Chapter 7 #3
Jake’s whole face changes. “No,” he says, his voice low and certain in a way I haven’t heard from him before. “You’re not going anywhere. This is it. This is yours.”
She seems to check this against something internal, some private measure she’s been carrying.
Then she looks past Jake to the doorway where I’m standing, and her eyes find mine.
“Are you coming back tomorrow?”
She’s not asking Jake. She’s asking me.
I came to get her here and settled, and tomorrow I start lining up the help Jake actually needs so I can get back to running his foundation.
“I’ll be around,” I say. “Your dad and I have a lot of work to do.”
It’s not what she asked. She’s four, not stupid, I watch her decide whether to push it. She doesn’t.
She turns back to her sea turtle and pulls her blanket up.
Her eyes are almost closed when she says it.
“Does Emilia have to go home?”
Neither of us answers.
Within three minutes she’s completely, thoroughly asleep.
Jake stands slowly. We both look at her for a moment.
Then we step into the hall and he pulls the door most of the way closed. We stand there in the quiet six inches apart, and I’m aware of a number of things at once. How late it is. How long today has been. How completely I can’t remember the last time I felt this tired.
The apartment is dim around us. The ocean is dark beyond all those windows.
Jake turns and looks at me. I look at him.
And the problem, the actual problem, is that for the first time since this whole arrangement started, I’m not sure I want to leave.
I leave anyway.
But I’m back the next morning before Poppy’s awake, because the nanny search isn’t going to run itself and Jake’s first instinct when I bring it up is to change the subject.
The first few days set a pattern, and the pattern is chaos.
Poppy wakes early and loud. She has opinions about cereal, about which window is the best window, about whether sharks have bedtimes.
By her third morning I’ve learned she’ll eat anything cut into triangles and nothing that isn’t, that she narrates her own life like a sports broadcaster, and that she goes boneless and tragic the instant anyone says the word nap.
I tell myself I’m there for the handoff. I’ve got a placement agency sending candidates by the end of the week. Someone qualified, someone permanent, someone who is not me. That’s the whole point. Get the right person in place and concentrate on the job I’m actually paid for.
I am at the penthouse more than I’m at my apartment. I keep a running list of reasons that all sound operational and none of which fully explain why I was here at six this morning watching a four-year-old lose a fight with a bowl of cereal.
Which is how I end up there a few days later, in a floor-length emerald gown, fighting with a zipper I can’t quite reach.
Jake crosses the room before I can ask. “Hold still.”
His hands find the zipper, one resting at the small of my back to steady me, and he draws it up slowly, too slowly, his knuckles tracing the length of my spine the whole way.
By the time it reaches the top, I’ve forgotten the zipper entirely.
I’m just aware of his hand, and how close he’s standing, and the fact that I haven’t taken a full breath in several seconds.
His hand stays where it is, warm against the base of my spine.
“There,” he says, and his voice has dropped lower than the word needs.
I should step away. I don’t. Damn it.
Our eyes meet in the mirror. He’s already looking at me. Not at the dress, at me and for a second the only sound in the room is both of us deciding not to move.
Then I step away, because one of us has to.
Day twenty-two of the engagement. I still count. It’s a habit I can’t seem to break and moments like that one are exactly why I haven’t.
The benefit is a Hale Futures donor gala he committed to months ago, back when his biggest problem was being thirty minutes late to things.
We can’t skip it. Two hundred donors, the people we’ve spent six weeks stabilizing, and the optics of the engaged couple not appearing together would undo all of it.
So we’re going. And Poppy is staying with Maggie, because if I’m leaving a grieving four-year-old with anyone, it’s the woman who raised four Hales and didn’t lose her composure once.
That’s the plan, anyway.
The plan does not survive contact with Poppy.
“Where are you going?” She’s at Maggie’s front door in her shark pajamas, sea turtle clutched to her chest, and her voice has an edge I haven’t heard before.
“Just to a work thing, baby.” Jake crouches down. “We’ll be back before you wake up.”
“You’re leaving.”
“For a few hours.”
“Mommy left.” It comes out flat and certain and it stops the entire room. “She said she’d be back and she didn’t come back.”
I watch it land on Jake like a physical thing.
Maggie is there before either of us can find words, lowering herself to Poppy’s level with the ease of thirty years of practice.
“Your dad and Emilia are coming back,” she says.
Simple. Sure. “I’m going to be right here, and we’re going to build something enormous out of couch cushions, and when you wake up they’ll be here. That’s a promise, and I keep mine.”
Poppy studies her for a long, evaluating moment.
Then she nods, hands Maggie the sea turtle for safekeeping, and walks toward the living room like she’s already mentally drafting the cushion fort.
Jake stays crouched a beat too long. When he stands, he looks concerned.
“She’s okay,” I say quietly.
“She thinks we’re not coming back.”
“Maggie’s got her.” I touch his sleeve before I think about it. “She’s okay, Jake.”
He looks at my hand on his arm. I take it back.
The gala is the easy part.
Two hundred donors, a room I’ve worked a hundred times. I move through it on autopilot: the Nakamuras, the Holts, the table of Pacific Edge board members who need to feel personally thanked. This is the job and I’m good at it.
Jake works the other half of the room. Every so often we orbit back into the same conversation, his hand finds the small of my back, and we sell it.
It’s the selling that’s the problem.
“You’re quiet tonight,” he says, steering two flutes of champagne off a passing tray and handing me one I won’t drink.
“I’m working.”
“You’re working beautifully. You always do.” He sets his glass down. “Dance with me.”
“I don’t dance.”
“You dance when two hundred donors are watching their favorite engaged couple.” His hand finds the small of my back again, warm through the silk, steering. “Smile, Hart. You’re radiant. It says so in the program.”
“There is no program.”
“There’s always a program.”
And then we’re on the floor, and his hand settles against my spine, and I’m too tired and too aware of him to hold the careful distance I usually keep, so I don’t.
The first song, I keep some space. Professional. A couple selling the room.
Jake closes it without seeming to try.
“Relax,” he murmurs. “You’re allowed to look like you like me. It’s practically in the contract.”
“There’s no contract clause about dancing.”
“There’s an implied one.”
A laugh escapes before I can stop it. I see a small flicker of satisfaction.
By the second song, I’ve stop noticing who is watching.
It just happens. The cameras, the donors, the careful performance, all of it fades away, and what’s left is his hand splayed warm and certain against my back, the steady thud of his heartbeat where my palm rests on his chest, the fact that I’ve let go in a way I don’t let go for anyone.
I should care that we’re being watched. The whole point is that we’re being watched.
I can’t make myself care.
Jake’s mouth comes close to my ear. His voice drops, all the humor gone out of it.
“A kiss for the donors,” he says.
It’s a joke. It’s supposed to be a joke. But there’s nothing light in how he says it and when I lean back far enough to look at him, he isn’t laughing. He’s looking at my mouth and we both know this stopped being about the donors.
Rule one. Nothing physical. I wrote it on a legal pad in my own handwriting.
And he’s handed me the perfect excuse to break it. For the donors. I could do it and call it strategy. He’s giving me the out and we both know it.
I tip my face up.
My clutch buzzes against my hip.
I have it open before the second buzz, and some part of me is grateful for the interruption, because another second and I’d have done it.
Poppy’s down, fort fully constructed. All quiet. Take your time.
The room rushes back in: the music, the donors, the two hundred people watching us not-quite-kiss in the middle of a benefit.
I step back first. “We’ve still got the Holbrook table.”
“Yeah.” Jake’s voice is rough. He clears it. “Right.”
We finish the night. We work the room another hour, and neither of us mentions the dance, or the almost, or the fact that I came embarrassingly close to kissing Jake Hale in front of two hundred people.
Poppy is asleep in the cushion fort when we get there, which is enormous, exactly as promised. Maggie raised four children; she does not break promises to frightened ones.
Jake carries her out to the car without waking her. She stirs once, registers him, and goes slack again.
Back at the penthouse, we get her into bed with no bath, she’s already in the shark pajamas, and waking her for anything would be a crime against the natural order.
Jake settles her under the blanket. Her sea turtle’s still at Maggie’s, traded for fort-building services, so he tucks one of the backups in beside her instead.
Her eyes open halfway. “You came back.”
“Told you we would,” Jake says.
She considers this with the gravity of someone twice her age. Then her eyes find me in the doorway.
“Both of you,” she murmurs.
I don’t answer that. Jake does it for me, “Go to sleep, bub.”
She’s asleep again before the words are fully out.
Jake and I step into the hall. I’m still in the emerald gown. He’s still in the tuxedo. There’s a fort to dismantle at his mother’s house tomorrow, and a moment on a dance floor neither of us is going to mention.
“For the donors,” he says quietly, and there’s the ghost of a smile in it.
“Don’t.”
But I’m smiling too, and we both see it.