3. Reid
— ? —
Reid
Her body lands against my chest in the rain, soaked through and shaking, and ten years collapse into nothing.
Because I have stood on a dock with this woman before.
Seventeen, and the dock smells of salt and diesel and the cold coming in off the water.
I’ve got a speech. I’ve had it for a week, rehearsed in the truck and the shower and the back of every class I couldn’t pay attention in, and tonight I’m going to say it if it kills me.
Scarlett Ashworth stands at the end of my family’s dock with her arms wrapped around herself, and I have never been this scared of anything in my life.
Her heel catches between two planks when she shifts her weight, and she stumbles half a step before she rights herself.
“Okay, that’s it.” I’m already moving. “You’ve nearly gone in the water twice tonight. Sit down before you take us both in.”
“I’m fine, Reid.”
“You’re a menace in those things.” Dropping to one knee on the wet boards, I work the thin heel loose from the gap and keep my hand around her ankle a beat longer than the job needs. “Who wears stilts to a dock. Honestly. One day I won’t be here to fish you out and you’ll just sink.”
“My hero.” Her voice has a smile in it, but it’s thin, stretched over a thing underneath.
I set her foot back down and look up at her from the boards, and I don’t stand. From down here she’s the only fixed point in a moving world, and the whole speech climbs up into my mouth at once. “Scarlett, there’s a thing I need to...”
“I’m getting married.”
A horn blows across the yard, one of the big freighters sounding off before it pulls out, and the noise rolls over the water and drowns everything.
Her mouth keeps moving and I catch none of it, and for half a second the not-hearing is almost a kindness.
Half a second where she could have said anything else.
“What?”
“I said I’m getting married.” Louder now, into the quiet after the horn, and she makes herself hold my eyes while she says it. “There’s a man. My father arranged it. It saves the family, all of it, and I’m going to do it.”
“Don’t.” It’s out before I can dress it up in anything. “Scarlett, you don’t have to. Whatever your father owes, whatever the number is, my family can...”
“It’s not about a number.” Her chin comes up. “My mother’s gone. My father can barely get out of bed and Margot’s still a kid. I’m the one who’s left. Duty’s the only thing I’ve got to give them, Reid. It’s the only kind of love I know how to do right.”
Every word I rehearsed dies somewhere behind my ribs. There’s no room left for it. She’s already decided, all the way down, the way she decides everything, with no daylight left to argue into.
So I don’t say the thing I came here to say. I look up past her instead, because it’s easier than her face, and there’s nothing up there. No moon. No stars. A flat black nothing pressing down on the both of us.
“Then hear me on one thing.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore.
“If he ever makes you an afterthought. If you wake up one morning and you’re not the first thing he thinks of, you call me.
I don’t care how many years go by. I don’t care if I have to drive through a hurricane to get there. You call, and I’ll come.”
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes go bright and she presses her lips together against whatever’s behind them, and then she nods, once, and walks back up the dock toward a car that’s going to drive her into a different life.
I stay where I am long enough to memorize the back of her head.
Then I go home and pour myself into being the heir my parents always wanted, into the Vanderbilt name and the deals and the kind of forward motion that leaves no room to look back, and I tell myself, for ten years, that I’m over the girl who chose her family over me under a sky with no stars in it.
It takes about one second to find out I’m not.
The instant her soaked, shaking body lands against my chest, every wall I built comes down at once. She weighs almost nothing. She’s trembling so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
And when she looks up at me with those green eyes, the ones I used to dream about in the years after she left, the vow comes back as fresh as if I made it an hour ago instead of a lifetime.
I came. I’m here.
And she’s looking at me as though she can’t decide whether I’m real or whether she’s finally lost her mind.
“You came,” she whispers, and her voice cracks on the words. “You actually came.”
My hands move to her face before I can stop them, cupping her jaw, tilting her chin up so I can see her properly.
Rain streams down her cheeks, mixing with mascara, and she’s barefoot in a ruined green dress that cost more than most people’s cars, and she is still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
“I told you I would,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended. “I told you if he ever...” I stop, because if I finish that sentence I’m going to say a thing I can’t take back. “What did he do, Scarlett?”
“Everything,” she says, and the note in her voice makes my blood run cold. “He did everything.”
I want to ask. I want to demand names and details and a precise accounting of every way Vincent Kensington has hurt her so I can systematically destroy him for each one.
But she’s shaking, and her lips are turning blue, and the rain is coming down harder now, and I have already waited ten years. I can wait through one more storm.
“Come on,” I say, shrugging out of my jacket and draping it over her shoulders. “There’s a hotel on the corner. Let’s get you warm first.”
The lobby of the Carlisle is all white marble and warm lighting and the kind of discreet luxury that doesn’t ask questions when a man in a soaked suit walks in with a barefoot woman in a destroyed evening gown.
The concierge takes one look at us and simply nods, directing us toward a private lounge with a fireplace and offering to send up tea and towels without being asked.
This is old money. This is the world I was born into and Scarlett was sold into, and right now I hate every gilded inch of it.
She sits in a leather armchair by the fire, my jacket still wrapped around her shoulders as she stares into the flames, color seeping back into her face by degrees.
The emerald dress is ruined beyond repair, the bodice gaping where pins used to be, the back torn in a jagged line from neckline to hem.
She looks as though she clawed her way out of a grave.
I suppose she did.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I say, settling into the chair across from her. “Not until you’re ready.”
She laughs, short and bitter. “Ready. That’s funny. I’ve been ready for ten years. I just didn’t know it.”
The tea arrives, and I pour her a cup without asking how she takes it. I remember. Cream, no sugar. She always said she got enough sweetness from the people around her and didn’t need it in her drinks. It was a joke when she was seventeen. It isn’t one anymore.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, wrapping her hands around the cup, trying to absorb its warmth through her palms. “For catching me. For all of this. You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did.”
She looks up at me, and her expression shifts. Recognition, maybe. Or memory. The ghost of two teenagers standing on a dock in the dark, making promises they were too young to understand.
“Reid...”
“Drink your tea,” I say, gentler than I mean to. “Warm up. Everything else can wait.”
She drinks. I keep my eyes on the cup so I don’t keep them on her. And slowly, minute by minute, the wreck of her begins to harden into another shape entirely.
It’s fascinating, in a terrible way. I can actually pinpoint the moment the shock recedes and the calculation begins.
Her spine straightens. Her jaw sets. The trembling stops, replaced by a stillness that reminds me of deep water, calm on top, with currents underneath that could pull you down and drown you.
I knew Scarlett Ashworth when she was soft. When she laughed easily and dreamed out loud and looked at the world as though it might actually be kind to her if she was kind to it first. Her father sold that softness to the highest bidder, and I spent ten years wondering what it had become.
Now I know. It became armor. It became strategy. It became a woman who could smile through a decade of erasure and emerge from the wreckage with a plan instead of tears.
“Margot is pregnant,” she says finally, her voice flat and controlled.
“With Vincent’s baby. They’ve been having an affair.
They’re planning to announce everything Monday.
The divorce, the engagement, the baby. She came to the fitting today to gloat.
To tell me my time was over and hers was beginning. ”
The words hit me one bullet at a time. Vincent. Margot. An affair and a pregnancy.
“Your sister,” I say, just to make sure I understand. “Your actual sister.”
“My actual sister.” She takes another sip of tea, steady as stone. “Who is carrying my husband’s child. Who has apparently been sleeping with him since before our last family Christmas, where I sat across the table from both of them and didn’t suspect a thing.”
I want to put my fist through a wall. I want to find Vincent Kensington and break every bone in his body, one by one, while he explains to me how he could have Scarlett, brilliant and beautiful and impossibly loyal, and still choose to betray her with her own blood.
But that’s not what she needs right now. The set of her shoulders tells me the way she’s holding herself together with nothing but willpower and spite. She doesn’t need my rage. She needs my patience.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
She looks at me for a long moment, an answer forming behind her eyes. Measuring me. Deciding whether I can be trusted with whatever’s coming next.