Chapter 31
NICK
I've positioned myself at the edge of the ballroom, back to the wall where the St. Regis's gilded columns cast long shadows, a glass of whiskey barely touched and warming in my hand. All my focus is on the vision in midnight blue silk up on the stage, her blonde hair glowing under the ballroom chandeliers, the pearls and diamonds at her throat a satisfying reminder that she’s mine.
My wife, although no one in this audience full of New York’s elite knows it.
Pride swells behind my ribs as I watch Avery at the microphone, wrapping up her remarks. The room has gone absolutely still. Not the restless, polite silence of donors calculating their tax deductions. Real, rapt attention. The kind you can't buy.
She's not performing. She's sharing. And this crowd, for all their sophistication, can feel the difference.
As she explains her belief that art can light a path out of the dark, she catches my eye across the crowd.
Even at this distance, her smile reaches me like a physical thing.
Everything male in me responds to that subtle, secret curve of her lips, meant only for me.
I take a sip of my whiskey and start calculating how soon before I can take her out of here and get her back into our bed.
I set my whiskey on the bar, about to head through the crowd to meet her once she finishes her closing words. A deep voice on the other side of me halts my exit.
"Impressive speech. Your fiancée is a natural."
The remark comes from my left—low, arrogant, with the kind of unstated authority that doesn't need volume. I turn, and the first thing I clock about him is his height. Six-three, at least. His hair is a similarly dark shade to mine, though slightly less contained than my precision style. Broad through the shoulders, he’s got a predator’s frame, trim and dangerous beneath a black tuxedo suit that screams Savile Row.
Storm-gray eyes are already locked on mine, reading me with the same sharp, assessing focus I'm turning on him.
A signet ring gleams on his right hand. Old family. Old money. The kind that opens doors I've had to kick down.
I don't recognize him, but everything about him puts my instincts on alert.
"Sebastian Roth." He extends his hand. His brief smile is more a baring of teeth, slashing deep dimples beneath cheekbones that could cut glass. "We've never met in person. I thought I'd fix that."
Sebastian Roth. Second in line to the formidable Roth hotel dynasty. The sonofabitch has cost me millions on more than one acquisition. He also, for reasons I’ve yet to figure out, seems to be engaged in some kind of private pissing contest with me.
Since he first appeared on my radar nearly two years ago, I've begun to anticipate his moves in negotiations. I’ve gotten to know his family company's financials better than some of my own subsidiaries. And, I can admit, I’ve respected his intelligence even as I’ve worked to outmaneuver him.
But we've never been in the same room until this moment.
I take his offered hand, albeit reluctantly. The handshake is firm and brief—his testing mine, mine answering. Neither of us yields. Neither of us pretends to.
"Roth." I release first. My choice. "A bit out of your element, aren’t you? Youth outreach programs don't seem like Roth Hospitality Group territory."
"No. But I wrote a sizable check to your foundation tonight, so I figured that earned me five minutes with the host." The smile tightens without losing any warmth. "The work you're doing here is impressive, Baine. I don't say that to many people."
"I'll take the compliment. Now tell me why you're actually here."
"Curiosity." He lifts a champagne flute from a passing tray with the casualness of a man who was born for ballrooms and black tie while I was running around barefoot and wild in Florida swamps.
"You and I have circled each other for years now without once being in the same room.
That Al-Hassan property deal alone should've warranted a handshake. "
I scoff under my breath at the mention of the Dubai hotel acquisition where he drove my price up by eight figures before backing off. He drops the reminder the way a fencer lowers his guard—casual, deliberate, daring me to respond.
"If you were trying to get my attention, there were better ways to go about it." I level a hard stare on him. "As for the Dubai deal, you lost. Not for the last time, either."
"True enough." Those gray eyes glitter with what I'd almost call appreciation. "I don't lose often. It’s good to find a worthy opponent."
“Is it?” I smile, the first I’ve allowed him. "I can’t say I know the feeling. Personally, I’ve met so few."
His laugh is low and unforced, totally unoffended, which tells me more about Sebastian Roth than any corporate filing I've ever read. Most men shrink when I turn cold. This one sharpens. He even finds the pushback entertaining, if his grin is any indication.
He takes a measured sip of champagne, then his gaze drifts past me—past the donors in their formal attire and jewels, past the crystal and candlelight—and lands on the projected dedication banner behind the stage where Avery is delivering her closing lines.
At first I assume Roth’s gaze is caught on my wife, but then I notice he’s not looking at her as much as he is looking above her. To where the letters on the banner glow in the soft light of the slideshow.
The Elizabeth Xavier Center.
The sardonic ease drops out of his expression like a switch being thrown.
"Elizabeth Xavier." He says the name quietly. Carefully. With a weight that has no business existing between two men who met ninety seconds ago. "I wish I’d known her."
There’s an intimacy in his tone, and it makes every muscle in my body lock tight.
My mother is not networking currency. She is not a card for a business rival to play over champagne to ingratiate himself.
Her name is on that banner because she taught me that beauty was worth fighting for when everything around us was violent and ugly and hopeless, and she deserved to have that remembered long after the cancer stole her from me.
The fact that this man is standing here saying her name and speaking about her with the familiarity of someone who has a right to it sends ice through my veins.
"Careful, Roth." My voice drops to the register that makes people across negotiating tables sweat. "That name means more to me than you can possibly know."
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't step back. But whatever game he walked in here thinking he was going to play, he's done playing it. He sets his glass down on the bar without drinking from it.
"My mother's maiden name is Xavier too. Madeline Xavier. Elizabeth was her older sister."
The ballroom erupts in applause for Avery’s speech, but I barely hear it. All my surroundings, the people, the noise, the hum of conversations—everything fades to the far edge of my consciousness as I absorb the shock of what I just heard.
My mother had a sister.
Sebastian Roth holds my stunned stare. "We're cousins, Dominic."
What. The. Fuck. My mother never mentioned a sister. She never mentioned any of her family, except to mourn the fact that they’d all turned their backs on her. I never even knew their names aside from her surname.
I realize now that a part of me had grown convinced that they weren’t even real. Her family had erased her so completely I’d believed it possible that they no longer existed. No parents, no siblings, no aunts or uncles, no cousins. I built my entire goddamn life on that foundation.
On the fact that after my mother died, I was truly alone.
And now this man—this business rival who's been nipping at my heels for reasons that are only just starting to make sense—has been walking around with this shocking truth. A truth he evidently decided to keep from me.
"How long have you known this?" The words grind out of me.
He hesitates, his intense eyes searching mine. "About five years. Give or take."
Five years.
My fury is white-hot and immediate, and I bank it only because hundreds of donors surround us and my wife is currently wending her way toward me through the crowd of effusive gala attendees.
Five years of knowing we shared the same blood. Five years of him holding every card while I played in the dark.
"Is this some kind of joke to you, Roth?
" I close the distance between us, not as a threat, but a promise that the civilized veneer I'm wearing right now is costing me more than he can possibly calculate.
"You’ve had this knowledge for half a goddamned decade, yet you choose tonight—this moment—to come forward? "
“It’s complicated.” His jaw flexes, the first crack in his armor all evening. "The situation with my family required careful navigation. There were reasons I couldn't reach out sooner. I'm not laying them out at a charity gala."
I want to tear that evasion apart with my bare hands. I want to slam him against a wall and extract every detail. Who else knows? Who decided to keep this buried? What kind of family sits on a secret like this while the person it belongs to lives without it?
But this isn't the time and it sure as fuck isn't the place, so my discipline holds. Barely.
"My mother's parents." The words taste like ash. I can't bring myself to call them grandparents. They threw my mother away. They don't deserve the title. "Are they still alive?"
"Our grandfather passed twelve years ago.
" A pause. "Our grandmother, Constance, is still living, but her health has been fading for a while. Memory lapses are becoming more frequent. All to be expected, given her age. I’m sorry,” he says, sounding like he means it.
“That’s probably not the answer you were hoping for. "
"I wasn't hoping for anything." I hold his gaze, refusing to feel anything where he or his family is concerned. "I stopped expecting anything from the Xaviers a long time ago. Meeting you like this only convinces me I was right."
He nods slowly. Accepting the deflection without comment or apology. The edge has returned to his eyes, but tempered now, the look of a man who's said what he came to say and is calculating the cost.
“I should go. This is your night, and I can see I’ve already worn out my welcome.”
All I give him is a curt nod. I’m not sure what to make of him or the information he just dropped on me, but I know I don’t want to deal with it here.
A silence stretches between us, loaded, taut, neither of us willing to break it the wrong way. Then Sebastian straightens, adjusting his cuffs, his composure reassembling. The cool mask he’d been wearing when I first saw him slides back into place.
"Congratulations on your wedding, Dominic. I mean that sincerely." He shifts to safer ground, and I let him, because neither of us gains anything by detonating all of our family landmines in a ballroom. "Your fiancée is extraordinary."
"Yes. She is."
He inhales, his dark brows furrowing. "Marriage, though.
" He says it like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth.
"Not something that holds any appeal for me personally.
I'm not a one-woman man. Can't imagine anything that would change that.
" He says it with the absolute confidence of a man who's never been proven wrong. "But hey, to each his own."
I almost laugh. I remember believing that. Knowing it in my bones—the feeling that I'd never tie myself to someone, never hand anyone that kind of power over me, never make myself vulnerable enough to be destroyed. I built walls so high even I couldn't see over them.
And then Avery came into my life and every certainty I'd constructed crumbled like it had never existed at all.
I keep that to myself. Some lessons a man has to learn the hard way, on his own.
Whether he’s my cousin or not.
"Anytime you want to lose to me again, Roth, I'm available."
He smirks. "Noted. Enjoy your evening, Dominic."
With that he turns and cuts through the crowd, his long, unhurried stride carrying him toward the exit.
People shift out of his path without being asked, unconscious deference to the man’s extreme confidence and physical authority that naturally commands a room.
Then he's through the far doors and gone.
I stand there, processing. The gala noise filters back in again, as though someone just snapped their fingers and the ballroom has come back to life. Laughter, music, the murmur of conversations. I grab my whiskey and down it in one gulp.
The bartender catches my eye and heads right over to pour me another. I empty the glass and push it away on a muttered curse.
"Nick?" Avery appears at my side, still carrying that post-speech glow, but her expression falters the moment she sees my face. “Is everything all right?”
Her hand finds my arm, and the warmth of her touch grounds me. I pull her to me and breathe in. “You did great up there tonight, angel. I’m so proud of you.”
She pulls back, searching my gaze. “What’s going on? Who was that man I saw you talking to before I got here?”
I glance toward the space where Sebastian Roth vanished. The stranger who just rewrote everything I believed about my family.
I turn to meet Avery’s concerned eyes. Those green eyes have seen every broken part of me and stayed anyway. Now she’ll help me carry this new burden too. "That was Sebastian Roth. His mother is Madeline Xavier, my mother’s sister. He’s my cousin."
“Your what?” The shock on her face mirrors the earthquake still settling in my chest. She swivels her head to look for him, but he’s long gone now. When her eyes settle back on mine they’re filled with tenderness. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I shake my head. A firm denial. “No. I want to enjoy the rest of this evening with my gorgeous wife. I want you to eat some of the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner they’re about to serve, then I want to dance with you and revel in all of the envious stares from every man in this ballroom.”
A small crease knits her brow. “Nick…”
I silence her with a kiss. “I don’t want to think about Sebastian Roth or the Xaviers or anyone else right now.”
She’s still frowning, still looking at me with soft concern.
I don’t give her time to ask all of the questions swimming in her eyes.
Taking her hand, I lead her back through the sea of guests to our reserved table, doing my damnedest to put Sebastian Roth and his unsettling revelation out of my head.