Chapter Seven
EVERETT
The lap pool sits at the far end of the gym. Three lanes.
My father built it because Conrad Kauffman didn't believe in going cheap on anything, including gyms, and because putting three lanes of heated water inside a skyscraper is exactly the excessive nonsense billionaires do when they run out of reasonable ways to spend money.
I inherited the nonsense. Along with the habit.
The gym is glass on three sides—Seattle sprawling out in every direction, the Sound flat and silver in the pre-dawn dark, the mountains just starting to catch the first pale edge of morning.
The pool itself is twenty-five meters, heated, lit from below in a blue so deep it looks like someone liquified the sky and poured it into concrete.
No one is ever up here at four-thirty.
That's the point.
I pull on my goggles, step to the edge, and dive.
The cold hits first. Even heated, the water is a shock—a full-body reset, every nerve snapping to attention.
Then the silence. That's the part I've been chasing since I was nineteen years old and discovered that the only place my brain would stop screaming was ten inches below the surface of a chlorinated pool.
The world above—the board, the contract, the woman sleeping in my penthouse—all of it goes mute the second my head goes under.
There's nothing down here but the black line on the bottom and the rhythm of my own stroke.
I swim the way I did in college. Hard and fast. Flip turns that send water sheeting over the edge, arms pulling through the surface like I'm trying to outrun something that lives in the deep end.
Four years on the Stanford swim team. Two school records that still stand, as far as I know.
Not because I had the most talent—because I was the most willing to stay in it long after everyone else got out.
My coach used to say I didn't swim to win. I swam to disappear.
He wasn't wrong.
Fifty meters. Flip. Fifty more.
I got maybe an hour of sleep last night. The rest was spent in my bed, staring at the ceiling, hyper-aware of the woman sleeping thirty feet down the hall in the guest suite wearing my ring on her finger. Every time I closed my eyes, my brain served up another image I didn't ask for.
The warmth of her finger when I slid that ring on.
The coolness of the metal against her skin.
The way her eyes locked on mine—not on the diamond, on me—like I'd handed her something far more meaningful than ten million dollars of De Beers.
Most women in my orbit would have expected a ring like that.
Would have held out their hand and waited for it like it was owed.
Aria looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
Like no one had ever put something that valuable on any part of her body, and she couldn't understand why I would.
That's the part I can't stop replaying.
My shoulders burn by lap eight. My lungs find their rhythm by twelve—the cadence of bilateral breathing that my body remembers even when my brain is somewhere else entirely.
Breathe left. Stroke. Stroke. Breathe right.
The repetition is mechanical. Meditative.
The closest thing to peace my nervous system knows how to produce.
By lap twenty, the thinking slows.
But it doesn't stop.
The arena steps two nights ago. Her fist in my lapel. Barefoot. That kiss in front of the town car while cameras lit up around us like a fireworks show nobody authorized.
And worse—the one before it. In my office.
Her thighs on either side of mine, her weight settling into my lap, her hands on my jaw, her mouth on my mouth.
I was three seconds from pulling her tighter against me.
Three seconds from letting her feel exactly what she was doing to me.
My hands stayed on the armrests by a margin so thin it should terrify me.
Then Jeremy walked in.
If he hadn't, I don't know what would have happened. And that's the problem. I have never almost lost control like that with a woman. Not once. Not with Sienna. Not with anyone. I have always been able to manage the situation, manage myself, keep the line exactly where I drew it.
Aria erased the line. I didn’t even see it happen.
Lap twenty-five. Flip turn.
She's a distraction I can barely afford for the next year, and with the possibility of annulment if we don't consummate the marriage, the idea of keeping this strictly professional just developed a structural flaw the size of the Grand Canyon.
By two a.m. I gave up pretending sleep was coming. Went downstairs to my office, stretched out on the couch, and stared at a different ceiling until my body gave up and dragged me here. The pool. The only place that's ever been able to quiet my head.
Lap thirty. The thinking organizes.
The board meeting is in three hours. Christian will want me to rehearse answers I shouldn't have to rehearse if the engagement were real. Everly will call fourteen times about vendors. The Vancouver GM will try to lowball me on the trade package. All of that is manageable. All of that is just work.
The thing that isn't manageable is the woman sleeping in my penthouse right now who kissed me like she meant it and then looked at me afterward like she was surprised she did.
Lap thirty-five.
I push off the wall harder than necessary and feel it in my ribs.
The problem isn't that Aria kissed me. The problem is that for three seconds in that office chair, with her weight on my thighs and her hands on my face, I wasn't thinking about the contract or the trust or the board or any of the fourteen reasons this has to stay professional.
I was thinking about pulling her closer.
About finding out what sound she'd make if I kissed her back properly.
Not the controlled version, not the public performance, but the real thing.
Slow. Thorough. My hand in her hair and her breath catching against my mouth and nothing between us but heat and bad decisions.
That's the version I can't afford.
The light is changing above me. I can see it through the water—the glass ceiling shifting from black to gray as morning creeps over the mountains. The city waking up. The day starting whether I'm ready for it or not.
I finish at forty.
Grab the wall. Pull off my goggles. Rest my forearms on the pool edge and breathe.
My heart rate is finally where it should be.
My shoulders ache in the good way—the way that means I pushed hard enough to earn the calm.
The surface settles around me, the water going from churned white to still blue, and for a few seconds I just float there.
Half in, half out. Watching Seattle light up through the glass.
This is the only place I've ever been able to think clearly.
Not the office. Not the boardroom. Not the penthouse.
The pool. The silence. The black line at the bottom that asks nothing of me except that I follow it.
I haul myself out, towel off, and head for the showers.
The water is just short of scalding and it's not helping.
Forty laps and I still can't shake the ghost of her shampoo.
Peonies. I've known the scent since she started—my mother always had them in the house, a florist on weekly delivery bringing massive bouquets like clockwork.
It should repulse me. Family association.
Bad memories. The whole Pavlovian catalog.
But the smell on Aria is different. Sweet and warm and nothing like the arrangements that sat on the mantel while my mother pretended everything was fine.
I didn’t mean to blurt out the flower. I didn’t mean to show my cards—that I’ve been cataloging small things about Aria for six months.
Maybe because some of it has been subconscious.
I'm not trying to notice every detail. My brain is doing it without my consent, like some rogue department I can't fire.
I shut off the water, grab a towel, and dry off. I'm buttoning the cuffs of a fresh shirt—I keep three in the locker room because mornings like this happen more often than I'd admit—when I hear voices on the gym floor.
Levi's easy laugh. Colston's low murmur.
I check my phone while I finish getting dressed.
Sienna Brighton: You're engaged?
Another text follows before I can decide whether to ignore her.
Sienna Brighton: Didn't know kissing in front of paparazzi was your style.
My jaw tightens. I pocket the phone without answering and head out to the gym floor.
Levi is stretching by the pull-up bar. Colston is settling onto the bench press with the unhurried energy of a man who's been up since four but won't admit it.
They both look up when I appear. They both look delighted, which means they've been talking about me.
"You're here early," Levi says. "Even for you."
"Couldn't sleep."
"Hmm." He tosses me a water bottle I don't need. "Something keeping you up?"
"Work."
Colston snorts from the bench. "Sure. Work."
I lean against the wall. I should leave. I should go to my office, get ahead of the board meeting, review the trust addendum Christian sent last night. Instead I stand here, because apparently some part of me wants the normalcy of my brothers giving me shit at five in the morning.
"Heard you were trending," Colston says, resettling the bar on the rack and sitting up. "Bold move. Very grabby."
I shoot both of them a look. My fingers twitch at the memory of her ass cheek in my hand. The way she pressed into the grip instead of pulling away. The small sound she made against my mouth that the cameras couldn't have caught but I will apparently hear for the rest of my natural life.
"Don't start."
"Oh, we've already started," Levi says cheerfully, pulling up something on his phone. "You should've seen the group chat."
"So," Colston says after a minute, "do you like her?"
"No."
Levi snorts. "You should have seen him in his office when I asked her if she was single. Just about threw me out the four-story window of the arena."
"I don't have time for this."