17. Rowan
ROWAN
The weekend at the lake goes by fast. Part of that is because I showed up a day late. The rest is because I spent most of it picturing my brothers wrapped around Leah in a bed two doors down from mine.
Time does strange things when you’re lying awake listening for sounds through a wall you designed to be soundproof.
I’m not jealous. I want to be clear about that, at least with myself. Declan and Emmett having her doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that I don’t have her, too. I want her to be mine, but I won’t let myself.
So the drive back Sunday night feels less like the end of a vacation and more like the end of a test I barely passed.
Koi Tower puts all four of us under the same roof, but at least here I have my own door, and my own space, and my own studio across town where nobody is walking around barefoot in one of Emmett’s shirts.
That plan lasts as far as Monday morning’s elevator.
The doors open on her floor, and there she is, laptop and a notebook tucked under one arm, looking like someone who would rather be doing anything other than what she’s about to do.
“Hey.” I glance at the laptop. “Heading out?”
She nods and steps in beside me.
The doors close. We’re three floors down before it registers.
“Hang on.” I hit the button to hold the car between floors. “Where’s your security?”
“Shift change.” She shrugs. “I was supposed to stay inside until the next guy showed up, but after two days at the lake, I don’t want to spend today locked in my condo. I just wanted to walk somewhere. Ease back into the week.”
“Does Declan know you’re doing this?”
“Declan is in a meeting until noon.”
Which is not the same thing as a no. I look at her. She looks at the doors like she’s willing them open. It’s the look of someone who has spent a lot of her life waiting for other people’s permission and is tired of it, and I don’t have the heart to make her go back upstairs.
I also don’t have any intention of letting her walk around the city alone.
“I’m going to my studio,” I tell her. “I’ve got drafts due mid-week. You could work there. Until your guy turns up.”
She looks at me quizzically. “Why don’t you work at the Oliver Development Group offices? That building is huge.”
“I like having my own space.” And I realize that Leah is the first person I’ve ever invited to my studio. So, I tell her that. “You’d be my first guest.”
Her whole face changes. “Really? You’ll let me join you?”
“There’s a desk. There’s coffee. It’s not exciting.”
“It’s not my condo,” she says, and laughs, and I let the elevator go.
My driver is waiting at the curb. She keeps pace with me easily across the lobby.
“It’s not that I don’t like my work,” she says as my driver opens the back door of the SUV. “It’s just—” She doesn’t finish her thought and climbs into the backseat.
I follow her in, sitting next to her. “You’d rather be creating your ideas.”
She stops with her hand on the seatbelt. “How did you know that?”
I didn’t read her mind. I just recognized something. But I don’t say that, because it would mean admitting how closely I watch her, and I’m not sure she’d want to know. I notice everything Leah does. I couldn’t stop if I tried.
“Lucky guess,” I say, buckling my own seatbelt.
The studio is on the top floor of a converted warehouse, big windows, exposed brick. I unlock the door and remember, one step inside, that I didn’t clean up on Friday.
“Apologies for the mess.” I run a hand through my hair as I look around the workspace. “Like I said, you’re my first guest.”
“What mess?” She’s already looking around. “This is all beautiful.”
“Beautiful?”
That’s not a word I’ve heard used for my work.
People say the buildings my brothers and I build are impressive, and every once in a while someone says beautiful after the finishing touches are done and the interior designer has had her way with the place.
No one has ever looked at my architectural drawings and blue pencil sketches and called them beautiful.
I’m not sure what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.
“You can work anywhere you’d like.” I motion at the desks and working nooks around the studio.
While I set down my things and dig around for a drafting lead, I watch her from the corner of my eye.
I want to see what she gravitates toward, which space calls to her, how she fits inside this place with me.
I’m different from my brothers this way.
They’re business and socializing and corporate politics.
I’m just the rich guy who knows how to draw.
Shit.
The one thing I forgot was the sketch wall, and how much I didn’t want her to see it. Not the blueprints. Not the schematics. My latest creative distraction.
Her. I’ve been drawing her.
“Leah, I can explain.”
I cross the room fast and start pulling down the drawings of her, the portraits I’ve sketched from the image that never leaves my head.
When I should have been drawing geometric lines and structural scale, I was drawing the soft curve of her cheek and the way her lashes gather at the corners of her eyes.
The most revealing ones are the sketches I made when I let my mind wander beneath her clothes. I pull those down fastest.
“No, wait.” She reaches for the papers in my hand. “I want to see them. Please.”
I let out a breath and hand them over.
“It’s just my creative brain being stupid while I’m trying to work.” It’s a poor cover for the fact that I can’t stop thinking about her, and I know it while I say it. “You’re very beautiful, and I—”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
She’s surprised. That makes me want to punch Kian in the face even more than I already did. Any man with Leah should tell her how beautiful she is on a loop. What a dirtbag my brother is, to have made her feel anything less than perfect.
“Of course I do. Because you are. Anyone who says otherwise, or who fails to tell you, doesn’t deserve the air they breathe around you.”
Leah sets the sketches down on a nearby table and steps closer. If the feeling in my chest when she’s this close were a tangible thing, it would be a bomb that would take this whole place up like kindling.
“Rowan.” She lays her hand on my chest. “You’re beautiful too.”
I feel myself shrink from her words, like a fox retreating into the tree line.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then.” The bitterness in my voice isn’t for her. “Because I look at my face and see all the terrible things it can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you already know what Kian did. The stealing. The girlfriends.” I stop to steady my breath.
Her palm is still against my heart, and it’s hard to think around it.
“What I didn’t tell you is what I took from all of it.
That anyone who says they love me is loving the face, and the face comes in two models. I’m interchangeable.”
I wait for her to pull her hand back. To tell me to get over myself, the way Kian did any time I complained about him using our likeness to get what he wanted.
Her hand stays. Her eyes soften, and so does her voice, and she lifts her other hand to my chest too.
“I don’t just see your face, Rowan,” she says, quiet, like a secret only the two of us share.
“I see a man who has appeared at my side every time I’ve needed him, without being asked.
A man who would give up what he wants to make sure the people around him have something real.
You step into the shadows to protect everyone else.
But I see you, Rowan. Not your face. You. ”
“Prove it.”
The words slip out before I mean them to. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. You don’t have to prove anything to me. I shouldn’t—”
“I’ll prove it by telling you a secret.” She cuts me off. “Something I’ve never told anyone. Something I keep close, because I’m afraid that saying it out loud will make it disappear. If I thought you were just a handsome face, Rowan, I wouldn’t trust you enough to tell you.”
“What is it?”
She pauses and looks around the studio, breathing deep, making sure. I don’t blame her. She’s been through a lot, and trust doesn’t come easy to people who know what it feels like to have it betrayed.
But when her eyes come back to mine, she smiles.
“I have a secret project. Just for me. Not something I’m being paid for, not something a client asked for.
It’s not even really graphic design.” She takes a breath.
“I’m writing a children’s picture book. I’m doing all of it, the writing, the illustrations, the cover.
It’s about a fox who never had a den of her own.
I want to see my book on bookstore shelves around the world.
Because the fox is me, and the den I never had is something I’m just now starting to find with the three of you.
And if the book is out there on a shelf one day, maybe it helps some kid feel less alone than I felt for most of my life. ”
I stand there feeling the weight of her hands on my chest and don’t say anything for a long moment.
I wasn’t going to tell her. Keeping my distance has seemed like the best way to keep from getting hurt. The fake relationship makes that hard. Her sleeping with Declan and Emmett makes that hard. But it has still felt like the smart choice.
Right now, I’m considering throwing smart out the fucking window.
“I have a secret too, Leah.” I lift my hand and cover hers.
“You do? What is it?”
“I already knew about your fox.”
“You did?” Then her face changes. “The napkin. At your family dinner.”
“The napkin.” I remember the moment exactly. “You went somewhere else in the middle of all that tension, and where you went was that fox. And when you thought someone might see, you hid it. I didn’t know about the book or what it means to you. But I knew one thing.”
“What?”
“That the fox was something precious to you. Something you’d protect.”
She smiles. “You got all that from a doodle on a napkin?”
“Yes. Because I see you, Leah. I have since the moment I first saw you at that gala.”
“Good.” She wraps my shirt around her fist and pulls me closer. “Then you understand what I mean when I say I see you too, Rowan. Not for your face. For the man you are.”
For one second, I let her. Her fist in my shirt, her mouth an inch from mine.
Then I put my hand over hers and ease her fingers open.
“Leah. I can’t do this.” I step back. Half a step. It feels like a mile. I check my phone. “We came here to work.”
She looks at me for a long moment, and I watch her decide not to say what she’s thinking. “Okay.”
She takes the desk by the window. I take my table. For the next five hours, she works on designing a new book cover. I draw the same wall section eleven times, and neither of us says a word about it.
We only take a small break to order some food.
When the sun goes down, we pack up and ride back to our building together, and neither of us says a word the whole way.