Chapter 25 Coco #2
The street is quiet, and the air hangs cool and heavy, pressing in on my skin. I click the button on my fob, and the black wrought iron gate creaks as it slides shut behind me, sealing me in. All I want is to get inside, lock the door, and put this day behind me.
Then I hear the low hum of an engine.
I turn just as Ridge’s black Aston Martin glides to a stop at the curb. The dark body gleams under the streetlight, flawless and remote, like something that belongs to another world entirely.
The windows are tinted so deeply they reveal nothing, the same controlled restraint Ridge wears like armor.
The driver’s window lowers, and he leans out, folding his arms on the edge, chin resting on his tattooed forearms. His eyes lock on me and don’t let go.
“Hey, beautiful,” he says, easy as breath.
My throat tightens. Everything inside me pulls in opposite directions. My body responds before my head can catch up, warmth flaring where it has no business being. That pull scares me more than anything Iggy said tonight.
“Hey,” I manage. Anything more would give me away.
“You okay?” His voice is lower now, stripped of the playfulness.
I think about lying, about brushing it off and retreating into my house and my silence. But I can’t do that with him. Not like this.
“It’s been a long night,” I say, slipping through the narrow side gate and stepping back toward the sidewalk. “I talked to my father.”
I can see the shadows of his jaw tighten under the streetlight. “How did it go?”
I shake my head, forcing something like a smile. “About how you’d expect. I just need sleep.”
His eyes narrow, something calculating moving behind them. “Can I come in and hold you?”
The question catches me off balance. Part of me wants to refuse to keep the chaos of tonight from spilling into him. Another part of me is already unraveling and wants his arms around me more than it wants air.
I nod. “I’d like that.”
He puts the car in reverse and parks down the block instead of blocking my driveway. I wait by the gate, listening to the steady rhythm of his footsteps on the pavement.
When he reaches me, his hand brushes my arm, light but intentional, before I turn and lead him inside.
He slows just before the steps, his gaze dropping to the ground. A folded piece of paper has snagged against the edge of the concrete, half caught in a crack.
He bends and picks it up. “This yours?”
I glance down and recognize it immediately. My stomach tightens.
“Yeah,” I say. “I must’ve dropped it when I grabbed the mail.”
He looks at it once and reads a line out loud casually. “Sommelier certification program.”
“That’s it.” I shrug, already wanting it gone. “I told you about it. I think I got on some mailing list a while ago. It’s nothing.”
He folds the pamphlet once and holds it out to me.
“My hands are full,” I say, shifting my keys. “Can you bring it inside?”
“Sure.”
He tucks it into his back pocket without comment and lifts his eyes back to my face.
“You okay?” he asks, and the moment moves on.
I unlock the door, and he follows me in. The house shrinks with him in it, the space tightening until his presence is all there is.
He pulls me into his arms without a word, and I let myself lean into him. His heat, his solid weight, slows the frantic edge inside me. Exactly what I need. Exactly why wanting him means stepping into a life that’s already closing doors behind me.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs, his mouth brushing the top of my head.
“I’m cold,” I whisper. The words ring hollow even to me. My hands twist into his shirt as I breathe in the familiar scent of smoke and leather.
“Coco,” he says quietly. “Talk to me. You don’t have to carry whatever this is alone.”
I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to hear confirmation or denial in his voice. But once the words are there, they refuse to stay buried.
“I need to ask you something.”
His body shifts, tension snapping into place. He pulls back just enough to look at me. “Anything.”
My heart slams against my ribs.
“Iggy said there’s a fentanyl shipment coming in,” I say. “He said it’s yours.”
Ridge doesn’t answer right away.
He stands there without moving, his focus slipping past me, and for a moment it feels like I’ve lost him to something unfolding behind his eyes. The pause stretches longer than it should, long enough for my chest to tighten and my certainty to start slipping.
“That isn’t true,” I add quickly, the words rushing to fill the silence. “It can’t be. I just need you to say it.”
He finally looks at me, but there’s no reassurance, no immediate outrage. Just a guarded focus that makes my stomach drop.
“Where did you hear this?” he asks.
The question is wrong. Not because of the words themselves, but because of how carefully they’re delivered, how much space he leaves around them. And because he still hasn’t said no.
“I told you,” I say quietly. “Iggy. He said people are scrambling for a piece.”
Ridge exhales through his nose and turns away from me, crossing the room as if he needs distance to think. His hands brace against the back of a chair, shoulders tightening beneath my gaze, his posture closing in on itself without quite collapsing.
“He inserts himself into your life an awful lot,” he says.
“Stop deflecting,” I reply. “Answer me.”
He doesn’t turn around.
“For weeks,” he says, voice low and controlled, “there’s been noise and rumors and bullshit. I don’t need you putting your nose in all of this.”
Something cold settles in my chest.
“So you’re not denying it,” I say.
His head snaps toward me. “That’s not what I said.”
“Then say it,” I press, the words cracking despite my effort to keep them steady. “Say you have nothing to do with it.”
The silence that follows stretches. The implication is loaded in a way that makes my ribs ache as I breathe through it.
I take a step back, folding my arms tight across my chest like they can keep me upright.
I search his face, still hoping for something I can recognize. The man who stood in my kitchen. The man who told me he loved me, who touched me like I mattered and whispered things to me that made me think he was different from this world we were born into.
Nothing gives.
“So this is who you are,” I say quietly. “Not with me. Not when it’s just us. But when it actually counts.”
The words hang between us, heavier than I expect.
His expression doesn’t change. If anything, it closes further.
I swallow hard. “I thought you were better than the worst of it,” I say. “I thought whatever this business is, you weren’t that.”
“That’s not how it works,” he says finally.
He still doesn’t say no. And that’s when the last piece falls into place.
Ridge drags a hand down his face. When he looks at me again, whatever softness was there earlier is gone, replaced by something resolute and distant.
“This is where I draw the line,” he says. “I’m not dragging you into this anymore.”
He turns toward the door.
“Ridge,” I say, not sure if I want him to stay or go. “I stood up to my father for you. For us. And you’re going to walk out like? That’s it?”
He pauses with his hand on the handle, long enough for something in my chest to lift. For a second, I think he might turn around, that he might finally say something that makes this stop spiraling.
But he doesn’t.
“I’m not the man you want me to be,” he says quietly.
That’s it. No denial, no fight, and no promise to make it right.
The door closes behind him, the sound echoing through the space he leaves behind.
I chose him. I chose him over my father, over my family. And when it mattered, when I asked him to choose me back, he walked away.
Whatever Ridge Stone is willing to do to stay on top, I finally understand one thing with brutal clarity.
I am not the thing he will risk everything for.