Beacon Hill Billionaires 1 - Owned by the Boss

The elevator opens on the sixteenth floor and the smell arrives first: fresh coffee, new carpet, and something floral from the reception desk, where a woman in a navy blazer is adjusting a vase of white tulips. A man in a hoodie rolls past on a skateboard with a coffee mug balanced on the deck. Nobody looks up. Mia Chen is carrying three weekends of work in a leather portfolio case, and her hands are shaking. The design is already projected on the wall of the conference room when she walks in. Six faces turn. The CEO of Ashford Media does not say hello. *Don't be sorry. Be on time tomorrow.* She gets through the pitch. She also sees the file name on Patrick Webb's laptop before he snaps it shut: *Mia_design_backup.docx.* She has shared that work with exactly one person, and it was not Patrick. What Mia signed on her way into this building is the other problem. Ashford Media's non-compete runs *twelve months post-employment, covers all design work* — any design work, for any entity. Her sister Ava has found a former diner in Brighton with a working kitchen and has sixty days to secure the funding for it. Mia promised her the money. She promised their mother, who spent thirty years as a seamstress and has the hands to prove it, that nobody in this family would have to go back to that. Leo Ashford is not what the building led her to expect. He reads her contract. He hands her a lawyer's card with a number written on the back in blue ink. He tells her what he knows about her situation before she can decide how much to admit. Which is its own kind of trap, because the man holding her career in a filing cabinet is also the one she wants, and his father sits on the board and has opinions about designers who are given exceptions. Then someone starts leaking to a competitor, and…