Chapter 21
ZACH
Maya’s been easing up around me, her previous frostiness melting away. I’m more at ease now about seeing her tonight, out of work, and having takeout.
No big deal.
I knock even though I have the fob to get in.
It feels right to do it this way. She opens the door, and my breath hitches.
She’s still in her work clothes but barefoot, with her hair tied up loosely.
I feel odd, and something flips in my chest. This isn’t the office.
This isn’t a meeting or a corridor we pass at work.
This isn’t a carefully managed distance.
The guardrails are no more.
Standing here, on her doorstep, I realize that whatever boundary existed between us has blurred. It’s going to be difficult not to remember the past and who we used to be. It’s going to be even harder to not want her.
“Hi.” She seems a little shy and awkward, too. I step into a world scented with peanuts, lemongrass and spice.
“You’re in luck,” she says, “I ordered pad thai and it’s just arrived.”
Pad thai. The memory wafts over me, stronger now that I can smell the food. It’s one of my favorites, because Mom loved it.
“With extra peanuts,” she says. “And spring rolls.”
“You remembered.” I’m touched that she would.
Dad was away a lot, that much I remember, though it all made more sense when his dirty secret was out.
On many of those times, with him away, Mom would get takeout on Fridays.
She’d give the cooks a night off, and she’d take care of our dinner.
I told Maya about it once, when I was telling her about my mom and how much I missed her.
A few weeks later, she ordered pad thai, sneakily.
Dad wasn’t away that time. He was hosting an important dinner, with lots of important people coming over.
He told us he didn’t want to hear us or see us.
Maya and I stayed out of the way. We sat outside, near the lake, in a tiny spot where no one could see us. I remember us sitting on the grass, with the cartons spread out between us on a picnic blanket. Just me and her. No Jett or Dex. Not her with the other staff members. Just the two of us.
I think it might have been the start of me falling in love with her.
I follow her to the marble-topped kitchen island where she props herself up onto one of the barstools. The cartons are out, along with chopsticks and cutlery and a jug of water. I’m having a crazy déjà vu moment.
“This is …” I swallow, because I’m all choked up. She looks crestfallen when she sees my expression.
“Zach?” she says, softly. “What’s wrong?”
I man up. Sniff, then straighten my shoulders. I can’t fall apart here, in front of her, even though she understands me so well. She always did.
“This is just like the old times.”
She smiles. “Dig in.” She hands me a pair of chopsticks, and we eat, quietly, devouring the food. There’s no need to say anything. She already understands what this means to me, and I’m genuinely touched by her thoughtfulness.
For a few minutes, it’s just chewing and silence. Then she looks up at me.
“Meeting Dexter was interesting,” she remarks, trying to be casual, but not quite.
Ugh. I’m still annoyed at my brother. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be sorry. He didn’t bother me although he seemed to take great joy in making you uncomfortable.”
“The man loves being a pain in the ass. Can’t help it. It’s in his DNA.”
“Who’s Dani?” she asks.
“An heiress to whom he is now engaged.”
She laughs, in surprise. “He’s engaged? To an heiress?”
“Properly engaged. She from Brazil. Her father owns a telecommunications business.”
“What do you mean by ‘properly engaged’?”
I pause, because I’m confused. I’ve respected Maya’s wishes and have tried to keep my distance, but not only has she invited me to have takeout with her, she’s now asking personal family questions.
She’s doing all the things she didn’t want me to do.
She’s straying into personal territory instead of keeping within professional boundaries.
And I’m now standing on the edge of uncharted territory, trying to fight my feelings for her.
What made it manageable was Maya keeping her distance, but now she’s intrigued after meeting Dex and she’s full of personal questions.
“It’s a long story. Maybe he’ll tell you one day. Or maybe he won’t.”
“I doubt I’ll ever meet him again, unless he turns up unexpectedly again at your office.” Her expression sobers.
The mood chills. Will she ever see him again? Will there ever be the possibility that Maya will be at one of our dinners?
“It was a business deal,” I say quietly. “A marriage of convenience, if you like.”
“A what?” She sets down her carton, her big eyes wide and unblinking. “A fake relationship?”
“Exactly that, or at least that’s how it started but they fell in love anyway. It was supposed to be a business deal, for a year. I still can’t believe he went for it but ... Dani’s a beautiful person, with a beautiful heart, so I can see why he fell for her.” I poke around my noodles.
“She is stunning.”
I frown and look up. “You’ve seen her?”
“I ... I ...” she fumbles. “Okay I confess. I looked you guys up.”
My lips curl in amusement at the confession. “So, you already knew?”
“I didn’t know it was a marriage of convenience. I … I saw a photo of the two of them at a charity event.” She looks flustered.
“The fake marriage was only known to both families,” I say lightly. “The press wouldn’t have known to report on it.”
“I see.” She keeps eating her noodles, eyes fixed on the carton, but the crease in her brow tells me she realizes she’s said more than she meant to.
Curious, I push a little further. “Why were you looking us up?” My heart lifts at the thought that she was curious enough to do an online search.
“Just to ...” She coughs lightly. “Just to see what you all looked like now.”
“When did you look?”
She stops eating, pauses a few seconds. “Why the million questions?”
She’s asking me that? Because it’s important to me. Because if she looked today, it would have been about Dex. Curiosity. Context. But if she looked before … “When did you look, Maya?”
“A … a few weeks ago, maybe.” She keeps her eyes on the carton.
I feel better. A quiet, foolish hope unfurls in my chest. Maybe she wanted to know what I was up to. Whether I was single or not. She’s admitted to being curious enough about me, about us, the Knight family, to look us up on her own. It matters to me. “Then you must also know about Jett and Cari?”
“Not really.” She shakes her head, cheeks turning pink. This woman can’t lie to save her life. “I don’t make a habit of looking up the Knights.”
“Of course not. Why would you?” I say, sarcastically, biting into a spring roll. “You want to know about Jett,” I remark, wiping my mouth with a napkin.
“Is he still always convinced he’s the smartest person in the room?”
“Very much so.”
She hesitates, then pushes. “And Cari? Tell me about her.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Anything.”
It feels like the old days when we’d talk about all sorts of things.
I’d tell her about my brothers—Jett’s temper, Dex’s recklessness, and my father’s quiet authority.
How he didn’t need to raise his voice to be listened to, and how everyone fell into line the moment he appeared.
She’d give me all the gossip about the house staff and the goings on there, then she’d swear me to secrecy, and beg me to never tell anyone.
She was afraid of getting her mom in trouble.
I would never have done anything to hurt her.
“Jett got together with his personal assistant.”
“Oh!” A string of noodles hangs suspended between her chopsticks.
“Cari’s lovely,” I say. “I honestly think she’s the right person for Jett. She’s younger than him, by about a decade, and he’s a single dad.”
Maya’s eyebrows shoot up. “That’s a big age gap.”
I think about that. I don’t really notice the age gap because Cari is so wise, and she’s suffered so much in her young life that she comes across as sensible, and grounded. Wise beyond her years. “She’s good for him. She’s exactly who he needed.”
“He’s a single dad, you say?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
I hesitate. “You really want to know?”
She nods, looking more serious now, so I tell her about Jett’s wife and what happened.
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s been tough for him, but meeting Cari has been the best thing to happen to him in a long time.”
“That’s nice to hear.”
“It’s been tough. I thought it would get easier with time, after what happened to Mom, and then growing up with the Italian Knights.”
“The Italian Knights?”
She wouldn’t know that we call them that, or at least I do.
Jett calls them the Half-Knights. Asshole, though I haven’t heard him use that in a while.
Either’s he softening because of Cari, or he’s realizing that our half-brothers are like us; people just wanting to get on with their lives, despite the Knight name, and our father.
“The … the uh … other brothers. You remember my dad had an affair and …”
“I know, Zee. You don’t have to talk about it. Matteo is one of the Italian Knights.”
I nod. She rests her hand lightly on my arm. It’s just a small gesture, but its unexpected, and it pulls me straight back to the past, back to the Knight Estate and how she used to comfort me, how she was always there.
How she changed my world. And how, one day, we slipped into something deeper when an attraction we’d been struggling to fight, became impossible to ignore.
We were standing too close, the air between us strangely still, and she looked up at me, her eyes flicking briefly to my lips before lifting back up.
For a second, neither of us moved, suspended in that fragile moment, on the edge of something we didn’t quite understand.