6. Noelle
— ? —
Noelle
The construction site smells like concrete dust and ambition.
I’ve been finding excuses to be here all week. Yesterday it was a paint color that needed approval. The day before, a question about light fixtures. Today it’s an interiors sign-off I have every right to do. This is still my job, technically. No one has fired me yet.
Sebastian walks beside me, playing the part of the boss on a routine visit. His suit is too nice for a construction site. His shoes are definitely going to be ruined. But he doesn’t complain, just keeps his eyes forward and his hands in his pockets like he does this every day.
The cover is thin. We both know it.
The site manager keeps looking at me like he’s trying to figure out what to call me. His eyes dart between my face and Sebastian’s, doing math he doesn’t have all the numbers for.
“Mrs. Sterling-” he starts.
“Ms. Hartley,” I correct. “The divorce is in process.”
Sebastian’s jaw goes tight, but he doesn’t say anything. Just keeps walking like he didn’t hear, like the name change doesn’t matter, like I’m not rewriting my whole identity one correction at a time.
The site manager nods too fast. “Of course. Ms. Hartley. The contractor trailer is this way.”
He leads us across the muddy lot, past stacks of steel beams and pallets of drywall. Workers in hard hats stop to stare. They know who I am. They know what happened. Everyone knows what happened.
I keep my chin up and pretend I don’t notice.
The trailer is cramped and smells like stale coffee.
Sebastian takes the door, watching the lot through the dirty window while I go through the cabinets.
We’re supposed to be finding the thread that ties Dorian to everything we already suspect.
Mostly I find my own handwriting on old change orders, my own signature on things I approved without reading, back when I still trusted the man whose name was on the account.
“Anything?” he asks.
“Same story as the records room.” I drop the folder. “Same money, same place it always ended up. They never bothered to hide it well. Why would they?” The bitterness gets out. “Nobody who loved me was ever going to check. I’d have signed anything he put in front of me, and he counted on that.”
“Then we keep going. Carefully.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it. “My mother has been cleaning up after Dorian since he was twelve. If we move too fast, she buries us both.”
“If we move too slow, that little boy gets signed onto the trust and I’ve got nothing left to fight with.” I shove the folder shut harder than I need to. “I don’t have time for careful.”
“You don’t have time to be reckless either.”
We glare at each other across the cramped trailer. This is how it always goes with us. Two steps forward, one step into a wall.
“You know what I can’t figure out?” I stand up, brushing dust off my dress. “Whether you actually want to help me, or if you just want to use me and throw me away like everyone else.”
“I told you from the start. This is mutual interest, not friendship.”
“Right.” I hear myself laugh, low and bitter. “Mutual interest. That’s all I am. That’s all I’ve ever been.”
Something flickers across his face. Almost human. Almost like he might actually feel something underneath all that ice.
“Noelle-”
“Forget it.” I grab the folder and head for the door. “Let’s just get what we need and get out.”
We make our way across the site and into the building. The elevator isn’t working yet, so we take the stairs. Forty-two floors of bare concrete and exposed wiring, our footsteps echoing in the empty stairwell.
By the time we reach the top, my legs are burning and my breath is coming fast. Sebastian isn’t even winded. Of course he isn’t.
The forty-second floor is all open frame and raw potential. No walls yet. No windows. Just steel beams and plastic sheeting and the wind tearing through from every direction. The city spreads out below us, all lit windows and dark gaps and tiny people who have no idea we’re up here.
I move toward the edge to check a sightline. The windows will go here eventually. Floor-to-ceiling glass with views of Central Park. I designed this layout. I picked these sightlines. This building has my fingerprints all over it, even if no one will ever know.
The wind catches me.
It’s stronger than I expected, a gust that hits me sideways and sends me stumbling toward the edge. My heel catches on something, a beam, a wire, I don’t know, and suddenly I’m falling, the city spinning below me, nothing between me and a forty-two-story drop except air.
Sebastian’s hand shoots out.
His fingers close around my waist, hard and sure, and he yanks me back against him. My spine hits his chest. His arm locks around my middle. For a second, neither of us moves.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. His breath is warm against my hair. The wind howls around us, but I can’t hear anything except the blood rushing in my ears.
“You’re standing on my foot,” I manage.
“I know.”
He still doesn’t move.
I can feel his chest rising and falling against my back. His hand is splayed across my stomach, fingers pressing into the fabric of my dress. If I turned my head, my lips would be inches from his jaw.
I don’t turn my head.
But I notice everything anyway, and I hate myself for the cataloging.
The heat of him through two layers of clothes.
The size of the hand spread over my stomach, the way one of his fingers has slipped low enough that a half-inch more would not be accidental.
The clean scent of him under the concrete dust. My heart is slamming and it is not all from the fall.
The danger has passed. There is nothing holding me here now except his hand and my own treacherous stillness, and every sensible part of me says to step out of his arms. I don’t.
For one breath longer than I can ever defend, I let myself stay exactly where I am, his palm spread on my stomach, his mouth at my hair, and the discovery that I do not want to move frightens me more than the drop did.
This is the man who treats me like an asset. I am not allowed to want him. I tell myself that, very clearly, and my body ignores every word.
His phone buzzes.
The sound shatters whatever was holding us still. He checks the screen and his whole body changes, the softness gone, replaced by something sharp and fast.
“Dorian’s here. On site. Someone told him his wife was walking the building.” He’s already pulling me toward the stairs. “He cannot find us up here together. Move.”
We move.
Forty-two floors down a stairwell with no lights, his hand wrapped around mine the whole way, both of us taking the steps two and three at a time until my lungs burn and the world shrinks to the slap of our feet on bare concrete.
Somewhere below, a freight elevator grinds upward. Dorian, rising while we fall.
We hit the ground floor and Sebastian yanks me sideways, away from the lobby, out through a gap in the plastic sheeting and into the loading yard at the back. Dumpsters. Stacked pallets. A wall of black contractor bags piled head-high, waiting for a haul-off that hasn’t come.
Voices. Close. Dorian’s laugh, the one I used to think was charming, carrying across the lot with someone fawning along beside him.
Sebastian pulls me down behind the bags.
We drop together into the gap between the trash and the brick wall, my back against the cold of it, his body folding over mine to make us smaller, and when I suck in a breath to say something he tucks my face into the crook of his neck, one hand splayed at the back of my head.
“Don’t,” he breathes into my hair, barely a sound at all.
I don’t.
Footsteps crunch across the gravel on the other side of the bags.
Six feet away. Five. Dorian’s voice, complaining about a delay, about cost, about something that used to be my entire world and now means nothing.
If he rounds the pile he’ll see us, the wife he’s throwing away crouched in the garbage with the brother he has never once thought to worry about.
Sebastian’s chest is pressed to my shoulder. His hand stays curved at my nape, his other arm braced on the wall above my head, caging me into the dark. I can feel his heart going. I can feel mine answer it.
And then, because my body has clearly lost its mind, the whole thing tips over into something else.
The sheer absurdity. Me, in silk and heels, hiding behind a stack of trash from the man I promised forever to.
A laugh climbs up my throat, helpless and absurd, and I have to bury it against his collar to keep it in.
His eyes drop to mine. His arm tightens around me.
Don’t you dare, his face says.
Which only makes it worse. My shoulders start to shake.
He clamps down, fighting his own mouth now, and that is the thing that undoes me, the discovery that Sebastian Sterling, all ice and contempt, is two seconds from losing it behind a dumpster.
We hold each other still through it, shaking, silent, his forehead dropping to my temple, my fist twisted in his shirt, both of us breathing the same panicked, ridiculous air.
Dorian’s voice moves off. The footsteps fade toward the front of the building.
Neither of us lets go.
His hand slides from my nape slowly, his fingertips trailing down the side of my throat, and now there’s nothing to muffle and nothing to run from and no reason left for him to be this close except that he is.
His forehead is still against my temple.
My fist is still knotted in his shirt. If I tilt my chin up even slightly, this stops being a near miss and becomes something I can’t take back.
“We should go,” he says. He doesn’t move.
“Yeah.” I don’t either.
We stay one more breath in the dark behind the garbage, and it’s the most alive I have felt since the day my life fell apart. Then he stands and pulls me up after him, and the cold rushes back into the space where he was.
We slip out the side of the lot and around the block to his car without a word. He grips the wheel like he wants to break it.
“That was close,” I manage.
“Too close.” His knuckles are white. Then, after a long moment, not looking at me, “And Noelle?”
“What?”
“Stop almost dying on me. It’s becoming a habit.”
The laugh gets out this time, real and surprised, and I catch the corner of his mouth twitching before he turns his face back to the road.