Chapter 6 #2
"Odette's garden. He was maybe fifteen, reached into a planter, and a tree frog jumped on his hand. The sound he made could've shattered glass." I take a sip of wine. "And that's all you're getting."
The frog story is an exaggeration. He flinched. Maybe swore. It wasn't the glass-shattering event I just sold, but Remy introduced me to his team as Darcy's friend and called what happened between us a mistake, so he can survive a frog story.
"That is nowhere near enough." Xander leans back, arms spread wide across the back of the chair, and the laugh he gives me is loud enough to draw Darcy's eye from across the rooftop. "You're not giving me anything else, are you?"
"Not a thing."
"Was hoping for a shortcut."
"I'm not the source." I tip my glass toward where Remy is standing across the rooftop. "Try the source."
"He doesn't talk much."
"That's the source's problem."
Xander leans back, arms spread wide across the back of the chair, and the laugh he gives me is loud enough to draw Darcy's eye from across the rooftop. "You're brutal. I love it."
His grin is genuine, and it makes me want to give him something, which is dangerous.
But Remy with these people doesn't match the Remy in the townhouse.
That Remy moved through sterile rooms like a guest in his own life, everything curated and nothing touched.
This Remy is stealing a muffuletta quarter off Jax's plate while Jax protests loudly, and when Darcy says something that makes the group laugh, Remy's smile reaches his eyes for the first time since Louisiana, maybe since before Louisiana, since the boy in Odette's garden who followed French instructions like they were scripture.
More than the townhouse, the hotel, or the LeBlanc house where every room held a version of him that didn't quite fit.
Watching him belong somewhere catches in my chest, and I look away before it can settle.
The table fills gradually. Plates loaded, conversations folding into each other with the comfort of habit.
Darcy has somehow ended up between Jax and Xander, which is either the best or worst seating arrangement in the history of dinner parties, and she's already holding court with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned whether she belongs in a room.
I take the chair Remy pulls out for me without comment. I don't look at him, because looking at him right now, with the string lights tracing the line of his jaw and the city going violet behind his shoulders, is not something I'm going to do with an audience.
The city goes full dark while plates pass hand to hand, and the string lights become the only thing separating us from the skyline. I take the sourdough before Darcy can reach for it, tear off a piece, and pass the rest to my left without looking at who's sitting there.
"The three who came in during the chaos.
" Remy's voice cuts clean across the table as he drops into his chair like a man who's done this a hundred times.
"Darcy, Evangeline, this is Cole." A nod toward the man at the far end, dark-haired with angular features and the kind of posture that suggests he's never slouched in his life.
His eyes move between Darcy and me with an assessment so quick and thorough that it feels like being scanned at an airport.
"Asher." Directly across, dark and still, watching from under brows that could qualify as structural elements. He doesn't smile, doesn't nod, just notes us with the same flat attention he probably gives a room he's already cleared.
"And Damian." The chair closest to the railing and farthest from the center, occupied by a man who doesn't seem to want to be noticed.
Gray eyes, crooked nose, stubble that lives in the space between purposeful and neglected.
He lifts two fingers from his glass in greeting. That's the whole introduction
"Darcy is my sister. Evangeline's her friend."
Evangeline, not Evie. Darcy's friend, not mine. Twice now, to two different groups, with the same polished delivery that costs him nothing and costs me exactly one smile held in place a beat longer than it needs to be.
"Nice to meet y'all." Darcy waves at all three with the enthusiasm of someone who hasn't noticed that one of them looks like he could snap a person in half without adjusting his grip. "I already love everyone at this table, just so you know. It's a blanket policy."
"Noted." Cole's response carries an almost-warmth, delivered with the timing of someone who weighs each word before letting it go.
He passes the crawfish bread to Asher without looking, and Asher takes it without acknowledging the handoff.
The smoothness of the exchange tells me these two have shared meals enough times that the choreography is automatic.
Damian says nothing. He eats methodically, gray eyes tracking the table's energy with an attention that reminds me of the Secret Service agents who worked my father's events. Present, watchful, and occupying a frequency slightly outside the conversation.
When Xander reaches across him for the pepper jelly, Damian shifts his glass two inches to the left without pausing or looking up, and the adjustment is so clean that I realize he knew Xander's arm was coming before Xander did.
"OK, but here's what I need to know." Jax leans forward, pointing at Darcy with a crab cake he's already bitten in half.
"Photographic evidence of him before he became this.
Because I've been working with this man for years and he arrived fully formed, like a Ken doll someone unboxed already dressed. "
"Oh my God, SO much evidence." Darcy grabs my arm. "Evie, tell him about the school play."
"I'm not telling him about the school play."
Darcy turns back to Jax, vibrating. "Grams used to tell this one to anyone who'd sit still.
In sixth grade he played a tree in the school play.
Not a talking tree. Not an important tree.
Just a tree in the background. And he committed SO hard that the next summer, when she told him the magnolias were off-limits, he climbed one anyway.
Wanted to know what being a tree felt like from twelve feet up.
Branch snapped, he landed in her herb garden, crushed her entire basil crop. "
"At least the basil smelled good." Remy says it without looking up.
Jax drops his forehead to the table. Xander is wheezing. Cole covers his mouth with his hand, and even Damian's mouth twitches by a fraction of a degree.
"And Grams made him replant every single stem." Darcy delivers the closer with the pride of a woman who knows she's nailed it. "In the July heat. Three hours. Supervised in French. And that is why Tripp gardens."
"A dedicated arborist." Cole's voice carries from the far end, dry. "That explains a few things about his operational approach."
Remy points his fork at Cole. "I will remember this."
"I'm counting on it."
Laughter rolls down the table.
"No, but listen." Darcy grabs Jax's wrist. "You cannot tell me you've never had a proper beignet, because that's a tragedy and I'm going to need a moment."
"I've had beignets."
"Where?"
"There's a place in the Mission that, OK, fine, it's not great, but it's got the powdered sugar and the, you know, the shape."
"The shape. He said the shape." Darcy looks at me with an expression of genuine anguish. "Evie, he thinks beignets are about the shape."
"Café Du Monde would like a word," I say, and Darcy points at me like I've just delivered closing arguments.
I turn my attention to the crab cake on my plate and cut it with the edge of my fork.
The crab is sweet and clean, bright with lemon, nothing like the Gulf.
"So how long has CPG been operating? Darcy mentioned Remy's been with the company a few years, but I don't think I've heard much about how it started. "
Cole answers first, and he's good. "CPG was founded a little over seven years ago to fill a gap in the executive protection market.
High-net-worth clients who need more than a bodyguard but less than a private army.
" He takes a sip of his drink. "We've grown steadily since then, and we work internationally now.
The team is small by design, which allows us to be selective about contracts. "
Every word is accurate. Every word is placed. And the answer tells me absolutely nothing I couldn't have read on a company website.
I nod and file the gap between the question and the answer. My fork finds the last bite of crab cake, and I eat it while Xander starts a side conversation with Cole about a contract in Marin County. No one at this table needs to know I'm building a case file.
"OK, wait." Xander sets his glass down hard enough that the table vibrates. "I've been sitting on this for an hour and I can't do it anymore." He swings his gaze to Darcy. "Tripp. You've been calling him Tripp all night. What is that?"
Darcy laughs like the question is absurd.
"Because he's the third? Remington Arthur LeBlanc the Third?
Everyone called him that since he was a kid.
Tripp." She takes a sip of her rosé, completely unbothered, completely unaware that she's just detonated something underneath the table that I can feel in the soles of my feet.
"It's not, like, a secret. It's just a nickname. "
The city is still loud, the fire pit still crackles. But the current underneath the conversation shifts, and I feel it like a seatbelt locking across my chest.
Forks pause. Glasses hover. My hand finds the stem of my wine glass and stays there, holding still so nothing else can move. It lasts maybe two seconds, and in those two seconds, I watch five men process the same piece of information at different speeds.
Remington. The Third.
Remington, with a numeral attached.
I already knew this. I've known this since I was twelve years old and watched him carry potting soil across Odette's courtyard while she called him mon Remington in a voice that treated the name like crystal.
The name isn't what confuses me. What confuses me is that these people, his people, the ones he trusts enough to invite onto a rooftop with string lights and crawfish bread, didn't know it.
Remy laughs.
It's perfect. Easy, self-deprecating, timed to fill the gap before the gap becomes a question. "Old family name. My grandmother insisted on it, and Darcy's never let me live it down."
He picks up his bourbon and takes a sip, and his smile over the rim of the glass is the exact smile I've watched my father use when a reporter asks about campaign funding, the one that answers the tone of the question without touching its content.
The table relaxes. Jax makes a joke about Remy being secretly royalty, and Xander runs with it, and the conversation rebuilds itself over the crack like water closing over a stone.
But the crack was there.
How fast he filled it. The machinery behind the smile, the calculation that chose self-deprecation over deflection because laughter closes doors.
I know that machinery. I was built inside it, fed by it every single day of my life.
My father can do what Remy just did, pivot from exposure to charm in the space between one breath and the next, and make you feel foolish for having noticed anything at all.
Watching Remy do it shouldn't feel like this. It shouldn't feel like watching someone I recognize in a place I didn't expect to find them.
And Kade.
Kade didn't react. Not during the silence, not during the recovery. His fork moved at the same pace, his blue eyes tracked the table with the same quiet authority they'd carried all evening.
He already knew. Not just the nickname, not just the name. Whatever Remy is carrying underneath the charm and the bourbon and the easy laugh, Kade has already seen it, and his non-reaction is the loudest thing at this table.
I set my glass down, carefully, and press my palms flat against my thighs under the table where no one can see the tension in them.
The conversation rebuilds. Someone opens another bottle.
Jax tells a story that gets Darcy laughing hard enough to draw Damian's gaze for half a second before he goes back to his plate.
The crack stays under the surface, but the table moves over it like nothing happened.
Darcy has no idea she dropped a grenade five minutes ago. She just keeps talking.
The evening keeps going. The fire pit throws orange light across faces that are looser now, softer with food and alcohol doing their slow work.
"You absolutely did it on purpose." Jax leans across his plate toward me, elbows on the table now, the move easy and just slightly too familiar. "She knows things. You know things. I'm being shut out of an entire knowledge ecosystem here, Evie, and I cannot accept it."
"I don't know what to tell you, Jax." I let the smile come. "Some doors are just closed."
"That's the kind of line that makes me want to find a window."
It's light, friendly, harmless on its face. Jax flirts the way he talks, with no apparent target, just the energy of a man for whom every conversation is an opportunity.
Remy's hand settles on the back of my chair.
Not on me. On the wood behind my shoulders, fingers curving over the top rail. He doesn't look at me when he does it, and he doesn't adjust. His attention stays on Damian across the table, who is making some silent point with his eyebrows that Remy keeps nodding at.
The hand stays.
I don't move. I don't shift backward into the place his knuckles would be, even though every nerve along my spine has just tuned to one exact frequency.
Across the table, Darcy's gaze drops to his hand on the back of my chair. Her eyes flick to mine, and the grin she buries in her wine glass is slow and knowing and absolutely lethal.
Jax keeps talking, oblivious. I'm not sure Remy has noticed either, which is the part that breaks everything I thought I knew about how he moves through rooms. The Remy I knew never did anything unconsciously. The Remy I knew didn't claim space he hadn't already accounted for.
This Remy just did.