Chapter 23
LEXI
We left the sitting room at Dominion Hall with the kind of reckless plan that always sounds smarter when you say it fast. An hour, Lucas had promised. A yacht. Then a jet. Dinner in New York, because why not set a match to common sense and see how bright it burns?
In the dressing room, racks of loaner clothes—somehow my size, somehow already tailored—waited like the universe was daring me to play. I picked a silk slip dress the color of champagne and a white blazer soft as dusk. Heels I could run in, if I had to. Hair down. Lips a bare hint of rose.
If the world insisted on watching, it could.
When I stepped into the foyer, Lucas was already there.
Black suit, open collar, no tie. He looked like a man you meet once and remember forever, the kind who could pry open a door with a glance or close it with a word.
His eyes swept me, not hungry so much as intent, cataloging. I felt it everywhere.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I am,” I replied, and I meant it.
As we walked down to the dock, we didn’t talk much. His hand held mine, my fingers brushing his knuckles now and then like I needed to prove he was real. Every time I did, the muscle in his jaw ticked like I’d just thrown him a switch he didn’t trust himself to touch.
The yacht was absurd in the best way—sleek, black, humming with quiet money.
Not ostentatious, not a floating nightclub.
A blade with rooms. Crew waited on the dock in polos that matched the sky, and for a second, the old reflex kicked in: smile, be gracious, apologize for the trouble of being you. Lucas didn’t give me the chance.
“Ms. Montgomery won’t need anything until we’re underway,” he said, in that even tone that closes a door without sounding like one. The captain nodded and vanished. So did the deckhand. So did the world.
We slipped out into the harbor, gulls cutting clean lines overhead, the peninsula sliding by to starboard. The wind found my hair. Lucas stood behind me at the rail, close enough that I could feel the heat of him, his presence a wall I could lean on or climb.
“What do you think?” I asked, eyes on the water.
He didn’t answer for a long beat. Then: “I’m not used to any of this.”
“The yacht?” I teased.
“The money. The speed. Doors that open because a last name asks them to.” He paused. “It used to be that when I wanted to see the ocean, I drove all night and slept in my truck.”
I turned. “Where?”
“Montana boy,” he said, a small smile. “Seven brothers, one house that leaned when the wind blew, a mother who could fix a fence and fry a steak without breaking a sweat. We weren’t just poor. We were … lean. Everything we had, we earned twice.”
“And the military?”
He looked past me, toward the line where the harbor met the Atlantic.
“It made sense. A place that wants your discipline more than your pedigree. My first year, I sent home every dollar I didn’t need to stay alive.
Second year, too. I learned to live on less than I could count with one hand.
” His mouth curved, rueful. “Now, someone hands me a key to a suite that costs more than my mom made in six months and expects me to sleep like that’s normal. ”
“Is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.” His knuckles brushed the small of my back—not possessive, not casual, something in between. “But I know what I want to do with it.”
“What’s that?”
He didn’t blink. “Spoil you.”
The words landed low and hot, ridiculous and right. A breeze lifted the hair at my neck; he watched it fall. For once, I didn’t reach for a joke to deflect. “I have my own money,” I said, not defensive—just fact.
“I know.” He eased closer, body heat skimming the line of my spine. “You can build a fortress out of your own money. I want to line the inside of it with everything else.”
I turned fully. “You really falling for me, Lucas Dane?”
“I told you I was,” he said softly. “Yeah.”
There are moments when the world cooperates—the engine a steady hum, the wind pitched to the right key, the city doing its best impression of a charming witness.
I stepped into him and felt his exhale, that low surrender that never sounded like defeat.
His hands bracketed my hips, careful, sure.
I tipped my mouth up to his and he met me halfway, the kiss patient at first, then less so.
The kind that says we have time, then proves it wrong.
He tasted like the sea. I curled my fingers in his shirt and found the solidity underneath. The rail pressed against my back; he caged me without caging me. The angle stole my breath; he gave it back. I made a sound I didn’t recognize and felt him answer with one I did.
Yes. There you are.
“Inside,” he said against my mouth, voice gone rough. Not a question.
We didn’t rush—rushing was for people who didn’t understand what was about to happen—but the corridor blurred.
Leather. Glass. Pale wood. A cabin that smelled like cedar and salt and the shadow of a thousand miles.
He locked the door with the kind of casual efficiency that made my knees soften, then leaned back against it as if to say the world could knock itself out on the other side.
“Tell me ‘no’ if you need to,” he said.
“I need to,” I whispered, “get you closer.”
His laugh was wrecked silk. My back found the edge of a low settee; his hands found the shape of me like he’d memorized it in the dark.
By the time we climbed back onto the deck, the sun had tipped, the sky the exact color of my dress, then dimmer.
Lucas stood behind me again, his chin in the curve of my shoulder, his breath warm against damp skin.
We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. He pressed a kiss to the place below my ear that made me think of future mornings, and I pretended I wasn’t already thinking them.
The yacht ghosted back toward the marina. Crew appeared as if conjured. The captain thanked “Mr. Dane” and “Ms. Montgomery” with professional discretion that still made my cheeks heat. Lucas gave him a nod.
My world loved chatter; Lucas’s world prized silence. I was figuring out that I could live inside both.
The drive to the airfield was another kind of quiet—the city giving way to flat stretches, the SUV steady like a heartbeat. We passed through a private gate that recognized the car without making a fuss. The jet waited like a promise someone had remembered to keep.
I’ve flown on plenty of nice planes. The studio sometimes springs for mid-tier glamour when it wants you bright and obedient on a talk show sofa.
This was not that. This was matte black and whispering, walnut and cream leather.
A flight attendant with an elegant bun smiled like she’d known us for years.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Dane. Ms. Montgomery.”
Lucas nodded the kind of nod that means you grew up without this and you’re never going to treat people like furniture. “Thank you,” he said.
She melted into the efficiency you only notice if you’re looking for it. We took the seats opposite each other at a low table, so close our knees brushed. Through the oval window, the runway lights winked in a line like a dare.
“First time?” I teased.
“On a plane like this?” He huffed. “First time where my feet aren’t in a duffel and my head isn’t on a rucksack.”
“You said you wanted to spoil me,” I said, reaching for his hand under the table.
He laced our fingers together, a simple interlock that did something reckless to my ribs. “I also said I’m not used to any of it,” he said. “That’s still true. But I can learn.”
A tray appeared—champagne already beading on the flute, a small tin that didn’t need its label read to be understood. I raised a brow. He looked almost sheepish.
“Humor me,” he said.
So, I did. I let him feed me a bite I’d had before in places where everyone wears black and waits for you to announce your virtue. It tasted better here with my bare knees against his and his thumb stroking the back of my hand like I might bolt out the emergency exit if he stopped.
The jet nudged forward, turned, paused. Acceleration caught our breaths and pushed them back into us.
Charleston fell away in blue squares of light.
My stomach dropped, then steadied. Lucas didn’t look out the window.
He looked at me, and the intensity of it made the cabin smaller, safer, more dangerous.
“What do you think?” he asked, stealing my earlier line.
I leaned my head against the leather and let the engine hum fill my ears. “I don’t want to go back to pretending I don’t want you.”
His hand tightened on mine. “You won’t have to.”
“You say that like you can promise me anything.”
“I can promise what I can control.” His mouth curved. “It’s a short list. But you’re on it.”
The possessiveness should have scraped. It smoothed.
Maybe because it didn’t come from entitlement.
It came from the part of him that scanned windows and counted exits and heard engines that hadn’t arrived yet.
The part that, if turned the other direction, would hold you there and dare the world to try.
We talked. Not the kind of talk you save for interviews or studio lunches, but the talk that unspools like a ribbon when you finally believe the person across from you won’t strangle you with it later.
I told him about the first time a director told me to be “less,” and how I spent a year being less until I forgot what more felt like.
I told him about the tennis player and the parlor trick of dating someone whose arms looked like safety in photographs.
I told him how fame is a house of windows where you paint the glass from the inside and hope no one notices when the brushstrokes get sloppy.
He told me about the Montana ranch that leaned and a mother who never did.
About a father made of smoke and lessons.
About the crack a grizzly put in his brother’s arm and how it welded the rest of them together.
About a barracks Christmas where someone hung a single strand of lights and it felt like a cathedral.
“You’re good at this,” I said softly.
“At what?”
“Letting me see the part you don’t show anyone.”
His eyes didn’t move from my mouth. “That part keeps trying to show itself to you, whether I like it or not.”
“Lucky me.”
“Lucky me,” he countered.
There were more kisses—of course, there were—first across the table, then in a seat that didn’t seem designed for two until we made it so.
Not frantic. Not polite. That middle ground where your hands learn a new language and your body says fluent.
He could be careful and he could be ruinous; both looked good on him.
Somewhere over Virginia, I laughed into his shoulder for no reason except that the engine noise and the press of him and the dumb hope threading through my bones made me feel seventeen and dangerous.
The flight attendant knocked once when the seatbelt sign dinged for turbulence, and Lucas sat back like a man who could recover altitude with his bare hands. I smoothed my hair and tried not to look like someone who had just been kissed enough to forget her last name.
“Back to Earth,” I murmured.
“Not yet,” he said.
We ate something small we didn’t need. He showed me a scar on his forearm I hadn’t noticed—the pale half-moon of a life lived at full speed. I traced it with a fingertip, and he caught that hand and kissed the inside of my wrist slow, like the pulse there was a story he planned to memorize.
“Does it feel different?” I asked, glancing around the cabin—the quiet luxury, the weightless ease.
“Some of it,” he said. “Most of it feels like borrowed clothes. But the part where I can take you somewhere no one can follow?” That smile I kept falling into. “That fits.”
“Lucas, I have millions,” I said, not coy. “I know what money buys.”
His gaze sharpened. “So, do I. I also know what it can’t.”
“What can’t it?”
“It can’t make me want you less.” His thumb stroked the hollow at the base of my throat, a gesture so simple I had to swallow against it. He held my gaze. “And it can’t protect you from people who think you’re theirs because they once watched you in a theater.”
The last line slid under my skin and nested there. “Then what protects me?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Me.”
If anyone else had said it, I would have smiled and said something clever about knights and armor and modern women. With him, it made something inside me stand up and breathe.
Clouds parted, and the world below organized itself into a geometry of lights.
The pilot’s voice broke in—calm, crisp—announcing our descent.
Lucas buckled my belt himself, his knuckles brushing the inside of my knee like a promise he fully intended to keep later.
The city spread out in a sprawl of gold and white, the rivers black scythes through it, bridges jeweled like bracelets tossed carelessly across a table.
New York. My old kingdom. The one that had turned me into a story.
“You ever get tired of this view?” I asked, watching the island of glass and ambition rise to meet us.
He looked at me instead. “Ask me again in an hour.”
“Because in an hour …?”
“In an hour, you’ll be sitting across from me in a dress I won’t let anyone else look at for too long.”
“Possessive,” I said, pretending to scold.
“Accurate,” he said, not pretending anything. Then softer: “You can tell me to stop. You can tell me to be civilized. I’ll try.”
“I won’t,” I said. It surprised me how easy the truth was. “I like you uncivilized.”
Something like relief flashed through his eyes, so brief a person who didn’t live on close-up lenses might have missed it. He took my hand again as the runway lights lined themselves up. The jet tipped, settled, lowered. The city waited.
Lucas didn’t look away when the wheels reached for the Earth.
Neither did I.