Cassian smiled.
Penelope removed her gloves and began packing her tools.
He watched her for a moment.
“Dinner.”
She stopped.
“That sounded dangerously like a summons.”
He corrected himself immediately.
“Would you have dinner with me?”
Penelope looked at him.
No guards.
No audience.
No velvet VIP booth above a room waiting for her humiliation.
Just a man asking a question and, apparently, prepared to survive the answer.
“Why?”
“Because I enjoy speaking with you.”
“You spent most of this week watching me tell you your expensive jewelry was defective.”
“Yes.”
“And you enjoyed that?”
“More than most conversations I have.”
She considered him.
At the party, his power had annoyed her because everyone around him treated it as permission.
During the appraisal, she had discovered something more complicated.
Cassian could command a room, but when she established a professional boundary, he had kept it.
When she told him not to confront Victor, he listened.
When evidence contradicted what his people wanted him to believe, he chose evidence.
None of that made him harmless.
It made him capable of hearing no.
That was rarer.
“One dinner,” she said.
Cassian’s eyebrows lifted.
“Is that a yes?”
“It is a conditional experiment.”
“With what conditions?”
“No private club where everyone stops breathing when you enter.
No bodyguards at the table.
No buying the restaurant because they gave away our reservation.”
“I have never bought a restaurant over a reservation.”
“You considered it quickly enough that I am keeping the rule.”
He laughed again—that same rough, underused sound she had first heard across the booth at Zero Bond.
“Agreed.”
Penelope picked up her bag.
“And Cassian?”
“Yes?”
“If there is one slider left, it is mine.”
He looked almost offended.
“That is unreasonable.”
“Then dinner is canceled.”
“Your negotiating tactics are brutal.”
“You approached the wrong appraiser.”
Months later, when people asked how Penelope Hayes had caught the discrepancy in the Romano collection, the professional answer involved microscopy, provenance, condition records, comparative photography, and the refusal to accept documentation at face value.
All of that was true.
But Holly preferred another version.
According to her, the entire thing happened because Penelope had seen the most dangerous man in Manhattan standing between her and fried bread with truffle oil and decided hunger outranked fear.
Penelope always corrected one part.
“It was a slider.”
Holly would roll her eyes.
