14. Adriana
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Adriana
Knox Beaufort has a theory about kissing, and I’m about to hear it whether I want to or not.
“The problem,” he says, handing me a glass of champagne I didn’t ask for, “is commitment.”
“Yours, specifically?”
“Ours. As a unit.” He steers me through the gallery with a hand at my back, guiding us past a sculpture that appears to be a chrome lobster having an existential crisis.
“We’ve been playing this too safe. A kiss at the gala, a kiss on the steps, a peck at the auction.
It’s becoming routine. Predictable. We need to evolve the product. ”
“The product.” I take the champagne because refusing it would require stopping, and Knox doesn’t stop when he’s building toward a point. “You’re comparing our fake relationship to a marketing strategy.”
“I’m comparing it to a stale one. There’s a difference.” He leans down, close enough that anyone watching would think he’s whispering his affection when he’s actually being ridiculous. “William’s across the room. Ten o’clock. Gray tie, looks like he swallowed a lemon.”
I don’t look. I’ve already seen him. He’s been tracking us since we walked in, and Blythe has been doing her best impression of someone who isn’t doing the same.
The gallery opening is one of those circle events that pretends to be about art while actually being about proximity.
Old money buying new things so they can stand near other old money and discuss the buying of new things.
I came because the foundation co-sponsored the exhibition and my face in this room matters.
Knox came because I told him to, and because he enjoys any event where he can irritate William by existing.
“So your solution,” I say, “is more kissing.”
“My solution is better kissing. More convincing. The kind that makes the room forget to look away.” He stops in front of a canvas that’s either a sunset or a medical condition, turning to face me with the full weight of his attention. “A practice run.”
“A practice run.”
“For authenticity. Purely strategic.”
“You want to practice kissing me. For strategy.”
“See, when you say it back to me it sounds absurd.” He grins. “That’s because you’re saying it wrong. I said it very smoothly.”
I look at him over the rim of my glass and take a slow sip, letting him wait.
His grin holds, but underneath it, his eyes are doing the thing they’ve started doing lately, the thing I pretend not to catch, where the playful surface thins just enough to show that he’s watching me closer than the joke requires.
“Fine,” I say. “One.”
His eyebrows go up. He wasn’t expecting a yes, and the surprise looks good on him, which is annoying.
“One kiss,” I clarify. “And you make it count, Beaufort, because I’m not doing a second take.”
“I always make it count.” He sets his glass on the nearest ledge without looking and steps in, and the crowd noise thins around us the way it does when he’s close, as though the room instinctively knows to make space.
His hand comes to my jaw. Not my waist, not my back.
My jaw. His thumb settles along the line of it, tipping my face up with a gentleness that doesn’t match anything else about him, and for a second he just looks at me, close enough that I can count the shades of brown in his eyes and the amusement living in them.
“They’re watching,” he murmurs.
“Good,” I murmur back. “That’s the point.”
He kisses me.
And it isn’t the gala kiss, the one I stole from him with fury in my chest and a room to detonate.
It isn’t the quick press on the company steps or the chaste peck at the auction.
This one starts slow, his mouth finding mine with a patience that suggests he’s been thinking about exactly how to do this, and the thought alone sends heat climbing up my neck.
My free hand finds his lapel. My fingers close around it on instinct, pulling without deciding to, and he makes a sound against my mouth that’s barely a sound at all, just a low hum of approval that I feel more than hear.
The gallery goes soft around the edges. Voices, footsteps, the chrome lobster, all of it recedes behind the feel of his mouth moving against mine, unhurried and warm, as if we have all the time in the world and he intends to use every second of it.
When we break, I have to remember where I am.
His eyes open first. I know this because when mine open, he’s already looking at me with an expression I can’t file under any category that keeps this simple.
“Not bad,” I manage. My voice comes out lower than I planned.
“Not bad.” He repeats it, offended and delighted at the same time. “I give you the kiss of a lifetime and I get not bad?”
“Don’t fish for compliments, Beaufort. It’s unattractive.”
“On me, everything’s attractive.”
I roll my eyes and start to pull back, but his hand is still on my jaw and he doesn’t let go. Instead, his thumb traces a line from my chin to the corner of my mouth, and my breath catches in a place I can’t blame on the champagne.
“They’re still watching,” he says quietly.
I turn my head a fraction, just enough to catch the reflection in the glass partition beside us, the one that mirrors half the gallery back at itself.
William and Blythe aren’t at ten o’clock anymore. They’ve moved to the far end of the room, their backs to us, deep in conversation with a woman I don’t recognize. Neither of them is looking this way. Neither of them has been, from the angle of their bodies, for at least the last minute.
Knox is lying.
He knows they’ve gone. He can see the same glass I can. And he’s standing here with his hand on my face telling me they’re still watching, because the kiss wasn’t for them and we both know it.
The smart thing to do is call him on it. Step back, reset, remind him and myself that this is an arrangement with rules I wrote and boundaries I set and a clean line between what we are in public and what we are in private.
Instead, I look at his mouth.
“Liar,” I say.
His grin starts slow. “Prove it.”
I should walk away. I should absolutely walk away.
“Shut up,” I say, and pull him back down by the lapel.
This kiss is different from the first one. It isn’t performed and it isn’t practiced. His other hand finds my hip, drawing me in until my body is flush against his, and the sound I make against his mouth is embarrassing enough that I’d deny it under oath.
He kisses me the way he does everything, with complete attention and the absolute confidence that he’s going to be good at it, and the infuriating part is that he is.
His mouth is warm and sure and he tastes faintly of champagne and entirely of trouble, and when we finally break apart I’m breathing harder than I’d admit to anyone, including myself.
“Better than not bad?” He’s still close enough that the words land against my lips.
“Don’t push your luck.”
But I’m smiling, and he can see it, and the thing that just happened between us isn’t going back in the box I built for it.
We separate. He retrieves his glass and I retrieve mine, and we move through the gallery as though the last two minutes didn’t rearrange the whole architecture of this arrangement. His hand returns to the small of my back, and I let it stay, and we look at art neither of us is seeing.
I excuse myself to the restroom ten minutes later, mostly because I need thirty seconds alone with my own face in a mirror to figure out what I’m doing.
The corridor is quiet, the gallery noise muffled behind the door, and I’m pushing into the restroom when a voice catches me from behind.
“Miss Adriana.”
The old name stops me. I turn.
Blythe stands at the end of the corridor, her clutch held in both hands in front of her, and the sweet mask she wore at the gala and the office is gone. What’s underneath it is smaller, harder, and much more honest.
“That was quite a show back there.” She doesn’t come closer. She lets the distance do the work. “The two of you. Very convincing.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it.” She tilts her head, studying me. “You almost had me fooled. For a minute I actually thought Knox Beaufort cared about anyone other than himself.” A pause, measured. “But I’ve been where you are. I’ve had that hand on my back and that smile aimed at me, and I know how it ends.”
My pulse stays even. I lean my shoulder against the restroom door and give her nothing.
“He gets bored, Miss Adriana.” She says it gently, the way you’d warn someone about a step they’re about to miss.
“That’s what he does. He’s never once in his life finished what he started, and you’re not going to be the exception.
The only question is how long you’re willing to pretend before you figure that out. ”
“You done?”
“I’m trying to help.”
“You’re trying to rattle me.” I straighten off the door. “Those are different things, and you’re not good enough at either one to bother pretending.”
The gentleness drops off her face. What replaces it is a rawness I haven’t seen from her before, a flash of the real Blythe, the one who looked at my life and decided she deserved it more.
“He’ll leave you.” She says it flat now, no performance. “The way he left me. The way every man in your life has left you. And when he does, you’ll remember I was the one who told you.”
I hold her eyes for a beat, two, three.
“Goodnight, Blythe,” I say, and push through the restroom door and let it close between us.
Inside, I press both palms to the counter and look at the woman in the mirror. Flushed cheeks. Mouth still warm. Eyes too bright and too honest for a woman running a con.
Because the thing Blythe said, the needle she buried in the warning, isn’t wrong about Knox’s history. He’s never finished what he started. Everyone knows it. It’s the first thing anyone says about him, and it’s the thing his own mother set a deadline to fix.
But she’s wrong about what I saw in the gallery. She’s wrong about the hand on my jaw and the lie about who was watching and the way he kissed me when nobody was.
Or she’s right, and I’m doing what I’ve always done. Wanting to believe a man so badly that I look past every warning sign waving in my face.
I turn the faucet on and let cold water run over my wrists until my pulse comes back to normal, and I stare at my own reflection and ask myself the question I’ve been dodging since the rooftop.
Is this still the plan?
Because if it is, the plan stopped working the way I designed it. Somewhere between the orange segments and the gray suit and the practice kiss that wasn’t practice, the weapon I built turned in my hand, and now I’m not sure which end I’m holding.
My phone buzzes. Knox.
Knox: You’ve been gone ten minutes. Should I send a search party or are you composing a review of my performance?
I stare at the text and the smile arrives before I can catch it, unbidden and real and completely unrelated to revenge or warfare or anything I can justify with the word strategic.
That’s the answer, isn’t it? The smile I can’t stop. The warmth I didn’t authorize.
I dry my hands and straighten my shoulders and walk back out to the gallery, to the man leaning against a chrome lobster with two fresh glasses of champagne, and I take the glass he offers and I don’t name the thing sitting in my chest, because naming it would make it real, and real is the one thing this was never supposed to be.
But my mouth is still warm.
And he’s still watching me the way he watched me before the kiss, the way he’s been watching me for weeks, the way I’m only now letting myself see.
And I am in so much trouble.