22. Adriana
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Adriana
Morning finds us tangled together, and I don’t want to move.
Sunlight falls across the bed in a warm stripe, catching the edge of his shoulder, the line of his arm thrown over my waist. His face is half-buried in the pillow, his breathing slow and steady, and I lie on my side watching the light move across him and thinking that this is the most peaceful I’ve been in longer than I can measure.
His hand twitches on my hip. Fingers tightening, pulling me closer by an inch, a gesture that happens in his sleep and means more to me than anything he’s said awake. The unconscious wanting. The body reaching for me without the brain’s permission.
I press my mouth to his shoulder.
He stirs. His eyes open, finding me instantly, and the smile arrives before anything else, unhurried, warm, the one that has no performance in it. The one I’ve started collecting in a private inventory of moments I’ll keep regardless of what happens to us.
“Morning.” His voice is rough, half-asleep, and his hand slides up from my hip to my waist. “You’re staring.”
“I’m observing. There’s a professional distinction.”
“You stole my line.” He rolls toward me, and the movement brings us flush, his chest against mine, his thigh between my legs, and the proximity sends a pulse of heat through my center. “I like you in the morning, Rosewood.”
“You like me every hour. You’ve mentioned.”
“Because it bears repeating.” His mouth finds the side of my neck, slow, open, the drag of his lips sending warmth down my spine. “You’re especially worth liking in the morning. Before you’ve built all the walls.”
“I don’t build walls.”
“You build fortresses.” He lifts his head and looks down at me, propped on one elbow, and his eyes are doing the thing that undoes me every time, the total attention, the seeing. “Right now you don’t have any. It’s my favorite version of you.”
My hand comes up to his jaw. The diamond stud catches the light at his ear, and I trace the line of it with my thumb before pulling him down to me.
The kiss starts soft and stays that way for a while, mouths moving against each other with the patience of two people who have nowhere to be and no urgency except the steady, building want that’s been waking me up next to this man for weeks.
His hand moves down my side, unhurried, learning the path it’s already memorized, and my body opens to him the way it’s learned to, without the bracing, without the old hesitation.
He pulls back an inch. “Tell me what you want.”
“You know what I want.”
“I want to hear you say it.” His mouth grazes my jaw, my ear, the hollow below it. “You spent years not asking for what you want. So ask.”
The words should be difficult. They aren’t.
“I want you.” My voice is quieter than I mean it to be, stripped of its usual composure. “I want you, Knox.”
He answers by pulling my shirt over my head, and then his mouth is on my collarbone, my sternum, the curve of my breast, tracing a map he knows by heart now with a devotion that never once feels routine.
My back arches into him, and the sound I make is the sound of a woman who has learned that asking is safe, that wanting is safe, that this man will give her exactly what she asks for and then everything she didn’t know to ask for besides.
I reach for him and he lets me take, lets me pull him free of his clothes and run my hands down his chest, his stomach, lower.
When I wrap my hand around him he goes still, his breath catching, his forehead dropping to mine.
My name comes out of his mouth broken in half, and the power of it, of being the one who undoes this man who undoes everyone, sends a rush through me that’s as close to worship as anything I’ve felt.
We move together in the morning light, face to face, his hand cupping the back of my neck, my leg hooked over his hip.
He enters me slowly, his eyes on mine, and the slowness is a conversation, every movement a sentence in a language we’ve been building since the rooftop.
I know his rhythm now. He knows mine. When I tilt my hips he adjusts, and when his breathing changes I pull him closer, and the knowing is the intimacy, not the newness but the depth of two people who have stopped performing for each other.
“Look at me,” he murmurs, and I do, and his face this close, this open, his guard so far down I can see every part of him he usually hides, it tightens around my chest and doesn’t let go.
I come with his name in my mouth and his eyes in mine, and the release rolls through me in a long wave that crests and holds and finally settles into a glow that reaches every part of my body.
He follows me over seconds later, his hand fisting in the sheets beside my head, and the sound he makes against my throat is the most honest thing I’ve ever heard from him.
For a long time we just breathe.
His forehead rests against mine. Our bodies are still connected, neither of us willing to break the closeness, and his thumb traces a line down the bridge of my nose in a gesture so tender that my eyes prickle.
“Rosewood.”
“Beaufort.”
“Stay.” He says it into the space between our mouths. “Don’t go to the office today. Stay here. We’ll order food and do nothing and I’ll ruin you again before lunch.”
I laugh, and the laugh moves through both our bodies where they’re still joined, and his grin widens at the sensation.
“I have a meeting at eleven.”
“Cancel it.”
“It’s with Gerald.”
“Gerald loves me. He’ll understand.” He kisses the tip of my nose. “Tell him Knox Beaufort is holding you hostage and demands a ransom of one uninterrupted morning.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You love it.”
The word sits between us. Love. He said it casually, a throwaway, the way people say it when they mean a smaller version of it. But my chest catches on it anyway, the way a thread catches on a nail, and for one unguarded second I think: yes. I do. I love it. I love this. I might love…
I kiss him before the thought finishes, and if he notices the urgency in it, he doesn’t say.
***
The office is quiet at noon.
I came in late, skin still warm from his shower, his crew neck under my coat because I’m running out of my own clothes and I’ve stopped pretending to care.
Gerald’s meeting went well, another backer secured, the turnaround gaining its own momentum now, a thing with weight that doesn’t need me pushing every second.
I’m at my desk sorting through the quarterly numbers when the door opens without a knock.
Blythe stands in the frame.
She’s bigger now, the pregnancy visible even under the loose blouse, and the sight of her sends the old jolt through me, not pain anymore, just recognition, the muscle memory of a wound that’s scarred over. She doesn’t have the sweet mask on. She’s past that.
“Miss Adriana.” The old name, flat now, no warmth in it. “I need five minutes.”
“You’re in my office.”
“I’m aware.” She steps in and closes the door behind her. “And I wouldn’t be here if I had another choice, so believe me when I tell you this isn’t a social call.”
I lean back in my chair and wait. My hands stay on the desk, unhurried, giving her nothing.
“I’m not here to fight with you,” she says.
“I’ve lost that fight. You’ve won. The company, the rooms, the whole thing.
Congratulations.” The bitterness is honest, and it makes her more dangerous than the sweetness ever did.
“But before you float away on the cloud you’ve been riding, I think you deserve to know what you’re actually floating on. ”
“Say what you came to say, Blythe.”
“The inheritance.” She watches my face when she says it. “Has he told you about his mother’s deadline? The one where Knox Beaufort has to prove he can commit to one person, inside the year, or he loses everything? The estate, the companies, the name?”
My hands stay still on the desk. My face stays still above them.
“He told me about Clementine’s condition,” I say evenly. “It was part of our agreement from the beginning.”
The confirmation crosses her face, she expected surprise, not composure. But she recovers fast.
“Then you know. You know that the whole reason he agreed to this, the whole reason he’s been buying you flowers and playing house and holding your hand in public, is because he needed a woman on his arm to satisfy Mommy’s ultimatum.
” She steps closer to the desk. “I was the first candidate, and I wasn’t good enough.
You’re the upgrade. More polished, better family, a name that looks serious.
But the function is the same, Adriana. You’re the box he’s checking. ”
“You’re done.”
“Am I? Because from where I’m standing, I see a woman who got burned by one man and ran straight into the arms of another man who’s using her for exactly the same thing, his own convenience.
” She puts her hands on the edge of my desk and leans in.
“William used you to prop up a company. Knox is using you to prop up an inheritance. The only difference is that Knox is better at making you feel special while he does it.”
The silence that follows is the kind where the room decides who won.
“Get out of my office,” I say.
She straightens. Reads my face. Finds nothing to hold onto, which is the thing about years of practice, you learn to go blank when the knife is in.
“Ask him,” she says at the door, quieter now, the cruelty spent. “Ask him what happens to his inheritance if you walk away. Ask him how much you’re worth to him in actual dollars. And when you see the number, ask yourself whether that’s love or accounting.”
The door closes behind her.
I sit very still at my desk, my hands exactly where they were, my face exactly what it was, and I let the poison do what poison does.
Because the information isn’t new. I knew about the inheritance. I was there when Knox proposed the term, standing on a rooftop with both our futures in ruins, and I agreed because the logic was clean. The same lie does double work. His word, his term, his reason for being in this at all.
I knew.
But knowing a thing in the abstract and having it held up against the last three months are two different experiences.
The oranges. Were they for me, or for the appearance of a man who cares?
The jacket left on my chair, attentiveness, or set dressing?
The hallway confession, “I don’t know how to stay and that scares me,” was that honesty, or the performance of a man who’s learned that vulnerability is a more effective charm than confidence?
Knox Beaufort is the best performer I’ve ever met.
He told me so himself, on the first night, on the rooftop.
“By most honest measures I’m not a good man.
” He warned me. He laid it out. And I let the warnings dissolve in the warmth of his hands and the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not watching.
William never warned me. Knox did, and I ignored it, because the warning came wrapped in a smile and a diamond piercing and mornings in his bed where he made me feel wanted.
My thumbnail finds the edge of my palm, pressing into the scar from the lamp, the one that’s been healing since the night my marriage ended in a spare room full of broken glass. The pain grounds me. My eyes sting, and I don’t let them win.
I won’t confront him. Not yet. Not until I know, and the only way to know is to watch, the way I watched William, the way I’ve always watched, quiet, careful, looking for the truth in the spaces between what a man says and what a man does.
But I can’t sit with the doubt and do nothing. The doubt will eat me alive if I let it, the way the suspicion ate me in that marriage, and I refuse to live in that space again. So I’ll channel it into the one thing I can control.
The detonator.
I pull the Brandon Reyes file from my desk drawer and open it, and I begin to plan.
The reveal. The timing. The room. The faces.
Every detail laid out with the same precision I used for the gala slideshow, because the woman who broke once in a spare room full of glass learned that breaking is a luxury, and the only currency that holds value is the plan.
Blythe wanted to take my peace. Instead, she gave me my focus back.
The paternity reveal happens on my schedule, in my room, on my terms.
And if Knox Beaufort’s feelings turn out to be as real as they feel at three in the morning when he holds me in the dark and whispers that he’s still here, then the reveal won’t touch us.
And if they don’t…
My hand closes over the file.
Then at least I’ll have the satisfaction of watching every person who hurt me lose everything they built on lies.
Starting with the woman who just walked out of my office.