The hallway outside the advising offices smelled like carpet and printer toner, and Damon had been sitting in it for nineteen minutes while students went in and came out.

Orientation had eaten the whole morning exactly the way Vespera promised; she’d said of a packed hall where the AC loses badly and some guy in a lanyard talking about school spirit for ninety minutes while four hundred freshmen slow-cooked in their own shirts, and then the exit, where two doors tried to process an entire stadium and the whole class got squeezed through like toothpaste.

He’ll probably come out of it with a folder he had not opened, a lanyard he had already ripped off, and a headache parked behind his left eye like it was waiting for a table.

But he had to deal this first; row of chairs, a printed sign taped to a door, and a schedule that ran twenty minutes late per appointment because every single one of them was running twenty minutes late.

Sixty grand a year and they sat me in a folding chair and I am out here numb-assed in a hallway that smells like a Kinko’s.’

He had spent the wait doing something more useful than sulking, at least. Building the site in his head. Layout, tone, what a woman would see first and how few taps it would take her to get from curious to booked. Clean. Discreet. Nothing that felt cheap or looked like a phone number scrawled in a bathroom stall:

"Viremont." He looked up.

And immediately lost the argument he had been having with himself in the hallway.

’Sorry, head. I thought I could think with you. But I think my dick wins this one.’

The woman in the doorway had a coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. Long black hair, waved and dark enough to look expensive even under hallway lighting and a pale skin.

Grey-green eyes that did not waste time being pretty about it and reading glasses pushed up into that hair like she had forgotten they existed. She was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt that should have been office-safe and was not, not completely, because the neckline sat just low enough to show the inner curve of a seriously big chest without actually giving the room a show.

Under that, a long pencil skirt, tailored, close through the hips, falling clean to her calves. Forty, maybe. Or a very forgiving thirty-something, sharp, composed with a serious face that did not do small talk and would not apologize for it.

He stood up the way you stood up for a teacher, not a date. Looked once. Properly. Then stopped looking like a man who understood the difference.

"That’s me."

"Come in. Shut the door. It doesn’t latch, so actually shut it. Don’t leave it half-open like the last one did."

’Yes ma’am. Immediately ma’am. I have known you four seconds and I already want a lawyer.’

Her office was a cave of paper. Filing boxes stacked two deep along one wall, a dying plant, a framed degree gone crooked, and a monitor turned so the student could not see it, a deliberate choice he suspected and one he immediately respected.

She sat like the chair belonged to the university and he was borrowing it.

The pencil skirt stayed neat when she crossed behind the desk but the shirt pulled once across her chest as she sat and then behaved itself.

She tapped twice and read.

Damon settled into the chair opposite and let the passives do whatever they were going to do.

He had not planned anything; he was not stupid enough to run game on the woman holding his registration hostage. But Manly Scent did not have an off switch and neither did the rest of his abilities, and some idle curious part of him wanted to know what happened when all of it landed on a woman like this.

What happened was nothing at all.

She did not glance up, did not shift in her seat, or do a single one of the small unconscious things every woman in his house had done the other night or this morning.

She scrolled, sipped her coffee, and made a noise in her throat that could have meant anything from interesting to I need a new plant.

’That’s like walking into a wall with a bouquet. Huh.’

[Advisor — Marguerite Hale]

[Desire Meter: 00/100]

[Thirst Gauge: 12/100]

’Zero. Dead flat at zero. Manly Scent, Mature Affinity, Liberator’s Presence, all three running full blast, and this woman is reading my transcript like I am a parking ticket. I have a cosmic seduction system humming under my skin and she wants to know if I passed pre-calc. Incredible. I should send her a fruit basket.’

But it was also genuinely refreshing, in a way he had not expected. Everything since midnight had been a door swinging open.

This was a wall, and a wall was information.

He still noticed her; that was were the hunting started although he was doing nothing at the moment: The line of the skirt, the way the long sleeves made her look stricter instead of softer, the quiet fact of her body under professional clothes, there and not performing.

He put it away and listened.

"Finance major," Marguerite said, still reading. "Damon Corvin Viremont. Your paperwork is immaculate. Health, transcripts, payment, all cleared in June." She looked up for the first time and pinned him with it. "Somebody in your family is extremely organized. That somebody is not you."

"My mother."

"Your mother is doing the Lord’s work. Do not waste it." She set the coffee down like the conversation had now officially started. "The only thing standing between you and a schedule is me, so we will do this properly and we will not do it twice. What do you actually want out of this degree. And do not give me the brochure answer. I have heard it fourteen times today and I am out of patience for it."

Damon opened his mouth to say something smooth.

Then did not.

Because she was watching him with the particular flat attention like she’d had heard every version of "I want to leverage my potential in the financial sector" that the English language could produce, and would know a rehearsed answer inside of four words.

"My family runs a business," he said. "One day some of that’s going to be my problem. I’d rather understand it than nod through meetings while someone else explains it to me."

Marguerite looked at him for a second longer.

"Better. That is one of the four honest sentence I have heard today and it is nearly two o’clock. Do not follow it with a joke. I am still working."

She turned back to the screen and started building.

"Right. Nobody takes finance in their first semester, so kill that idea now if you had it. You take the runway. Microeconomics, because everything in the business core is built on it and half the sophomore courses will not open to you without it. Financial Accounting. That is the language. You cannot read a fund’s position if you cannot read a balance sheet, and you would be amazed how many people in that industry are faking it. I will not let you be one of them on my roster."

’Noted. Depressing. She just called half of Wall Street a liar and did not blink. I think I am in love with her hostility.’

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