6. Knox #2
She turns to me. And from where I’m sitting, with the makeup half gone and the armor all the way down, she looks unguarded in a way I’d have sworn she didn’t have in her, waiting on my answer the way you wait on a verdict.
I don’t usually explain myself to anyone. I find myself doing it anyway.
“I never touched her. Not once.” The words come easier than they should. “I was making a point of being a better man than usual. Ironically, I was so busy proving I could be serious that I never noticed what she was doing behind my back.”
The irony of it sits flat and unfunny between us. She looks down at her hands.
“So it can’t be mine. Whatever that child is, it isn’t mine.”
She nods slowly, taking it in, and then the heel of her palm comes up and presses hard over her eyes.
“God.” It comes out muffled. “Look at me. I’m a mess. I’m sitting in a bar with a stranger, getting drunk and asking him to be the father of my husband’s mistress’s baby so I can feel better about my own life. I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”
“You’re having a bad night. You’ve earned a bad night.”
“You should go.” She drops the hand and won’t look at me now, staring at the bottles behind the bar.
“Really. I dragged you into the middle of all this with no warning, I’ve kept you here watching me fall apart, and you don’t owe me any of it.
Thank you. For playing along back there, for the jacket, for not leaving yet.
But you can leave now. I’ll be fine. I’m always fine. ”
It would be easy. She’s handed me the door and asked me to use it.
I don’t move.
“Excuse me.” She slides off the stool too fast, catches herself on the bar, and steadies. “I need the restroom.”
She crosses the floor with the careful overcorrection of someone who knows exactly how drunk she is and is determined not to show it, one hand trailing the backs of the stools, my jacket still hanging off her shoulders.
My eyes follow her the whole way, watching her hold that straight line by sheer will, until the restroom door swings shut behind her.
I wait.
I tell myself I’m waiting to settle the tab even if I’ve already settled the tab.
A few minutes in, I hear it through the door, faint, the unmistakable sound of a bad night catching up with a person all at once. I lean against the wall beside the door and study the ceiling and do her the courtesy of pretending, even to myself, that I can’t hear a thing.
The water runs for a long time after.
When she comes out, she’s changed. Not sober, not all the way, but the wildness has gone out of her. Her face is freshly washed, the makeup mostly gone with it, and without it she looks younger and harder at once, scrubbed back to the bones of herself. She finds me against the wall and stops.
“You’re still here?”
“I’m aware.”
“I told you to leave.”
“You did.” I push off the wall. “Come on. You need air more than you need that restroom wall, and I know where the good air is.”
I don’t wait for her to argue and I don’t look back to check whether she’s coming. I just walk, toward the stairs at the end of the hall, and behind me I feel her hesitate. Her stare lands between my shoulder blades and stays there a long moment. Then, footsteps. Uneven, careful, following behind.
The roof is empty and the city is laid out under it. The evening breeze welcomes us when we step out.
I slow as we come out into it, and she walks on past me to the low wall at the edge, drawn to the open space.
She sets her hands on the ledge and breathes in deeply, her shoulders dropping on the exhale, and I watch the night start to do its work.
The drink loosening its grip, the wreck easing off her face by degrees.
Crossing to her, I hold out the glass of water I carried up with me. Adriana takes it and drinks half without arguing and we stand there with the lights going on under us. Neither of us says anything for a while. The wind takes some of the heat off the night.
“Better?” I ask.
“Marginally.” She sets the glass on the ledge. When she speaks again, the slur is mostly gone, the gears turning behind her eyes. “I want to say something… and I want to say it while I can still think straight or before I lose my nerve.”
“I’m listening.”
“I meant the apology. I pulled you into this. It’s going to be in every feed by morning, your name knotted into my divorce, and that’s not nothing for a man in your position.
” She turns to face me, arms crossed, my jacket still on her shoulders.
“So let me make it right. I’ll put out that the kiss was mine, a grieving woman’s bad judgment, clear your name.
You walk away clean. No one’s the wiser. ”
I look at her for a moment.
Then I laugh, low, because the picture of this woman squaring her scrubbed-bare face to protect me is the most genuinely entertaining thing that’s happened all night.
“You have me badly misread.”
“How so?”
“You think you dragged a bystander into your war?” I lean my forearms on the ledge beside her. “You didn’t. You handed a loaded gun to a man who’s been looking for an excuse to fire it for a while.”
Her eyes narrow, the analyst surfacing through the last of the drink.
“Months ago, someone fed my development numbers to a competitor and tried to gut a deal that would’ve cost me a great deal.
I caught it, because the thief wasn’t clever enough to tell the difference, and the deal that was meant to ruin me fell apart instead.
” I watch her absorb it. “The competitor was your husband, the thief was Blythe.”
She goes very still. “You’re telling me they came after you? Together? Before any of this?”
“Before the affair surfaced, yes. So understand me. You didn’t pull an innocent into your mess.” I let the corner of my mouth go up. “I want to make them pay for trying to fool me too.”
Adriana turns that over, fitting it against everything else she learned tonight.
“You’re not bothered,” she says at last. “Your girlfriend slept with my husband, robbed your company, and is carrying a child that’s not yours. And you’ve spent this whole night amused.”
“I am bothered.” The word comes out flatter than the rest, and I let her hear the thing I keep behind the easy face.
“I have exactly one rule, Adriana. People can pick a fight against me, can reach across a table and try to take what’s mine where I can see them do it.
That’s business. I respect it.” I turn to look at her. “What I don’t forgive is being played.”
“That’s a fine line for a man with your reputation.” Her mouth tilts, dry. “Aren’t you famous for toying with people? Business and otherwise.”
“I am.”
I don’t dodge it, because she’s right. What people think of me is not entirely incorrect.
“By most honest measures I’m not a good man, and pretending otherwise would waste both our time.
” The chuckle comes out low, and I mean it.
“I just don’t care for it when I’m the one being played.
Yes, it’s hypocritical, I’m aware. I’ve made my peace with being a hypocrite. It pairs well with everything else.”
That earns the ghost of a smile, the place a smile would go on a less ruined night.
“A businessman doesn’t sit in the wreckage feeling sorry for himself,” I go on. “I turn my setbacks into opportunities.”
“Opportunities.” She says it slowly, tasting the word, and I watch the last of the drunk woman go out of her, pulling back.
What’s left in her place is the Adriana Rosewood I knew of for years, the one with the volume turned down on purpose, guarded and focused and three moves ahead.
She turns from the skyline to face me fully.
“Then let me offer you one.” Her arms come uncrossed. “By tomorrow, you and I are the same kind of ruined, Beaufort. I’m the cold wife whose husband paraded a pregnant mistress in front of the whole circle. You’re the playboy whose karma is his girlfriend knocked up by another man.”
There’s no heat in the way she says it. No self-pity, no tremor, none of the wreck from downstairs. It pulls at my attention in a way I wasn’t expecting.
“Neither of us walks out of that room looking like a winner.” A pause. “Unless we do.”
I feel the smile start before I can decide whether to let it. She’s dealing me a better hand than I walked in with, and she knows it.
“Unless we do,” I echo. “All right, Rosewood. What do you have in mind?”
“They’ll talk no matter what we do. So we give them a louder story than the one William told.
” She holds my eyes steadily, sober enough now to mean every word.
“There’s no better headline in this city than a Rosewood and a Beaufort falling into a scandal together.
They’ll be so busy with the love story they won’t look at anything else. ”
I lean an elbow on the ledge, watching her. “You really have a desire for spectacle, don’t you?”
“It’s not just about the public image.” Her eyes go darker, settling into place. “We can have an alliance while we’re at it. We join hands in public, and we take them apart in private. Same enemies, same wound. The romance is just the cover we destroy them under.”
I tilt my head at her. “Remind me not to make an enemy out of you.”
“You’d be wasted as one.” She almost smiles. “We make better allies.”
That, I don’t have an argument for.
I straighten off the ledge to my full height. She’s a good deal shorter than me, but when my eyes find hers she meets them level, as if the distance isn’t there at all, and holds.
“I’m going to need to add a term, though.”
Her arms cross, her chin lifting, not a trace of retreat in her. “What is it?”
“My mother set me a deadline. Commit to one serious relationship, inside the year, for my inheritance. It’s why I got entangled with Blythe in the first place.
” I let the skyline have my eyes for a beat, then bring them back to her.
“You saw how that ended. So while you’re using me to bury your husband, I need you to be real enough, in public, that my mother believes I’ve finally settled on something I intend to keep. ”
Adriana takes it in without a wasted motion.
“So the same lie does double work,” she says slowly. A nod, more to herself than to me. “It’s efficient. It holds together better than either piece would alone. I can do that.”
Then she squares her shoulders under my jacket and holds out her hand.
“Partners, then. Mr. Beaufort.”
My eyes catch on the hand, then lift to her. The glint comes up without thinking. I step in, closing the space she left between us, and lean down until she has to tip her head to keep my eyes, near enough to feel whether she’ll flinch.
“You sure you can handle this, Rosewood? It won’t be clean, and it won’t be quick.”
She doesn’t flinch. She tips her chin up, holds my gaze, and takes a step in of her own, until there’s almost nothing left between us.
“I’m not as innocent as you think I am, Beaufort.” Then the corner of her mouth curves, slow and faintly amused. “Unless you’re the one having second thoughts?”
The hand stays out between us, steady. Her brow lifts.
“Deal?”
I laugh, because she is, without question, the most interesting thing to walk into my life in years.
I take her hand. And instead of shaking it, I use it to draw her the last inch in, until her chest nearly meets mine and she has to look up to hold the eye contact she won’t surrender.
“Deal,” I say, quiet, into the small space left between us.
She doesn’t pull back. Neither do I.
Her hand stays in mine a beat too long, and I let it, because I have the distinct feeling that the fun is only just beginning.