrome and cold enough to preserve evidence. Offices were personal. Conference rooms were transactional. In a conference room, nobody expected you to be human. They expected a balance sheet with a pulse.

He was twenty minutes into a vendor analysis when his phone vibrated.

Gabriel: Dinner tonight. Seven. The usual place. Non-negotiable.

Knox: Define non-negotiable.

Gabriel: The version where I show up at your apartment if you say no.

Knox: That’s coercion.

Gabriel: That’s friendship. See you at 7.

He pocketed the phone and returned to vendor margins. The numbers cooperated. Numbers always cooperated. By noon, he’d reviewed several proposals, approved a couple, and redlined one until it bled.

People at Oath Capital described Knox Knightly in a narrow set of terms: exacting, unreasonable about decimal placement, and allergic to approximation. He’d overheard an intern call him “a calculator in a Brioni suit.” He’d considered correcting the brand. It was Tom Ford.