Chapter 8
BECKETT
Seven years without a word from Laurel Mercer, and all it takes is her name in my inbox to fuck up my concentration.
Three attorneys are arguing over the indemnification language in a twelve-million-dollar acquisition, and I haven’t absorbed a useful word in the past thirty seconds.
My pen has gone still against the margin of the contract.
Outside the glass walls, the city has settled into darkness, traffic threading between buildings far below, yet my eyes keep straying to the notification glowing at the corner of my screen.
Laurel Mercer.
I let Mara finish her argument without opening it, less out of discipline than stubbornness.
I’m not derailing a twelve-million-dollar negotiation because a woman I haven’t spoken to in years decides to put her name back in front of me at eight-seventeen on a Wednesday night.
Opposing counsel chooses the same moment to revive a point we settled an hour ago, and by the time he starts repackaging the objection in different language, my patience is gone.
I drag my thumb across the trackpad and open Laurel’s email.
Laurel: I need to know exactly what happened after you sent the revised offer in February 2019. Who responded, and what were you told?
“Beckett?”
Mara’s voice draws me back to the table.
My general counsel has stopped mid-sentence, and the two attorneys across from us are watching me now, one with a marked-up page still pinched between his fingers.
I know exactly where the deal stands: the provision Mara can concede, the one she won’t, and the liability carve-out they’ve spent the past hour complicating for sport.
Another round of the same shit isn’t going to improve it.
I cap my pen and slide it onto the contract. “We’re done here.”
The attorney nearest me glances at the documents as though the remaining pages might appeal the decision for him. “There’s still the liability carve-out.”
“Which you’ve explained three times. Send Mara the revised language tonight. If you’ve found a fourth way to make the same point, save it for nine tomorrow.”
Whatever response he had lined up never makes it out.
Mara is already closing her laptop, one corner of her mouth lifting just enough to tell me she enjoyed that more than opposing counsel did.
Chairs scrape back, folders disappear into briefcases, and the room empties through a handful of restrained goodnights.
I remain at the table until the door closes behind them, undo one cuff, and pull up the Vale House archives.
Her file takes a few clicks to surface, the correspondence still intact after all these years.
I keep what matters. Paper trails have a habit of becoming valuable the moment someone’s memory starts disagreeing with mine, and that habit has saved me more than one expensive argument.
The revised proposal is still there, dated February 2019.
Grant’s response is exactly where I remember it.
So is my reply asking to speak with Laurel directly, the call note logged ten minutes later, and the follow-up my office sent a few days after that.
I read the thread once, paying closer attention now to what isn’t there: no response from Laurel, no confirmation forwarded in her name, not a single sentence written by her.
I knew that much in 2019. What I couldn’t know was whether Grant was speaking for his wife or speaking over her.
Her email answers a question I stopped asking years ago.
I could send the archive and let the documents speak for themselves. It’d be cleaner, certainly more appropriate than reopening a part of my life I’ve had no reason to examine in a long time. By the time I finish making the argument, my phone is already in my hand.
Her number hasn’t changed. I stare at it for a second, irritated by how much I like knowing that, then hit call before I can manufacture another reason not to.
She answers on the first ring. “Beckett?”
Hearing her is more disarming than seeing her name on my screen.
The injury left a rasp in her voice that wasn’t there in Austin, roughening the clear, effortless sound I remember.
Until now, I’d known about the damage only through industry talk and the occasional headline.
The cadence is still unmistakable. So is the way she says my name.
“Laurel.”
“I was going to wait for your email, but since you called, tell me now. Who answered you after you sent the revision, and what did they say?”
Straight for the artery.
“Grant replied the next morning. According to him, you’d reviewed it and decided to stay independent.
I asked to hear it from you, not him. Ten minutes later, he called, told me you’d made your decision, and made it clear I was expected to respect it.
My office made one more attempt a few days later. We never reached you.”
She says nothing for so long that I glance at the screen to make sure the call is still connected.
At last, her voice comes through. “I never saw it. The revision. I didn’t even know you’d sent one.”
I pull the archived thread onto my second monitor. “I have the original proposal, the revision, Grant’s response, my reply, and the follow-up from my office. Timestamps, attachments, everything.”
A horn blares on her end, followed by the sound of tires rolling over concrete. The echo is wrong for an open street.
“Okay.” A breath passes. “Beckett?”
“I’m here.”
“Was that the last time Vale tried to do business with me?”
The question takes my hand off the mouse.
“No. After your injury, we put together a publishing proposal. No recording commitment, no touring requirement, nothing contingent on your voice recovering. Vale would provide the capital and infrastructure; you would build the imprint around your catalogue, sign and develop writers, operate it under your own name, and retain the majority stake.”
“And Mercer received it?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t.”
I lean back in my chair, looking at the two separate sets of correspondence open across my monitors.
Different years. Different proposals. Same woman missing from every decision made in her name.
A car door shuts through the phone, the sound bouncing off concrete, and the acoustics finally place themselves.
“Where are you?” She hesitates just long enough to make me sit forward. “Laurel.”
“I’m downstairs.”
I look toward the conference-room doors. “Downstairs where?”
“Your parking garage.”
∞∞∞
I’m downstairs within minutes, crossing the garage toward a black Range Rover parked beneath a row of fluorescent lights.
Laurel is standing beside the driver’s door with a battered guitar case at her feet and a document box braced against one hip.
Her hair is twisted into a loose knot, several dark strands already escaping around her face, one brushing the corner of her mouth as she turns at the sound of my steps.
She looks tired. Pissed off, judging by the tight set of that mouth.
And so fucking beautiful that my stride loses half a beat before I correct it.
Christ.
I remembered her face. I’d forgotten the fucking pull of it.
My eyes move over the arch of her brows, the sharper cut of her cheekbones, the full Cupid’s bow of her mouth.
Some of the softness I remember at twenty-eight is gone, leaving her more self-possessed, less interested in making herself palatable for anyone else.
Considerably harder to look away from too.
Her navy dress bares her shoulders, fits close through her waist, then falls over hips I’ve already spent too much time appreciating. Stellar restraint on my part.
She shifts the box against her side, and the diamond on her left hand glints. Message received. I haul my eyes back to her face. Wanting Laurel was never complicated—I wanted her in Austin because I had eyes. Married woman, though. Pretty basic math.
The real inconvenience came later, in Los Angeles, when I discovered the face came attached to a brain sharp enough to make bullshit expensive.
She picked holes in my deal, rejected lazy answers on principle, and looked at me like owning the label didn’t magically make every argument out of my mouth a good one. Fair.
Grant kept answering questions I’d directed at her.
Laurel kept taking the conversation back without raising her voice or turning it into a fucking production.
He spoke; she waited; then those eyes came back to me and we carried on.
I liked the hell out of that—the slight lift of her brow when she thought I was feeding her shit, the way she pushed harder instead of backing off, the fact that I kept finding myself smiling whenever she came back with something smarter than what I’d given her.
I wanted to sign her, work with her, and look at her far longer than another man’s wife had any business occupying my thoughts—the first two were legitimate; the last stayed exactly where it belonged, in my fucking head.
“You could’ve told security you were coming up.”
“I wasn’t sure I was.”
“What changed?”
“I found the email you mentioned.”
She readjusts the document box against her hip. I take it before her forearm loses the argument, and the weight lands in my hands with a solid thud. “What the hell is in here?”
“Everything I had the sense not to leave at home.”
“Does Grant know you’re here?”
Her eyes meet mine, cool and direct. “I don’t give a fuck what Grant knows anymore.”
A faint smirk pulls at my mouth. I see. Grant Mercer appears to be having a spectacular week.
I hook the box under one arm and head for the elevator. “Come with me.”
A few minutes later, Laurel sits across from my desk with the revised offer open between us, her fingertip parked beside Grant’s claim she had reviewed the terms herself.
She reads the same sentence for the fourth time.
I leave her to it. I’m shit at consolation, but I know better than to crowd pain with sympathetic noise simply because silence makes most people twitchy.