Chapter 40
LAUREL
“You did all this?”
Beckett stands just inside the spare-room door, staring past me like the room has knocked every clever thing out of him.
Deep blue and violet constellations drift across the ceiling and spill down the walls, sliding over his dark hair, the black frames on his nose, the broad line of his shoulders.
There’s this rare, unguarded softness on his face that makes every minute I spent getting this right worth it.
I smile. “Of course I did. It’s our second date.”
His eyes come back to mine. “For me?”
“For you.”
Beckett gave me the best first date of my life without ever making it feel like he was trying to impress me.
He just paid attention. To me. He remembered what I could and couldn’t eat, what I wanted, what I didn’t, where my boundaries were.
I wanted to give some of that care back.
I wanted him to walk into tonight and know I’d been thinking about him too.
So I planned.
I dragged two mattresses together beneath the projector and covered them in quilts, blankets and far too many pillows.
A low tray sits between two floor cushions with flatbread, strawberries, cheese, crackers and sparkling water, the cheesecake still downstairs waiting for later.
A vanilla candle burns on the windowsill, its warmth mixing with the faint cedar scent from the old chest underneath it, and the blackout curtains have swallowed the outside world so completely there is nothing beyond these four walls but drifting stars and us.
His eyes narrow with sudden understanding. “Wait. Is this why you kept disappearing upstairs while I was making dinner?”
I grin. “Maybe.”
“I was starting to worry about your bladder.”
A laugh slips out of me. “How romantic.”
“I was concerned.”
“You were nosy.”
“Also true.”
The amusement fades almost as quickly as it came. Beckett looks around again, slower this time, lingering over the blankets, the tray, the drifting stars as if every detail means something different now that he knows I put it there for him.
“Well,” I murmur when the silence stretches. “You’re making me nervous now.”
A breath leaves him, almost a laugh, but the softness doesn’t disappear. He reaches for my hand instead, threading our fingers together as his attention settles back on me.
“I’m trying to think of something to say that doesn’t sound inadequate.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I know.” His thumb strokes mine. “That might be why I want to.”
My heart gives a painful skip.
“I wanted to do something for you,” I whisper. “You made the first one matter to me. I wanted this one to matter to you.”
“It already does.”
His gaze travels around the room once more before returning to me. “Thank you, Laurel.”
I squeeze his hand. “You’re welcome, handsome.”
His free hand goes to the back of his neck, rubbing there once as he looks anywhere but directly at me.
A laugh warms my throat. “You know, you blush a lot for a man who negotiates nine-figure deals.”
“Boardrooms rarely put me in rooms full of fake stars with a woman I’ve wanted for years.”
What?
“Years?”
The realization of what he’s just admitted crosses his face a second too late.
Oh, absolutely not.
I tug on our joined hands. “You said it. Come sit down and ruin your own evening.”
He chuckles under his breath and lowers himself onto the mattress. I follow, tucking one leg under me as blue light drifts across his shirt.
“Years?” I repeat, because I’m not letting that disappear. “How many years are we talking about here?”
Beckett lifts the frames slightly and rubs a thumb along the bridge of his nose, giving me the look of a man discovering that honesty has consequences.
“Austin.”
The word knocks loose a memory immediately: backstage after the show, seven years ago, when Vale House was still just another company making offers I had no intention of accepting blindly.
Beckett had introduced himself by telling me I had one of the strongest pens in Nashville, and two weeks later I sat across from him in Los Angeles arguing over an offer that gave his company too much control and me too little reason to trust it.
“Since then?”
“You have no idea.” His voice lowers, some of the humor leaving it.
“You were furious with me. Brilliant, but furious. You took that contract apart line by line and looked at me like my last name was supposed to impress you and had failed miserably. You knew exactly what was wrong with the deal, exactly what you’d earned the right to ask for, and you never made yourself smaller just to make the room more comfortable.
” He pauses, almost smiling at the memory.
“I’d spent years sitting across from artists who wanted Vale House badly enough to become agreeable the minute negotiations started.
You didn’t give a damn whether I liked you. ”
A soft laugh leaves him.
“And I liked you before the meeting was half over.”
Shock pins every muscle in place, my mouth still open around whatever I want to say.
“I wasn’t in love with you,” he continues after a moment.
“I didn’t know you well enough to call it that.
But I wanted you. I wanted to know you. There’s a difference, and I’m not going to rewrite history because we’re sitting under fake stars now.
” His hand settles beside mine on the blanket, close without claiming it.
“You were married. That made the rest very simple. Whatever I thought about Grant, whatever I thought about the way your career was being handled, you had made vows to him and I wasn’t going to turn professional access into an excuse to interfere with your marriage. ” He pauses. “But Grant knew.”
I finally find my voice. “How?”
Beckett’s expression goes almost rueful.
“Men know. You can call it ego, territorial instinct, whatever ugly evolutionary bullshit you prefer, but a man usually knows when another man is paying particular attention to the woman he loves. Grant saw me listen to you. He saw where my attention went when you spoke. I was careful. I was never indifferent.”
Grant had hated Beckett almost on sight. I’d always blamed the offer, the competition, his pathological need to measure himself against another powerful man.
It never occurred to me that the jealous asshole had simply clocked Beckett wanting more than my signature before I did.
“So when I came back…” I begin.
Beckett exhales through his nose, and this time there’s no hiding the warmth in his face even under all this blue.
“Seven years later, you walked back into my life furious again, except this time you had every reason to be. And yes, some part of me thought the universe had developed a very strange sense of humor.” His fingers finally find mine.
“But you were hurt. Your marriage was collapsing. Your career had been tampered with. The last thing I wanted was for you to look back one day and wonder if I saw your worst week as my opportunity.” His thumb moves over my knuckle.
“So I waited. I gave you the offer. I told you to get your own lawyer and your own accountant. And every time you chose to come back into the room after that, I let myself want a little more.”
I have to blink hard once. “Jesus, Beckett.” He watches me, almost wary now, as if he’s afraid he finally said too much. “You really liked me.”
A slow breath leaves him. “I really did.”
“For seven years?”
That makes him shake his head. “No.” His answer comes without hesitation, and weirdly, I’m glad for it.
“I wanted you seven years ago. You were married, so I lived my fucking life, Laurel. I wasn’t sitting in a dark room preserving myself for a woman who belonged to someone else.
” His eyes stay on mine. “I loved someone. Seriously. I built a home with her. We got close to building the rest of it too.” Surprise must cross my face because his fingers close a little tighter around mine. “Elise.”
I shift giving him my full attention now. “How close is close?”
For a few seconds he watches the stars move across the ceiling. “Four years. We lived together for most of it. Marriage stopped being hypothetical. We looked at venues, talked dates, budgets, guest lists. All the deeply romantic administrative shit people apparently do before promising forever.”
There’s affection in the memory, but no longing, and that distinction matters more than I expected it to.
“We loved each other. That was never really the problem. We were also both ambitious as hell, and for a long time we thought that meant we understood each other better than anyone else could. If I had to cancel dinner for work, she understood because she’d done it the week before.
If she disappeared into a project for three days, I understood because I’d disappear into one the next month.
Neither of us ever asked the other to choose.
” His attention stays on the ceiling. “Eventually we got so good at giving each other space that there wasn’t much left between us.
Same house, same bed, shared calendar, separate lives.
Somewhere in there we stopped being in love and kept planning a wedding because admitting that felt harder than moving another date. ”
Even with his explanation, asking feels more dangerous than it should. “Do you still love her?”
His eyes come to mine. “Not in the way you mean. I care what happens to her. I’m glad she’s happy. She has a husband, a daughter, a whole life I’ve no wish to disturb.” There isn’t a pause designed to reassure me, and the knot inside me loosens.
I nudge his ankle with mine. “Thank you for telling me.”
“You know every bad detail of your marriage is either public record or sitting in a lawyer’s inbox. It felt dishonest to let you think I arrived here with no wreckage of my own.”
“I don’t need you spotless, Beckett.”
“Good.”
“I’d hate you spotless.”
“Even better.”
I study him for a moment. “Did losing her change you?”