15. Adriana
— · —
Adriana
Knox has started keeping oranges at his place.
I don’t know when it happened. One morning they were just there, a whole bowl of them on his kitchen counter, and when I looked at him he shrugged and said the housekeeper bought too many.
But the housekeeper doesn’t buy the small ones with the loose peel, the kind you can pull apart with your fingers without a knife.
Those are the ones I eat. Those are the ones I’ve been eating every morning we spend working through the plan at his table, and he noticed, the way he notices everything, and now there’s a bowl.
He hasn’t mentioned it once.
Neither have I.
This is what the weeks have done to us. Filled in the spaces between the public performances with small, unmarked gestures that don’t belong to any deal we wrote down.
His jacket on the back of my chair at restaurants, left there because I always get cold halfway through.
My violet pens migrating to his desk, one at a time, until there’s a cluster of them in his pencil cup and he uses them to sign things without comment.
A shorthand language of objects that neither of us has agreed to speak.
I could catalog every one of them if I let myself, but that would mean admitting they add up to more than the sum of their parts, and I’m not ready for that math.
“You’re quiet,” Knox says from the passenger seat, his window down, the wind pulling at his hair as we leave the city behind. “Plotting or brooding? I need to calibrate.”
“Neither. I’m thinking about the Eastlake meeting.”
“The one from Tuesday?”
“Gerald called this morning. They’re back in.
Full allocation, same terms as before William lost them.
” I keep my eyes on the road, but the satisfaction sits in my chest, real and earned.
“That’s the third client this month, Knox.
Three that left because they didn’t trust what William was doing, and three that came back because they trust what I am. ”
“Look at you.” He says it low and warm, without the usual joke attached. “Saving the world one handshake at a time.”
“Saving a company. The world can wait.”
“The world can’t afford you. Your hourly rate would bankrupt the UN.”
I laugh, and the sound of it surprises me, loose and easy in the car. That’s new too. The laughing. Not the performative kind I’ve been wearing in public my whole life but this one, the real one, the one that escapes before I can decide whether to let it.
Knox grins at the windshield, pleased with himself for causing it, and I turn my eyes back to the road before the warmth in my chest becomes a thing I have to explain.
The countryside opens up past the last suburb, and the property appears twenty minutes later.
Green, rolling, impossibly still after the city’s noise.
Conrad’s place, or rather the family’s old country estate that Conrad claimed by simply being the only one willing to live in it.
The house sits low and pale at the end of a drive lined with oaks, and the stables are visible behind it, the horses already out in the morning sun.
Conrad is waiting at the paddock gate with his sleeves rolled and a grin already forming.
“You brought him,” he says to me, looking at Knox.
“He insisted on coming.”
“She invited me,” Knox corrects, climbing out of the car. “Begged, really. I couldn’t bear to disappoint her.”
“I said, and I quote, ‘Conrad has horses, you can come if you want.’ That’s not begging.”
“The subtext was begging. I’m fluent in subtext.”
Conrad looks between the two of us, his grin widening in a way that tells me he’s filing this exchange somewhere I’ll hear about later. He extends a hand to Knox.
“Conrad Rosewood. The nice one.”
“Knox Beaufort. The charming one.” He takes the hand, and the shake is easy, two men meeting without pretense. “I’ve heard a great deal about you. Mostly that you’re the only person in your family Adriana tolerates.”
“Tolerates is generous. I’m the one she calls at one in the morning when she needs a place to land.” Conrad glances at me, fond. “I take what I can get.”
The horses are saddled within the hour. Conrad takes the tall bay he’s always ridden, Knox takes a gray that eyes him with open suspicion, and I take the chestnut mare I’ve known since she was a foal, pressing my face to her neck and breathing her in.
The smell of her, warm coat and hay and leather, reaches a place in me that the city can’t touch.
“You rode growing up?” Knox asks, adjusting his stirrups with the competence of a man who’s done this before but not recently.
“Before I could read.” I swing up into the saddle and gather the reins with hands that remember this better than anything else in my life. “My father put me on a horse when I was four. Said it was the only education a Rosewood needed.”
“He wasn’t wrong.” Conrad clicks his tongue and his bay moves forward. “Only time she was ever disobedient as a child. Put her on a horse and she turned into a whole different person.”
Knox looks at me, one eyebrow lifted. “A whole different person?”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Beaufort. I’m still the bossy one. I’m just faster.”
“Faster than me?”
“We’ll see.”
The trails wind through the back of the property, past the tree line and into the fields beyond, and for the first mile I hold back, matching Conrad’s pace, letting Knox find his seat.
He rides well enough. Straight-backed, comfortable, the kind of competence money and good instruction produce.
But there’s a caution in him, a measured quality, the way a man rides when he’s been taught the form but hasn’t felt the freedom of it.
I have.
The trail opens into a long stretch of flat ground and the mare feels it under me, the shift in my weight, the loosening of the rein, and she surges before I’ve fully asked.
My body drops into the gallop on instinct, heels down, hands light, the wind pulling tears from my eyes as the field blurs past.
Behind me, I hear Knox swear, then laugh, and the thunder of his horse picking up pace, but the mare is faster and I know this ground.
I’ve ridden this stretch since I was a girl, knew every dip and rise before I knew the hallways of my own house, and for a few breathless seconds there is nothing in the world except speed and grass and the feeling of being completely, entirely free.
I pull up at the crest of the hill, the mare blowing hard underneath me, and turn in the saddle.
Knox is thirty lengths behind, closing the gap with an expression that’s caught between irritation and admiration, and when he reaches me, his horse tossing its head beside mine, he stops and just looks at me.
My hair is half-down, my cheeks burning, my chest heaving. I know what I look like and I don’t care.
“You,” he says, “are full of surprises.”
“You’re full of excuses.” I’m grinning. “Admit I’m faster.”
“You had a head start.”
“I had a better horse and better hands. There’s a difference.”
He shakes his head, but the way he’s looking at me isn’t the usual look, the calculated charm, the easy appraisal. This one is simpler, stripped down to a reaction he didn’t have time to dress up, and the warmth in it goes through me in a way I’m glad the wind can explain away.
Conrad catches up a minute later, entirely unhurried.
“She did this to me every summer growing up,” he tells Knox. “Don’t take it personally. She’d race the groundskeeper’s son and cry when she lost, and beat every one of my friends and never let them forget it.”
“I wasn’t that bad.”
“You kept a scoreboard.”
“I was eight.”
“You laminated it.”
Knox laughs, a full sound that scatters birds from the hedge, and I duck my head to hide how much I enjoy hearing it.
We ride back slowly. The trail narrows through the trees and Conrad falls in beside Knox, the two of them talking easily, and I let my mare drift a length ahead, close enough to hear without being part of it.
“She seems good,” Conrad says. Not a question.
“She is good.” Knox’s voice behind me, matter-of-fact. “Better than good. She’s the smartest person in every room I’ve been in with her, and she’s spent the last month proving that to people who should have known it all along.”
A pause. Then Conrad, quieter, “I told her to be careful with you.”
“I know.”
“I told her you ruin people for sport.”
“Also true. Historically.”
“And now?”
The pause is longer this time. I keep my eyes on the trail and my hands still on the reins, because if I turn around, whatever Knox is about to say will become a thing said to me instead of about me, and I need to hear it the way it comes out when he thinks I’m not listening.
“Now,” Knox says, “I’m trying very hard to be worth the risk she’s taking.”
The trees thin, and the stables come back into view, and I don’t turn around. My throat tightens around a feeling I can’t swallow and don’t want to.
After the ride, Conrad walks us to the car. Knox goes ahead to check his phone, and Conrad catches my elbow at the gate.
“I was wrong about him,” he says. He’s watching Knox across the gravel, the way brothers watch men who matter to their sisters. “Or he’s very good.”
“He’s very good at a lot of things.”
“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it.
” Conrad turns to me, and his face is the softest, most earnest version of a Rosewood I’ve ever seen.
“The way that man looks at you when you’re not paying attention, Adriana.
He looked at you the entire ride. Every time you pulled ahead, every time you laughed, he was watching you, and the look on his face wasn’t someone keeping up appearances. ”
My chest does a thing I’m not prepared for.
“We have an arrangement, Conrad.”
“I’m sure you do.” He squeezes my elbow and lets go. “But whatever that arrangement is, someone forgot to tell his face.”
He hugs me, presses a kiss to my temple, and waves me off. I walk to the car with the sentence sitting in my ribs, warm and terrifying.
Knox looks up from his phone when I reach him. “Your brother’s good. I was prepared to be interrogated and instead I got a pleasant morning out.”
“He liked you.”
“Everyone likes me. It’s exhausting being this popular.”
“And yet your humility endures.”
He opens my door, and as I move past him to get in, his hand catches my wrist. Not to stop me. Just to hold it, for half a second, his thumb pressing against my pulse in a gesture so small and so natural that it happens before either of us can decide it should.
My pulse jumps under his thumb. His eyes meet mine.
“Good day, Rosewood?”
“Good day,” I say, and my voice comes out softer than I mean it to.
He lets go. I get in. The door closes, and he rounds the car and slides into the driver’s seat, and neither of us mentions the wrist, the pulse, or the look on his face that Conrad described and I’m now trying very hard not to think about.
The countryside rolls past the windows. Knox drives with one hand, the other resting on the center console, close enough that if I moved my hand two inches, our fingers would touch.
I don’t move my hand.
But I don’t pull it away, either.