DMUnder TwoSignaturesDELPHINE OSEI

A Dear Maeve romance

Under Two Signatures

Nobody can know. That was always the problem.

By Delphine Osei

Completed · 15 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

An architect and the anonymous investor funding her tower fall for each other under an agreement neither can break.

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Warm: Sensual tension; intimacy fades to black. For adults 18+.

Her letter to Maeve

Dear Maeve,

For two years I have written careful memos to a man I am not allowed to meet. Not a call. Not a coffee. If anyone thought I’d broken that rule, my name would come off the partnership shortlist before it was ever on it.

Four days ago, at a fundraiser, a stranger stood in front of my worst sketches and asked the one question about my building that mattered. For twenty-five minutes I stopped performing confidence and simply had it.

This afternoon I heard his voice again, on a video call about my own project, from the side of the table I’m forbidden to speak to. Then he texted me. He would rather tell me the rest himself, if I’ll let him.

I haven’t answered. I keep reading his message the way I read a drawing, following where the weight goes, and I can’t tell yet whether it holds.

About the story

Meera Anand leads the biggest project Sydney’s most prestigious architecture practice has taken on in a decade, and the one rule of Bellweather Tower is absolute: no contact with the anonymous investor beyond written approvals. So when she meets a man at a gallery opening who turns out to be that investor, the attraction is instant, mutual, and against the terms of a contract worth her entire career.

Julian Harrow has stayed out of the public eye for five years, since a fraud at his father’s fund took nine million dollars of other people’s money and left his own name attached to it. He deals with people through documents, because a document can be drafted so that nobody standing near him gets hurt. It works beautifully until he meets a woman who would rather be told the truth badly than managed well.

When a partner spots them leaving a party together, Meera has four days to declare the relationship or be reported. What follows is not a scandal so much as a slow, public argument about who gets to protect whom: a disclosure filed with dates, an investor who recuses himself from his own building, a journalist who prints nothing untrue and ruins her anyway, and a decision Julian made in nineteen days in 2019 that he has never once said out loud.

Content warnings

Emotional abuse (past) · Financial fraud · Workplace humiliation · Alcohol

Every chapter

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  1. Chapter 1The Gallery
  2. Chapter 2The Investor Clause
  3. Chapter 3The Signature Line
  4. Chapter 4Renegotiating Nothing
  5. Chapter 5The NDA
  6. Chapter 6After Hours
  7. Chapter 7The Family Name
  8. Chapter 8Office Party
  9. Chapter 9The West Lift
  10. Chapter 10The Declaration
  11. Chapter 11Nineteen Days
  12. Chapter 12The Journalist
  13. Chapter 13Twenty Past Six
  14. Chapter 14Julian's Choice
  15. Chapter 15Two Signatures