A Dare Like No Other (Unrequited Sin #10)

Chapter 1

* * *

Sloane Whitaker swept through the side entrance of the Magnolia Estate with her dress bag over one arm and her face already done, her curls pinned back exactly the way she’d asked, her eyeliner straight on the first try for once in her life.

She passed the catering tables dressed in white linen and gold chargers and let herself believe, just for a moment, that a day this smooth might actually stay that way.

Nothing had gone wrong yet. She intended to keep it that way right up until the music started.

She found her cousin Renee near the gift table, squaring off a crooked stack of programs, and asked if anyone had seen Marcus.

He’d gone back to the kitchen with Macy, Renee told her, something about the bartender losing track of the good champagne for the toast. Sloane checked her phone.

Less than an hour to go. She’d fetch him herself rather than stand here wringing her hands waiting on someone else to do it.

The hallway behind the kitchen smelled of bleach and warm bread, and the walk-in freezer door at the end of it stood propped open with a folded towel.

She pushed it wider and stepped into the cold, his name already on her lips.

Then the rest of the world fell out from under her.

Marcus had Macy pinned to the metal shelving, his tuxedo jacket off, her bridesmaid dress shoved up around her hips.

Sloane stopped in the doorway with one hand on the frame and said nothing at all, the freezer’s chill crawling up her bare arms while her brain refused, for one long beat, to translate what her eyes were showing her.

Macy broke away first, wrenching her dress down, slapping a hand over her mouth.

Marcus turned with his shirt untucked and his belt hanging open, both hands rising the way men’s hands always rose right before they lied to her.

Sloane stayed exactly where she was, half in and half out of the cold, and waited to see which of them would be coward enough to speak first.

“Sloane, wait.” Marcus took a step toward her, palms out.

“It’s not what it looks like, I swear it didn’t mean anything.

” She slid back out of reach before his fingers could find her arm.

“I don’t want her. I want you. I have only ever wanted you.

” Behind him Macy was already crying, dragging mascara across her wrist. “I’m sorry, Sloane, I am, I don’t want him either, I don’t even know why I let this happen. ”

She heard them. She just didn’t have anywhere left to put the words.

Sloane worked the engagement ring over her knuckle until it came free while Marcus kept talking, begging for one minute, just one, to explain it the right way.

There was no right way, and she had no intention of standing in a freezer to hear him invent one.

She flicked the ring into his lap as he sank back against the prep table, then turned and walked out without raising her voice, because raising it would have meant letting him see how far down the blade had gone.

She passed Macy without a glance and shouldered through the kitchen doors into the back hallway.

Out in the lobby the guests had begun to gather in their cocktail finery, programs in hand, her name and Marcus’s printed in gold script that would be in a dumpster by nightfall.

Sloane kept her chin level and her steps even and let the turning heads turn.

She found her mother at the gift table, checking seating cards against a list.

She leaned close so no one else could hear.

“I need to go. The wedding’s off. Marcus was in the freezer with Macy.

” Diane went still for the space of a breath, then set the cards down without a word and reached for her daughter’s hand.

“Go get the car. I’ll handle everyone out here.

” Sloane nodded once and turned for the side exit she’d walked through not an hour ago, a different woman entirely.

Outside, the cool air found her bare arms again and the circular drive was already filling with arriving cars.

She walked straight to her own, dress still zipped, shoes still on, ignoring every guest who called her name across the gravel.

She drove the whole way home with her hands steady at ten and two and her eyes bone dry, because falling apart on the highway wouldn’t undo a single thing.

It was only after she’d stepped through her own front door and turned the lock that she sank to the floor in her wedding gown and finally, finally let herself break.

* * *

A few months later…

The rooftop bar was the kind of place built for people having a better night than Sloane was.

Glass railings, a skyline laid out like a bribe, string lights overhead throwing everything gold she didn’t have the energy to appreciate.

Her friends had hauled her up here to celebrate her freedom, as Renee kept calling it, like a canceled wedding and a cross-country move were achievements to toast instead of wreckage to survive.

Sloane sat with her third untouched cocktail sweating a ring onto the table, laughing in the right places a half-beat late, performing fine for an audience that loved her too much to catch she was anything but.

She felt him before she found him. That particular weight of being looked at, steady and unhurried, the kind that didn’t flick away guilty when she lifted her head.

He stood near the far end of the bar with a tablet in one hand and a man in a suit talking at his shoulder, and he wasn’t pretending to hear a word of it.

He was watching her. Had been, she suspected, for a while.

Tall, broad through the shoulders in a way no tailor could fake, pale gold hair catching the lights, a jaw cut sharp under a close beard.

When their eyes met he didn’t look away, didn’t smile, didn’t do a single thing a normal man did when he got caught.

He just held it, like he’d already decided staring was within his rights and she was welcome to make something of it.

She looked back down at her drink, pulse ticking up against her will.

A man in a linen blazer chose that exact moment to slide into the chair beside her, drink in hand, smile already loaded, leaning in too close to ask if she was here alone.

She angled her shoulder away on instinct, the polished little retreat she’d perfected over years.

She didn’t get the chance to do it twice.

A shadow fell across the table, and when she glanced up the man from the bar was simply there, hands in his pockets, expression flat and unbothered.

He said nothing. He didn’t have to. The blazer took one look at whatever lived in that face and remembered, abruptly, that his drink needed refreshing somewhere very far away.

“Did you just scare off a grown man with a stare?” she asked, watching the blazer flee.

“He looked like he needed somewhere else to be.” The stranger pulled out the chair across from her and sat without asking, like the seat had been waiting on him.

Renee reappeared then with the other friend trailing behind, both of them clutching their phones and looking entirely too pleased with themselves.

“We’re heading down to the lobby bar, there’s a sax player taking requests,” Renee said, gaze bouncing between Sloane and the stranger. “You coming, or are you good?”

Sloane held his eyes a beat longer than she meant to before she answered.

“I think I’ll stay up here a little while longer.

” Renee’s brows shot up and her mouth opened around several follow-up questions, but the other friend caught her arm and steered her toward the elevator.

Renee threw one last look over her shoulder, mouthing something that might have been call me or might have been be careful, and then the doors swallowed them both.

“They seem protective,” he said, watching the elevator light count down.

“They’ve had reason to be lately.” Sloane turned her glass slow against the table, not ready to pull that thread yet. “What about you? Anyone waiting up, making sure a woman with a no-names policy hasn’t kidnapped you?”

“No one waiting.” Simple, weightless, and somehow she heard the rest of it underneath anyway. “I work most nights. People stop expecting you home when you stop coming home.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“It’s efficient.” He leaned back, studying her with an ease that made her feel like the only person in a building full of them. “What about you? What do you want, underneath all the spreadsheets and the soul-crushing numbers?”

“You’re assuming a lot about my spreadsheets.”

“You told me you work in data analysis ten minutes ago, before you decided names were off the table.” A faint curve at the edge of his mouth. “I’m a fast study.”

“Apparently.” She turned the question over longer than it probably warranted. “I want something of my own one day. Not someone else’s company, someone else’s numbers. Something with my name on the door.” She caught herself and huffed a quiet laugh. “Ironic, given the rules tonight.”

“What kind of something?”

“Consulting, maybe. Teaching people to read their own data instead of paying a stranger to do it for them.” She lifted a shoulder, faintly embarrassed at how much she’d just handed a man whose name she’d refused on principle. “And you? What’s the dream behind the suit?”

“Building things that last.” He said it like the admission cost him, even stripped of every identifying detail. “I’ve spent a long time making sure what I build doesn’t fall apart the second I leave the room.”

“That’s awfully philosophical for a man who ran off a stranger with his eyebrows a minute ago.”

“I have layers.” The corner of his mouth tipped up, and she felt the pull of it drop straight through her stomach.

“Layers.” She tilted her head. “Give me one. A real one, since we’re trading.”