The Nerd Who Stole The Quarterback (Astra and Zayne) novel Chapter 216

14:12 Tue, Aug 25

The Nerd Who Stole The Quarterback

Isla

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ISLA

For one terrible second, neither of us looked away.

Zane continued answering the moderator as though nothing had happened, his voice carrying through the auditorium with the same controlled ease as before, but those green eyes remained on mine.

Then self-preservation finally won.

My gaze dropped to the tablet so abruptly that my hair slipped forward across my cheek.

Shit.

If he hadn’t recognized me before, behaving like someone desperate not to be recognized probably hadn’t helped.

I stared at the figures on my screen while his voice continued somewhere beyond them, refusing to give myself another reason to look up.

A few seconds of eye contact meant nothing. He’d been surveying the audience, and I happened to be sitting in the path of his gaze.

Except he’d stopped.

That was the part my brain wouldn’t leave alone.

Rebecca shifted beside me and turned a page in her briefing packet, while Kieran remained focused on the presentation without any indication that he’d noticed something unusual.

At least there was that.

I tucked my hair behind my ear and returned to the point Zane was making about Vantage’s distribution network. The first sentence took longer than it should have, but by the time another line appeared beneath it, my hands had stopped threatening to betray me.

There was no reason to give those few seconds more meaning than they deserved. Zane hadn’t expected to see me here, and whatever version of Astra Hawthorne he remembered belonged to another life.

Another question pulled Zane’s focus elsewhere, and I managed to keep my eyes on my notes for all of twelve seconds before giving in and looking up again.

He was no longer watching me.

Relief came immediately, followed by a flicker of disappointment that irritated me almost as much as the fact that I’d looked in the first place. What exactly had I expected him to do, spend the rest of the presentation staring at me?

I pushed the thought aside and returned to my notes as the presentation opened to questions from the

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The Nerd Who Stole The Quarterback

audience.

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A question about Australian regulatory exposure finally dragged me fully back into the reason Sinclair had brought me here.

Zane answered without hesitation, explaining how Vantage’s existing approvals would affect the integration timeline while the relevant figures appeared behind him. I followed the numbers, mentally comparing them with the projections we’d built at Sinclair, and for several minutes the morning became what it was supposed to have been.

By the end of his answer, the earlier eye contact almost felt like something I’d imagined.

Then his eyes found mine again.

There was no slow survey of the auditorium this time and no accidental path that happened to end in Sinclair’s section. One moment Zane was answering a question about regulatory exposure.

The next, he was looking directly at me.

My lungs tightened.

His delivery never faltered. Anyone watching him would have seen the same composed CEO addressing a room full of investors and competitors, but I was beginning to understand something nobody else had reason to notice.

He wasn’t looking around anymore.

He was looking at me.

I held his gaze despite every instinct telling me not to, and the seconds stretched long enough to make coincidence increasingly difficult to believe.

“Isla.”

Rebecca’s voice broke through whatever was happening.

“What do you think?”

I turned toward her and nearly lost my grip on the tablet. “About the Australian timeline?”

Her eyebrows rose slightly, but at least I’d recovered fast enough to know what she meant.

“Aggressive,” I continued. “If they’re accounting for Vantage’s existing approvals, it’s possible, but they’re leaving very little room for regulatory delays.”

“That was my thought too.”

Rebecca added something to her notes while I tried to ignore the heat crawling beneath my collar.

When my eyes eventually returned to the stage, Zane had moved on.

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The Nerd Who Stole The Quarterback

Good.

That was good.

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The final questions ended shortly before eleven, and applause rose as Zane wrapped up the presentation and exchanged a few words with one of the Vantage executives. I began gathering my things.

“We’re staying,” Rebecca said beside me.

My hand paused over the briefing packet. “For the two o’clock session?”

“And the competitor roundtable before lunch. There’s a networking break first.”

Of course there was.

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