5. Reid
— ? —
Reid
The tailors arrive at seven, three of them, with garment bags and pincushions and the kind of discretion that costs more than most people’s cars. I hired them because they don’t ask questions, and right now Scarlett needs a room full of people who don’t ask questions.
She stands in the center of my living room in a borrowed robe while they circle her with measuring tapes, and her hands won’t quite stay still.
I notice. I’ve spent ten years training myself not to notice things about Scarlett Ashworth, and it turns out the training was useless, because I clock every breath she takes.
“The burgundy,” I tell the lead tailor, nodding at the swatches fanned across my coffee table. “And the midnight blue. Nothing safe. Nothing she could disappear inside.”
“You realize I’m standing right here,” Scarlett says. “Being discussed. Like a sofa.”
“A very expensive sofa.”
“Reid.” She turns, and the robe shifts, and one of the tailors very politely studies the ceiling. “I can’t take this. Do you have any idea what a wardrobe like this costs?”
“Roughly. Yes.”
“Then you know I can’t afford it. I’m in a one-bedroom walk-up that smells like the diner downstairs, my accounts are frozen until the divorce sorts out whose name is on what, and everything I actually own is sitting in a penthouse with Vincent’s locks on the door.
” She crosses her arms. “I left the hotel last week because I couldn’t keep bleeding money on a room I only slept in.
So no. I’m not letting you dress me like I’m some project you picked up. ”
There it is. The thing under all of it. She’d rather wear the same three outfits into battle than owe a single soul a single thing, because the last time someone “helped” her family, it cost her ten years and her own name.
“It’s not a gift,” I say.
“It looks remarkably like a gift.”
“It’s an investment. You’re about to walk into rooms full of people who decide who matters in this city, and you’re going to take Vincent apart in front of them.
” I keep my voice level, reasonable, the tone I use when I want someone to stop arguing and start agreeing.
“Armor isn’t charity. It’s equipment. Bill it to the partnership and pay me back out of the waterfront when we win. Interest, if it makes you feel better.”
Her jaw works. She’s looking for the catch, the hidden cost, the moment I turn out to be every other man who ever handed her something with strings stitched into the lining.
“With interest,” she says slowly.
“A punishing amount. I’m ruthless.”
A breath of a laugh escapes her before she can stop it, and the tailors take it as permission to keep pinning.
“Fine,” she says. “A loan. On the books. I pay you back every cent.” She lifts her chin. “And the second you treat this like leverage, I’m gone.”
“Understood.” I let myself look at her, just for a moment, in the burgundy they’ve started draping.
“For what it’s worth, you shouldn’t have to be talked into taking up space.
You spent a decade making yourself small enough to fit inside someone else’s shadow.
I’m just buying back the square footage. ”
That lands somewhere she wasn’t braced for. Her eyes hold mine a beat too long.
“You toasted me,” she says quietly. “At the gala. By my own name. In front of everyone Vincent’s spent years lying to.”
“I did.”
“That’s the second this stopped being just business, Reid. You know that, right?”
“I knew before that.” The words are out before I weigh them. “But I’m a patient man. We can call it business as long as you need to.”
The tailors pack up an hour later, and the first event is that afternoon. Scarlett comes down the hall in a navy sheath with one stiletto in her hand, the strap twisted, her balance off as she tries to fasten it standing up.
“Let me.”
I cross to her before she can argue and lower myself to one knee. She goes still above me. I take her ankle, steady and unhurried, and thread the thin strap through the buckle, drawing it snug against her skin. The room is quiet enough that I can hear her breathing change.
“Reid.”
“Hold still.” I set her foot down and look up at her from the floor, and a thing moves across her face that she doesn’t have a name for yet.
“Every man in your life knelt on you to keep you down there. Your father. Vincent. They needed you small so they could stand tall.” I rise, slow, until I’m looking down at her again.
“I kneel so you walk in standing. There’s a difference. ”
Her throat works. For a second I think she might say the thing neither of us is ready for. Instead she smooths her skirt, lifts her chin, and the armor settles back into place.
“Then let’s go take what’s mine,” she says.
***
The thing about a woman they all wrote off as the quiet wife is that nobody sees her coming.
The tea is Diana’s, held in a garden that costs more to maintain than a small country, and the moment Scarlett walks in I watch the whole room recalibrate.
They’ve been chewing on her for a week, the cold wife, the grew-apart story, the poor thing who couldn’t hold her marriage together.
And now here she is in burgundy, unbothered, holding a teacup like a scepter, and the gossip turns on a dime from pity to fascination.
I hang back near the roses where I can watch without crowding her. This is hers to run.
She doesn’t accuse anyone of anything. That’s the genius of it.
She just talks, warm and easy, and somewhere between the second cup and the petit fours she mentions, almost as an aside, the real reason a certain landmark development almost collapsed three years ago, and how she happened to be the one on a midnight call fixing it while a certain someone slept.
She doesn’t say Vincent. She doesn’t have to.
The women lean in, and you can see the math happening behind their eyes.
“She’s a force,” Diana says, materializing beside me with a champagne flute and a knowing look. “I always thought so, even when Vincent was doing his level best to make us forget she had a pulse.”
“She is.”
“And you’re standing in my roses watching her the way a man watches a woman he’s already lost a great deal of sleep over.” Diana sips, unhurried. “The whole circle’s talking, you understand. The Vanderbilt heir, suddenly very invested in the Kensington divorce. People are drawing conclusions.”
“Let them draw.”
“Are they wrong?”
I keep my eyes on Scarlett, who’s just made the most powerful woman at the table laugh into her napkin. “We’re business partners, Diana. She’s reclaiming what’s hers and I’m helping. That’s the whole story.”
“Mm.” Diana doesn’t believe a word of it, and she’s polite enough not to say so.
“Well. Whatever it is, be careful with her. That one’s spent so long paying for things she never bought that she won’t know what to do with a man who hands her something and asks for nothing back.
” She glances at me, sharper now. “And Vincent doesn’t lose gracefully.
When he figures out the room is turning, he’ll get ugly. ”
“I’ve been patient for years,” I say. “I can be patient through ugly.”
She studies me for a long moment, then lifts her glass a fraction, a verdict and a blessing in one gesture, and drifts back into her party.
By the time the cups go cold, the deal under all of it is done, and three of the most important women in the city have quietly decided they were never really that fond of Vincent Kensington.
The days run together after that.
We fall into a rhythm I have no business enjoying as much as I do.
Mornings strategizing over coffee she makes too strong on purpose because she knows I hate it.
Afternoons in rooms full of people learning, one careful conversation at a time, that the empire they admired had the wrong name stamped on it.
Evenings that stretch later than they need to, both of us pretending we don’t notice how late.
She talks more now. Not about the war. About before.
“He had this way of making me apologize for my own ideas,” she tells me one night, curled in the corner of my couch with her shoes off, a glass of wine she’s barely touched.
“I’d bring him something I’d built, something good, and by the end of the conversation I’d be thanking him for letting me work on it.
I didn’t even notice I was shrinking. You don’t, when it happens slow enough.
You just wake up one day and you can’t remember the last time you took up a whole room. ”
“You’re taking up the whole room now.”
“I’m trying.” She looks at me over the rim of the glass, and there’s a question in it she hasn’t decided whether to ask. “It’s strange. Being around you. You keep looking at me like I’m the most interesting person in the building, and I keep waiting for the bill.”
“There’s no bill.”
“That’s the strange part.”
The storm rolls in on a night we’ve both worked too long, the sky going from gray to charcoal to black while we sit at my kitchen island arguing about which investor to peel away next.
Thunder cracks loud enough to rattle the glasses, and my phone lights up with a flood warning for the coastal roads, the only route back to her side of the city.
“You should stay,” I say.
She glances at the window, where the rain’s coming down in sheets. “The roads are really that bad?”
“Unless you’d like me to fish your car out of the bay in the morning and deliver a moving eulogy. I do a wonderful eulogy. Very few dry eyes.”
That earns me a real laugh, the kind that comes from her stomach, the kind I haven’t heard since we were teenagers. “That’s genuinely morbid.”
“I contain multitudes. Stay. Guest room’s down the hall, and there’s enough of my stuff in the closet to drown you comfortably.”
She pulls one of my old sweatshirts over her head a few minutes later, and the sight of her in it does something to my chest I decide not to examine. We end up back on the couch with the lights low and the storm throwing itself against the windows, and she’s quiet for a while, watching the rain.
“Do you remember the Ashby party?” she asks suddenly.
My whole body remembers the Ashby party. “The one where they served those terrible little quail eggs.”
“And we hid in the boathouse for two hours so we wouldn’t have to dance with anyone.
” She’s smiling at the window, somewhere far away.
“You stole a bottle of champagne off a waiter’s tray and we drank it warm sitting on the dock, and you told me about the boat you were going to build someday and sail to nowhere in particular. ”
“I was seventeen and an idiot.”
“You were going to name it after me.” She turns her head, and the smile turns into something softer, more dangerous. “And then it got quiet, and you looked at me, and I looked at you, and you leaned in.”
The memory is so close I can taste the warm champagne. Her face tilted up in the dark, the music thudding through the boathouse wall, the inch of space between us shrinking to nothing.
“And the Caldwell girl came crashing in looking for the bathroom,” I say.
“And I panicked and told you I had to find my father.” She laughs, but it cracks at the edges. “I think about that more than I should. What would’ve happened if she’d needed the bathroom thirty seconds later.”
“I think about it too.” My voice has gone rough. “I’ve had ten years to think about it.”
She goes still. The storm fills the silence, and neither of us looks away, and the inch of space between us is back, the exact same inch, like the boathouse never ended and we just paused it for a decade.
She’s the one who pulled back then. We both know it. The question hanging in the dark between us is whether she’ll do it again.
“Reid.” My name comes out unsteady. “I’m not going to be able to pay this back. Whatever this is. I don’t have it in me to owe you something this big.”
“I’m not asking you to pay anything back.” I don’t move. I won’t be the one who closes the inch. Not this time. It has to be her. “I told you. There’s no bill.”
For one suspended breath, she leans the smallest fraction closer, and my heart forgets how to function.
Then she stops. She presses her lips together, drops her gaze, and pulls the sweatshirt tighter around herself like a woman remembering she’s supposed to be careful.
“I should sleep,” she says softly. “Long day tomorrow.”
“Long day tomorrow,” I agree, because I’m a coward and a gentleman and apparently both at once.
She pads down the hall, pauses at the guest room door, and looks back at me with an expression I can’t read and won’t sleep for trying to.
“Goodnight, Reid.”
“Goodnight, Scarlett.”
The door clicks shut.
I lie in the dark and listen to the storm tear itself apart against the windows, and I think about Scarlett Ashworth two walls away, in my sweatshirt, in my house, an inch and years from where I want her, and I wonder how much longer either of us is going to keep pretending this is just business.
I don’t think it’s going to last the night.