Are you good in bed?"
the billionaire asked, and the older black single father's answers stunned her. The ballroom on the top floor of the Asheford Hotel in Manhattan smelled of champagne and ambition. Celeste Whitmore stood near the window with a glass in her hand, watching the city glitter below like something she already owned. She was 42 years old, the chief executive of Whitmore Meridian Group, and she had spent two decades learning that silence was the most expensive thing in any room. Men feared her.
Women envied her. Nobody, in longer than she could remember, had surprised her. Then she saw the man by the bar decline a drink from a woman twice as wealthy as most people in that room, and something in her chest, some old dormant instinct, sat up and paid attention. She crossed the floor without deciding to. She stopped in front of him, close enough that the noise of the party seemed to fall away, and she asked the only question that felt honest, in a room built entirely on dishonesty.
"Are you good in bed?" The words landed like a dropped glass. Conversations near them stumbled and went quiet. A waiter froze midstep. Malcolm Veyron did not flinch. He did not look away, and he did not smile the practice smile of a man flattered by a powerful woman's attention.