Chapter 4 #2
I drag my attention back where it belongs.
She’s pale beneath the soft wash of makeup, and there’s anger in her face, yes, and humiliation too, still clinging to her skin like heat after a fever.
But there’s also something steadier than either of those things, something I remember all too well from the plane.
Because even then, when she had every reason to fold in on herself and let fear make her smaller, she didn’t do it, didn’t break, didn’t beg for softness she did not truly want.
The memory of that—the memory of the way she took me, the way she looked at me while I ruined her with my hand over her throat and my mouth at her ear—returns with enough force to settle low and hard in my body before I shove it down again, firmly, because if I let myself dwell on it now, even for a second, then I’m no better than the jackals I have just interrupted.
The room is still waiting for me to decide what happens next, and I am well aware of it.
Aware of the tension sitting beneath the chandeliers and silk and polished silver.
Aware of the way the guests have adopted expressions of polite discomfort that fool no one.
Aware of the servants along the walls keeping their eyes lowered while hearing every word, every laugh, every shift in tone, because houses like this are built on memory just as much as they’re built on stone, and whatever happens in this room tonight will be carried in whispers long after the flowers rot and the bride’s family sends out their thank-you notes.
Camille, to her credit, understands before my son does that the evening has slipped away from her, and though she keeps her chin lifted and her shoulders squared in that elegant, brittle way women like her learn young, I can already see the calculation beginning behind her eyes.
She knows she has overreached. She knows, worse, that she has done it with an audience, which means whatever dignity she recovers from this must be recovered carefully if she wants to keep it.
Ethan, unfortunately, still looks as though he believes he can outlast my patience if he stands there long enough with his jaw set and his expression blank, a childish instinct that would be almost funny if it didn’t so often embarrass me.
I look at Sienna again. I can’t not look at her. Someone like her should never have been left standing alone in a room full of wolves.
Something cold moves under my skin, and I lower my voice, though in the silence it still carries. “Are you all right?”
For a second she just looks at me. Not as if she doesn’t understand the question. As if she doesn’t know which answer is safe. Her throat works once. Then she gives the smallest shake of her head. Barely anything.
I nod once, a small acknowledgment, then turn away from her before I do something unwise in front of two hundred people and several branches of my own family.
“Dinner will proceed,” I say.
The room moves instantly. Conversations don’t resume so much as restart in awkward fragments.
Chairs scrape. A server nearly drops a wine bottle before catching herself.
Someone laughs too loudly at nothing at all.
People look everywhere but at the center of the table where this just happened, which is how the wealthy like to handle ugliness once it has become inconvenient.
I don’t take my seat immediately. Instead I look at Camille. “Mrs. Laurent should be seated there, I assume.”
Her mouth parts, then closes again. “Yes.”
“Then sit her there.”
It’s not an instruction I should have to give. Still, she obeys.
Sienna is already moving, trying to step back into the machinery of the evening as if she can disappear inside her own competence.
I watch her exchange a few clipped words with one of the servers, watch her place the binder down for a moment so she can straighten a setting that does not need straightening.
She’s buying herself a second.
A breath. A wall. Some shred of control.
I know the instinct. I respect it. I should leave it alone, but instead I cross the room.
By the time I reach her, she has picked the binder up again.
Her head comes up instantly, wary, and I get a better look at her face from this distance.
The anger is still there. So is the humiliation.
And behind both, buried much deeper than it was on the plane, is the same nervous tension I noticed in the lounge.
The same alertness. As if she has been bracing for impact for so long she no longer knows how to stand any other way.
“You don’t have to do anything else right this second,” I say quietly.
Her eyes flick to the room, then back to me. “Yes, I do.”
Her voice is rougher than I remember. Or maybe that’s just what hurt does to a voice.
I glance at the place settings, the staff, the guests already pretending the spectacle has passed. “It appears dinner is capable of beginning without your immediate intervention.”
The corner of her mouth almost moves. Not quite a smile. More the memory of one.
“I’d still rather be useful,” she says.
My gaze drops, only briefly, to the binder in her arms, the way she’s holding it too high and too tight against herself. Protective. Instinctive.
Something about it pricks at me, but I push the thought aside. Now is not the time to start examining why her posture feels significant.
I lean a fraction closer. “Come with me for a moment.”
Her eyes widen. “What?”
“Outside. You need air.”
“I’m working.”
“You are about to cry in front of people who do not deserve the privilege.”
That stills her. Color rises higher in her face.
For half a heartbeat I think she will refuse on sheer pride alone. Then she draws in a careful breath and says, “I’m not going to cry.”
“No,” I say. “You’re not.”
It comes out gentler than I intended.
Her expression changes, very slightly. Less defiant. More shaken by the softness than she was by my authority.
Christ.
I step back before I make that worse. “Two minutes.”
She hesitates, then nods once.
Good.
I guide her toward the side doors off the dining room, not touching her, though the effort of not touching her is suddenly far more noticeable than it should be.
The second we step onto the covered stone terrace, the air changes.
Cooler. Damp. Rain drifting over the lawns in a silver haze beyond the arches.
Behind us, through the glass, the dinner carries on in that false, glowing way events always do after something ugly has happened.
Beside me, she exhales.
Not gracefully, not quietly. Like she has been holding the entire room out of her lungs.
For a few seconds neither of us speaks.
She walks to the nearest column and braces one hand against it, facing the rain.
The coat she’s wearing shifts with the movement, the dark fabric hanging loose around her.
The sight of it drags up a memory with vicious clarity.
My hand sliding under silk. My palm fitting over the lush curve of her waist. Her body opening under mine with a helpless little sound that still lives in the back of my throat if I let myself think about it too long.
I do not let myself.
Usually. Tonight is proving less disciplined than usual.
“You found an interesting way to reappear,” I say at last.
A short, disbelieving laugh escapes her. “You think this was my idea?”
“No.”
That gets her to glance at me.
The terrace light catches the shine in her eyes. She’s furious about that too, I can tell. Furious that they made her feel it, furious that I saw it. Furious, perhaps, that I am standing here at all after seven months of being nowhere.
I understand fury. It has always been one of my better languages.
The same mouth I kissed open in the dark. The same dark lashes. The same softness that does not diminish her face but gives it warmth, gives it life. A woman like her is dangerous to a man like me.
“I had wondered,” I say, “what happened to you.”
That gets her attention back. She turns her head and stares at me fully this time, something between shock and caution moving over her face.
I continue before she can answer with something false. “You vanished.”
A beat passes.
Then two.
“I didn’t vanish,” she says finally. “I got off a plane.”
The line should amuse me.
Instead, I feel my mouth tighten.
“Yes,” I say. “Without leaving a name. A number. Anything useful.”
She lets out another laugh, softer this time and with no real humor in it. “Useful to who?”
“To me.” The words are out before I decide whether I should say them.
She goes still. Rain whispers over stone somewhere beyond the terrace. Inside, I can hear the dull murmur of dinner finally settling into motion. The music has started again. Strings, soft through the glass.
Her gaze stays on mine. “Why?” she asks.
A very simple question. And an irritating one.
Because you got under my skin in the span of one flight.
Because I spent weeks thinking about your mouth.
Because I have fucked other women since you and remembered you anyway.
Because there are not many things in this world I fail to find when I decide I want them, and the fact that I could not find you offended me more than I care to admit.
I say none of that. Instead I tell her a smaller truth.
“Because I wanted to see you again.”
She looks down at the binder in her hands. Not coy, just overwhelmed, perhaps. Or trying to steady herself. The wind lifts a strand of her hair and pushes it across her cheek. Before I can think better of it, I reach out and tuck it back.
She freezes, and so do I.
The contact is nothing. Barely there. My knuckles brushing warm skin. A simple gesture. And yet the effect is immediate. Her breath catches. My body remembers her with humiliating speed.
I drop my hand.
Too late, of course. We are both already feeling it.
“I shouldn’t be out here with you,” she says.
No. She should not.
Neither should I.
And still I ask, “Because of them?”
Her mouth curves in a way that is not a smile. “Among other things.”
I look back through the glass toward the dining room where Ethan sits rigid at his place beside his fiancée, pretending to recover his dignity with every straight-backed sip of champagne.
My son. I feel the old irritation rise again, but this time it is braided with something else. Something darker. More personal.
When I look back at her, she’s watching me carefully, as if trying to measure what I know and what I don’t.
And suddenly I know one thing for certain. This is not over.
“Sienna.” Her name settles into my mouth as if it belongs there.
Her lips part. It’s a mistake to notice that, but I notice anyway.
“Yes?”
I take a step closer. Only one, but enough to make the air between us change.
“I don’t know what kind of mess this weekend is going to become,” I say, “but no one in there is going to speak to you that way again.”