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******
"Yes," Marvin confirmed smoothly, his eyes burning into hers. "It is entirely about you."
"You wrote me a song."
"For your birthday, I called Iris." he purred, the faintest hint of a dimpled smirk appearing. "Among other reasons."
She looked at the guitar resting on the couch. She looked at his handsome face. She looked at the artisan lemon tart she had completely stopped eating.
"Marvin," Amy breathed, shaking her head in sheer, unadulterated disbelief. "You made my favorite cake from scratch. You cooked my mother's comforting soup for the first time in... a very long time. You played me a masterpiece of a song Iris that you wrote about my soul."
She gestured toward the window. Sometime during the dinner, she had finally noticed the small, elegant crystal vase of fresh white peonies resting on the windowsill that had not been there that morning when she left for work.
"You decorated my apartment," she continued, her voice thick with emotion. "And you stood in the shadows and sang to me when I walked in the door after a day of work." She looked at him directly, her logic desperately trying to assert itself one last time. "You are eleven years old."
"Almost twelve," Marvin corrected effortlessly, without a single shred of defensiveness.
"Marvin."
"Yes, my lady."
"Why?" She said it simply. She didn't say it as a complaint, or a nervous deflection, or a corporate accusation. It was just the genuine question that had been simmering underneath the entire evening. The question that the romantic architecture of the dinner had been building toward, that she was finally ready to ask.
He looked at her across the wooden coffee table.
The reflection of the single taper candle danced warmly in his eyes. His expression assumed that quality it always had when he was actively choosing his words with full awareness of their cosmic weight.
"Because you deserve to be accurately seen, Amy," Marvin said, his voice dropping into a register that commanded the very air in the room to still. "Not just professionally—though you are gorgeous, brilliantly exceptional at your work, and I am acutely aware of that fact, and I hope I communicate my reliance on you adequately. I mean personally."
He held her gaze, refusing to let her look away from the truth.
"You spend an exhausting amount of effort managing everyone else's needs, their corporate requirements, their creative outputs, and their chaotic schedules," Marvin murmured, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "You are extraordinarily, almost good at the work of caring for other people's professional lives. And I have noticed, in these days of observation, that you extend to yourself a smaller portion of the attention you so freely extend to everyone else."
A heavy, intimate pause hung in the candlelight..
"That is a tragic thing I noticed, Amy," Marvin whispered, the Incubus charm wrapping completely around her heart. "Today... I wanted to do something to correct it."
Amy Adams, who had been performing on stages since she was eight years old, and who had developed in the grueling decades since an incredibly hard-won composure, sat in her living room chair and simply let the tears stream freely down her face without making a single attempt to stop them.
"Okay," she breathed. Her voice was remarkably steady, which she internally considered to be a monumental achievement given the circumstances.
"Okay," Marvin agreed softly, a beautiful, warm smile breaking across his face.
She reached forward with trembling hands and cut two generous slices of the artisan lemon tart. She handed one to him on a porcelain plate across the coffee table, and kept one for herself. They sat in the warm, amber quiet of the evening, eating lemon tart in silence. And the tart tasted the way she needed it to taste—which meant it tasted like something luxurious that she hadn't allowed herself to want, and was now being freely, generously given anyway.
"There is exactly one more thing," Marvin announced smoothly, when the lemon tart was half gone and the evening had finally settled into the easy comfortable quiet that only followed a magnificent meal and a soul-baring conversation.
"Marvin," Amy laughed wetly, wiping her eyes with a napkin. "If you produce a diamond necklace or the keys to a European castle from behind that couch, I swear I am going to—"
"It is not from behind the couch," Marvin interrupted mildly, his eyes gleaming with amusement.
He reached into the breast pocket of his crisp white shirt.
He produced a thick envelope.
It was cream-colored, heavy stock. Her name was written across the front in his aristocratic calligraphy.
She looked at it resting in his elegant fingers.
"Should I be concerned?" she asked, her heart giving a nervous flutter.
"No," Marvin said, with the mildness of honesty. "Interested, I hope."
She took the envelope. She popped the wax seal and opened it with the same care. She pulled out the single, thick, folded document inside and opened it.
It was a contract.
Not a handwritten note, not a promise on a napkin. It was a proper five-page legal document—the formal, precisely formatted legal architecture that she had become intimately familiar with in her weeks of managing his professional CAA correspondence. It carried the rigid structure and dense, binding language of a multi-million-dollar corporate agreement.
She read it with the attention of someone who has learned to read Hollywood contracts carefully, her eyes darting through the clauses.
It was, she established in the very first paragraph, a first-look talent agreement.
And in the second paragraph, she read the terms of that first-look. It was a legally binding commitment to offer, upon the official establishment of an independent film recording and production studio under the Meyers family enterprise, the inaugural, flagship talent contract to one Amy Adams.
The contract explicitly slated her for rapid development as an A-list actress and a recording artist. The terms included full, creative consultation rights, a guaranteed, fully-funded debut cinematic project of no less than a specified budget. This she had never seen offered to a debut talent in any negotiation she had ever witnessed or participated in at CAA.
She read the first page twice. Her breath completely left her lungs.
Then, she slowly looked up at him.
"Marvin... you're opening a movie studio?" she whispered, her voice completely hollow with shock.
"In time," Marvin confirmed smoothly, taking a sip of his sparkling cider. "When the global infrastructure is fully ready. The financial foundations are currently being laid as we speak. The market work and corporate espionage you've been coordinating with the Asian Vanguard contributes to that war chest, among several other things."
He looked at her with steadiness.
"When the studio gates finally open, Amy, I want the very first name on the marquee roster to be yours."
"Marvin, I—"
"You possess acting range, and your physical looks are entirely cinematic," Marvin interrupted softly, stating it with the calm, indisputable certainty of someone stating a basic geological fact about a mountain. "You do not have an adequate voice, nor do you have merely a serviceable one. You have a breathtaking, Broadway-caliber voice that has been tragically under-deployed for reasons that have more to do with the geographic limitations of where you've been trapped, rather than with what you actually possess. The Chanhassen Dinner Theatre work is good. But it isn't enough."
He held her gaze, the Incubus power blazing in his eyes. "I intend to do something incredible about that."
She looked down at the contract. Then at his face. Then back at the contract. "Marvin, this is a legally binding document," she breathed.
"That is exactly what contracts are designed to be, my lady," he agreed smoothly.
"I haven't had a lawyer look at this."
"I recommend doing so before you sign it," Marvin said, completely unbothered. "I will have Thomas— agreements—make himself available to you this week. The terms are favorable to you. A secondary legal opinion will only confirm this fact, not revise it."
She looked at the document trembling in her hands. The first-look clause. The budget guarantee. The creative consultation rights that were written with a specificity that indicated someone had thought carefully about exactly what those rights meant in practical Hollywood reality, rather than simply making an empty, verbal gesture in their direction.
"Why me?" she asked.
She didn't ask it modestly. She wasn't performing a cheap, insecure uncertainty about her own artistic value. She asked it genuinely, wanting to understand the specific, cold reasoning of the brilliant boy sitting across from her.
"Because I have watched you for days, Amy," Marvin said, his voice dropping into that devastating register. "I have watched exactly how you operate under catastrophic, global pressure. I have seen what you do when international wire transfers go wrong. I have watched how you treat people across every single level of a professional hierarchy. I have heard you singing to yourself in moments when you thought no one was listening in the estate."
A heavy, pregnant pause filled the room.
"I have seen what your brilliant mind does with a complex problem that doesn't have an obvious, easy solution," Marvin murmured. "And I have heard the raw power of your looks. All of those factors together produce a answer to the question of who exactly I want to launch."
Amy sat perfectly still.
She sat with a multi-million-dollar contract in her lap, the artisan lemon tart on the coffee table, the vintage guitar leaning against the couch, the fresh peonies on the windowsill, the masterpiece of a cake still resting on the kitchen counter, and continuous days of irrefutable evidence that the impossibly handsome boy sitting across from her was an entity that fundamentally did not fit into any earthly category she had brought to the job when she started it.
"I'm going to cry again," Amy informed him, her voice thick and watery.
"That is fine," Marvin smiled softly.
"It's embarrassing."
"It isn't," he corrected gently, the aura wrapping around her like a shield. "It is profoundly honest. And honesty is almost never embarrassing in the correct, intimate context."
She looked at him. This strange, and overwhelmingly extraordinary little man. A man who had spent his entire day cooking her soup, baking her cake, writing her a masterpiece of a song, and personally drafting a legal document designed to permanently alter the trajectory of her professional life.
A demon who had memorized a birth date from a corporate file and a culinary preference from a muttered sentence she'd said to herself in frustration.
Who had been paying attention these days.
"Okay," Amy said, wiping her eyes fiercely.
She looked down at the five-page contract. A sudden, fierce, and reckless spark ignited in her chest.
She grabbed the thick stack of premium, legal-grade paper with both hands.
Before Marvin could even ask what she was doing, Amy tore the entire contract directly in half.
The loud *rrriiiippp* of the paper tearing echoed like a gunshot in the quiet apartment.
Marvin actually blinked, genuine surprise flashing across his features for the first time all evening.
"Amy, what on earth—"
"I don't need this piece of paper," Amy declared fiercely, tossing the torn, multi-million-dollar halves of the contract onto the coffee table. Her dark eyes were blazing with unwavering conviction.
She leaned forward, closing the distance between them, looking directly into his stunned, nebula-blue eyes.
"I don't need five pages of legal jargon to tell me exactly what you are going to do when you finally open the gates to your own studio, Marvin Meyers," Amy whispered, her voice vibrating with romantic light. "I know exactly who you are. I know exactly how you operate. When the time comes, I know you will build me into something, simply because I am not sure."
She reached out, her hands gently framing his flawless face.
"I don't want a contract," she murmured, her thumbs lightly brushing his cheekbones, the heat of the Incubus magic flaring wildly between them. "I just want you to promise me."
Marvin stared at the beautiful woman holding his face. The demon inside him roared with approval. She hadn't just accepted the gift; she had rejected the corporate safety net in favor of blind faith in his word. It was the intoxicating acceptance of her soul.
A slow magnificent smirk spread across his lips.
"I promise you, my beautiful lady," Marvin purred, his velvety voice laced with unbreakable power. "The world will know your name."
He gently reached up, covering her hands with his own, pressing a lingering romantic kiss to her palms.
"Fine," Marvin chuckled, the romantic tension breaking into a moment of pure, brilliant banter. "I accept your dramatic rejection of my legal efforts. But remember this, Miss Adams... before you inevitably become a famous A-list movie star, you must swear to personally headhunt and interview a replacement executive assistant for me."
He raised an eyebrow, his eyes gleaming with wicked mischief.
"And she must be exactly as gorgeous as you. Exactly as stunningly beautiful as you. And exactly as brilliantly smart as you. Otherwise, I will simply have too many problems."
Amy threw her head back and let out a loud, joyous, and completely unburdened laugh that filled the entire apartment.
"You are impossible, Marvin!" she laughed, gently swatting his shoulder. "Good luck finding a unicorn like me twice in one lifetime."
"I am an excellent hunter," Marvin smirked, reaching forward to cut himself another small slice of the lemon tart.
*****
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