Jacob Huntington had the kind of presence that didn’t just walk into a room—he commandeered it. Six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, and tailored like a weapon, he wore power like a second skin. Dark hair always clean-cut, neat. Steel-blue eyes—cold, calculating, unbothered—hidden behind tinted Tom Ford prescription glasses that were more for shielding than seeing. His suits? Custom. His watch? Patek. His body? Built like someone who knew that control started with discipline. Nothing sloppy. Not a wrinkle, not a scuff, not a flaw. He was all edges, efficiency, and sharp silences.
They’d been married for two years.
Technically.
It wasn’t love. Not at first. Not even close.
It was strategy. You had your empire—old money, generational grip on one of the industries that made the American machine run. Shipping? Pharmaceuticals? He didn’t care. You had your reasons. He had his.
For him, it was about control. Leverage. Power consolidated. Access earned, not gifted. You were beautiful, well-connected, and smart—too smart to pretend this was some fairytale. It was mutual toleration. Mutual privacy. You did your thing, he did his. Separate bedrooms, matching NDAs. Matching last names. It worked.
Mostly.
Except now, lately, he couldn’t stop seeing you.
Like really seeing you. In those in-between hours—early morning light slipping across marble countertops, your bare shoulders turned away from him while you stirred tea with a practiced hand. Or the way you’d stare too long at nothing when you thought no one was watching. The tired elegance. The sadness stitched into your silences. You had that same look he wore behind his glasses. Crying without the mess.
And fuck if it didn’t wreck his focus.
It was stupid. Irrational. Out of rotation.
Because Jacob Huntington had a rotation—meetings, check-ins, acquisitions, mergers. Monday was China. Tuesday was Berlin. Wednesday, he’d be back in L.A. and lifting at five before briefing his staff at seven. He tracked quarterly earnings like weather. He fucked like it was a transaction, when he needed it. Controlled. Handsome. Detached. He didn’t do messy.
You were supposed to be neat.
But there was something about how you moved around his penthouse like it wasn’t his. Something about the ghost of a laugh you used to have when you teased him. The long pauses. The way he memorized the slope of your collarbone like it was part of a report he needed to get right.
He’d picked up your prescription once. Saturday, 2:07 PM. CVS in Dupont Circle. You never asked him to. He told himself it was on the way.
He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.
Was this longing?
No. Of course not. He didn’t do longing.
He followed rules. Made his bed in the morning. Cleaned up well. Drove a matte black Bentley and paid his taxes early. He was good at this life. Respected. Feared. Loyal, in his own cold-blooded way. He wasn’t a romantic.
Except he remembered your first argument, the way your voice cracked when you told him you felt like a ghost in your own home.
And he hadn’t said anything then.
But now? He memorized your face like it might be gone in the morning. Each expression. Each tired line. Like reading a Beckett play backward and still pretending he understood the ending.
He used to think he had the world in his hand.
Now he wasn’t sure if he even knew how to hold you.
Maybe that was the lesson.
Maybe that was what scared him most.
He didn’t show it, of course.
Jacob didn’t do shows of emotion. No messy declarations. No desperate gestures. His love language, if it could even be called that, came in the form of perfect execution. Of remembering your favorite wine even though you said it once in passing, eight months ago. Of installing blackout curtains in your study because your migraines flared when the afternoon sun hit wrong. Of clearing an entire evening on his calendar—not to talk, not to fuck, not even to be near you, just in case you needed something.
He didn’t know anything at all. Not really. Except that he wanted you.
Not as a partner. Not as a business advantage.
But as His.