Chapter 2 FIRST ENCOUNTER

Lora stood at the mouth of that river in a fitted black dress and low heels, a clipboard clutched in her hands like a lifeline. Her badge read Bolt Lora – EVENT COORDINATOR, but the word that pulsed behind her ribs was the one she couldn’t print on plastic: fate.

He was five meters away, and every nerve in her body knew it.

Simon Zack’s attention flowed from one donor to another. He nodded, smiled, listened but even listening, he held the room the way gravity holds planets. When he laughed, it was soft and contained, a private joke that somehow made everyone lean closer as if they’d been invited in.

Lora made herself look down at her checklist: 8:35 p.m. — Speech notes to podium; 8:40, Video roll call; 8:50 — Auction paddle test. She scanned the top of the stage. The teleprompter blinked a calm, reassuring green. The LED wall slept in a slideshow of sponsors’ logos.

You are here to work, she reminded herself. And yet her gaze slipped back, helpless.

A hand landed on her shoulder. “You’re vibrating,” Ross Sandra murmured, glossed lips quirking. “Not very professional.”

Lora startled, then forced a breath that wasn’t a gasp. “I am not.”

“You are. And if you keep staring like that, security will assume you plan to abduct the heir.” So-ra’s voice lowered as she followed Lora’s line of sight. “He does look extra… well ironed tonight.”

“That’s not a thing,” Lora muttered, despite the corner of her mouth lifting.

“It is now.” So-ra’s teasing softened; she squeezed Lora’s shoulder. “Okay. Ten minutes and he goes on stage. Your window is small, coordinator-nim. What’s the plan?”

Lora swallowed. The words that rose in her throat sounded ridiculous even inside her head. I’m going to walk up to him and ask if he remembers dragging a dripping, terrified stranger out of a river. He’ll say yes, and we’ll both laugh, and…

She shut down the fantasy before it could embarrass her further. “Professional contact first. If I can talk to him even for thirty seconds, maybe he’ll…” Remember? Recognize? “Maybe I’ll know.”

“Know what?” Sandra asked, softer now.

“If I’ve been right all this time.”

So-ra’s eyes flickered, sympathy and worry walking hand in hand across her face. Then she squared her shoulders like a general. “Thirty seconds. Use logistics as a pretext. I’ll run interference if his handlers try to peel you off.”

“His handlers?”

At that exact moment, a poised woman in a pearl-buttoned jacket glided to his side and murmured something into his ear. He leaned closer, listening, and Lora felt that old, irrational flare of jealousy—at the ease of that proximity, at the way the woman didn’t tremble or second-guess herself in his orbit.

Sandra caught Lora’s expression and sighed. “Yes. Handlers. Hyenas. Mothers. Take your pick.”

“Mothers?” Lora echoed.

“You know Madam Anna is here, right?”

Lora’s spine straightened instinctively. “Tonight?”

“Mm.” Sandra jerked her chin toward a table where a woman with a razor-sharp bob and an immaculate ivory hanbok jacket sat as if the chair had been designed to flatter only her. Everything about her screamed of inherited habit: money, command, the kind of attention that never has to be asked for because it arrives ahead of her. Next to her, Chairman Simon sat with measured ease, the quiet smile of someone who knows the room is already his.

“They’re both here to watch their golden son sparkle,” Sandra murmured. “Try not to faint in front of them.”

“I’m not going to faint.”

“You’re vibrating,” Sandra repeated, and slipped away to bully a cameraman into a better angle.

Lora smoothed a palm down the skirt of her dress, steadied the clipboard, and started toward the center of the room. She wove through clusters of donors, murmuring apologies, smiling mechanically past blazers that smelled of cigar boxes and cologne.

At the edge of Zack’s circle, she paused. One of the waiters near her shifted his grip on a tray heavy with champagne flutes, his wrist dipping under the weight. Instinct moved her faster than thought; Lora slid a hand under the far edge of the tray just as a flute began its suicidal lean. It wobbled, shimmered, then settled.

“Good catch,” a voice said to her left.

Not his voice yet but her skin broke into gooseflesh anyway. She turned. The woman in the pearl jacket—handler, hyena, whatever had clocked the save. “You’re with the PR firm?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Lora said, trying not to pant like a mLorathoner at the finish line. “Bolt Lora, event coordination.”

“Stay close. We might need a reroute to the stage.”

Reroute. Pretext. Lora nodded tightly and took the step she’d been dancing around for five years.

She lifted her gaze. And there he was…closer now, the light skimming the clean line of his jaw, catching in the tiny scar above his eyebrow that the magazine spreads always blurred out. He’d been listening to an investor, head tipped in polite attention. As if he felt her as surely as she felt him, his gaze shifted and found her.

Her heart executed a perfect swan dive. She kept her feet this time.

“Excuse me, Director Lee,” the pearl jacket woman said smoothly. “This is Ms. Kim, our event coordinator. She’ll escort you to the stage at eight thirty five. There’s been a small change.”

“Of course.” His eyes didn’t leave Lora’s face. “Ms. Kim.”

Up close, his voice did strange, tender damage to her, like heat after a long shiver. Lora bowed slightly. “Director Lee. We’ve adjusted the prompter script to include the anonymous donor acknowledgment. I’ll cue you at the foot of the stairs.”

“Thank you.” He paused, a fractional hesitate that stretched and thinned the air. “Have we met?”

The question hit her like sunlight on unprepared eyes…blinding, greedy, hopeful. The answer crowded her tongue. Yes. In the water. You smelled like river and rain and safety.

She smiled instead, small and careful. “Not formally.”

Something like amusement curved the corner of his mouth. “Then consider us introduced.”

He held out a hand. Not the easy politician’s shake she’d seen him deploy across the room, but one he offered down and inward, a degree softer than necessary. Lora placed her hand in his. Warm. Solid. A jolt arced up her arm and pinwheeled behind her ribs.

“Director,” another voice intruded, sticky with importance, “about the hotel naming rights…”

He released her hand. The moment snapped like spun sugar. But as he pivoted, his sleeve brushed her wrist, and there was the faintest lift of his eyebrow. Wait. Not dismissing. Postponing.

She stepped back, pulse ricocheting, and let the new man flood the space with words about tax advantages and international partnerships. She pretended to check her clipboard again, but all she’d written there in the last sixty seconds was his name, faintly indented by the pressure of her pen under the paper.

Eight thirty five came, as all moments do, whether we’re ready or not.

Lora found herself walking beside him through the narrow corridor behind the stage, the noise of the ballroom dropping like a curtain. Back here, the air smelled of wires and dust and the lemony cleaner housekeeping favored; a tech ducked past them muttering into a headset.

“Ms. Kim,” Steve said quietly.

Her name in his voice rolled warmth through her. “Yes?”

“Thank you for the reroute.” He glanced sideways at her as he walked. “Quick adjustments are the difference between good events and great ones.”

“You’d be surprised how much of our job is hiding small disasters,” she said before she thought better of it.

He laughed. Not the public laugh; something lower, unpolished. “I believe it.”

They reached the foot of the stairs. The MC’s voice boomed from the other side of the curtain, cuing the applause line before the guest of honor. Lora took a breath that tasted like opportunity and risk. “Your mic will go live as you step onto the mark. Two minutes and thirty seconds for the opener; the video will roll behind you, then it’s three minutes for the appeal. If you need to slow—”

“I’ll watch your cue,” he said. “I trust you.”

The words landed in her like a stone into still water, ripples spreading outward. Trust. A strange, intimate word from a man whose world traded in credentials and leverage. She nodded, throat tight, and moved to her mark where he could see her hand as she counted down.

The curtain parted on a blade of light. He stepped into it as if light were his natural element and applause his birthright. The crowd rose like tide. Lora watched from the wing, the practiced gestures, the measured cadence—confidence packaged and sold with a smile. And yet, sometimes, in the space between sentences, his focus darted toward her, a check, a silent Are we on course?

Every time, she answered with the smallest nod, and something about the line of his shoulders eased.

When he finished, the room stood again, eager, generous. The quartet surged to fill the moment; the MC gushed; the screens faded into the sponsor carousel. Steve stepped offstage, pulse of attention still clinging to him like static.

“You were perfect,” pearl jacket murmured, slipping a new glass of water into his hand, “except for the ad lib about transparency…”

“It mattered,” he said mildly, then to Lora, “How did we do?”

“We hit time to the second,” she said, fighting the foolish urge to beam at him like a second grader with a gold star. “Thank you for trusting the cues.”

His jaw tipped, something appreciative in the small shift. “I told you I would.”

“Director Lee,” a different man called, harried, “the press line is backed up, your mother wants a photo with the ambassador…”

“My mother can have the photo.” A beat. “Ms. Kim, walk with me?”

Pearl jacket’s eyes flickered to Lora’s badge. A fragment of territorial surprise; Lora felt it like a draft. But she fell into step by his side as he moved down the corridor toward the foyer where photographers waited.

“I know you’re working,” he said quietly, “but do you get to enjoy these events at all?”

She thought of the blister blooming on her heel and the way adrenaline had been her only dinner. She smiled. “In my next life, I’ll attend as a guest.”

“Hmm.” He seemed to consider that seriously, as if weighing whether he could grant her reincarnation on the spot. “You caught that champagne earlier.”

“You saw?”

“I see what keeps things from breaking.” The look he gave her was brief, but it landed and lingered. “That’s a rare talent.”

“Champagne?” she teased, because if she didn’t, she might say thank you in a way that gave away too much.

“Grace,” he corrected. “Under weight.”

Her face warmed. “It’s in the job description.”

“Then your job description is better written than most.”

They broke into the foyer, where flashbulbs skittered like fireflies trapped in glass. A cluster of reporters shifted forward, microphones like spears. Madam Anna stood at the head of the line, immaculate, lips a cool red. Chairman Simon hovered to her left, fingers laced before him.

“Zack.” Madam Han’s smile was photogenic and unyielding. “Ambassador Choi.” She glided to position, eyes skimming Lora once, cataloguing, dismissing, moving on.

For the next ten minutes, Lora became a shadow hovering just beyond the frame, tugging lines into clean arcs, nodding cues to the house photographer. She watched him switch on that high gloss charm—how he could be all light and surface and yet, if you knew to look, there were depths he didn’t invite anyone to swim.

By the time the press line ended, the ballroom had shifted into auction mode. A professional fast talker revved up the room, numbers bouncing in gleeful escalation. Lora checked her phone—three missed messages from So-ra.

WHERE ARE YOU

TELL ME EVERYTHING

IF YOU KISSED HIM I NEED TO KNOW IN REAL TIME

Lora bit back a laugh and texted: WORKING. NOT KISSING. CALL YOU AFTER.