Chapter 48
Frankie’s heels clicked against the rooftop’s polished stone as she followed Marcus toward a corner dressed up with twinkle lights and gauzy curtains. Subtle as a mousetrap.
Her shoulders locked and jaw clamped tight. Ms. Birdie clearly had expectations that Frankie’s heart would do the Grinch thing.
Not. Happening.
After being stood up five days straight, her heart was locked down tighter than a Birkin vault and stored somewhere Marcus DeLuca Grant (a.k.a. Absolutely Not Him) had no access.
And yet…she’d been caught. Again. So tangled in her emotions for him she hadn’t even seen Ms. Birdie’s meddling matchmaker net until it was too late. Damn it.
The ambush had started with a last-minute call: Ms. Birdie asking her to represent Naked Runway at Lola’s rooftop tribute. An hour’s notice. Ten minutes of conversation. Not one syllable suggesting Marcus would be in attendance.
Unless you counted the warning to “be on your best behavior.” Frankie did not count that. She’d perfected bad behavior long before the Lola incident.
Still, she couldn’t lie to herself. Some small, traitorous part of her had wondered if he might show. He’d been Lola’s connection at her original debut, after all. Any reasonable person could have expected him at the rescheduled event.
But she hadn’t expected this.
An after-party tête-à-tête staged with all the subtlety of a Hallmark Channel finale.
Ms. Birdie hadn’t even bothered with innocence when Frankie confronted her about Marcus’s presence.
Worse, she hadn’t given her the courtesy of a heads-up that Lola was about to reveal her secret to the entire crowd.
One minute Frankie had been the town’s fashion villainess, the next she was practically canonized as a do-gooder.
Years of carefully building a formidable reputation and poof, stripped away in a heartbeat, leaving her raw, exposed, and not even in a flattering light.
Ms. Birdie’s motive for not looping Frankie in wasn’t hard to decipher.
She knew Frankie would rather gargle sequins than sit through the “why” being aired in public. And she needed Frankie here. Needed her to run headfirst into Marcus.
Frankie reached for the righteous fury she usually weaponized in moments like this. Her armor. But it didn’t show. The space it used to occupy was…vacant.
What rose instead was quieter. Steadier. Something therapy had planted and Gi Gi’s Crossing had watered. And when it finally clicked, she knew exactly who to blame.
Mr. Uptight himself.
Thanks to Marcus, she could no longer get a proper mad on to hide behind.
That convenient emotional fire extinguisher had been replaced with a new, annoying lesson: Don’t torch the house you might want to live in later.
And wasn’t that just infuriating?
Marcus stopped at the velvet settee and motioned for her to sit. “After you.” His voice carried a thread of nerves.
Good. He should be nervous.
She glided down with practiced grace, folding her hands in her lap to keep from lunging for his throat. “Nice setup,” she muttered. “Very Ms. Birdie. I knew better than to think she’d stay out of my business.”
Marcus sat beside her, still gripping the gift box. His expression wasn’t smug. It wasn’t guarded. It was hesitant, wary. A man bracing for impact.
Which, to be fair, he should be.
She’d read the article. Understood why he’d bolted at the festival when the journalist showed up.
Self-preservation she could almost admire.
But not showing up at the coffee shop? That wasn’t survival.
That was silence wrapped in cowardice. Which was why she’d stuffed her heart in a black box and told it to shut up.
Except…the damn thing still pinched now as she looked at him.
He’d decided when to disappear.
Now, apparently, he got to decide when to reappear.
Neat trick, if you were the one holding all the power.
And yes, she’d fallen in love. Not despite his interference but because of it. Because of him, her heart had finally shouted down the tyrant in her head.
Hell. Who even was she anymore?
She refused to look at the gift box, unwilling to give him that satisfaction. “I find it interesting that you couldn’t bother to show up at the coffee shop for five days straight, but you’re here now with a pretty package you supposedly brought for me. Why now and not then?”
He exhaled, and something flickered in his expression, raw enough to nearly undo her. He didn’t look like a man chasing small talk and some neat bow. He looked like a man braced to lose her for good. That made this more than a reunion. This was a reckoning.
And damn if there wasn’t a tiny thrill in knowing he understood exactly how much work it was going to take to win her back.
“When you first came on my radar,” he said, “I saw you as a force of nature. Something a man didn’t control. He just held on and hoped to survive.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
His lips curved faintly, but his eyes stayed serious.
“Now I see you for what you really are. A fierce, stubborn wildflower that insists on blooming between concrete cracks. But wildflowers need light to thrive. And I didn’t show up at the coffee shop because I didn’t want to drag you into the shadows where I dwell. ”
Her chest constricted.
“You deserved better than that,” he finished.
The uncomfortable burn behind her eyes threatened, so Frankie scoffed and stiffened her spine. “Of course I deserve the light. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, was stolen from me by a certain uptight asshole who hijacked my life.”
He flinched. “Exactly,” he said tightly. “Which makes me wonder. Were you drunk or what when you invited me back into your life via a billboard?”
“More like temporarily delusional,” she snapped.
“In my defense, I didn’t even discover your little clipping until I was already back in Manhattan.
And when a man gifts a woman that kind of dangerous secret, she’s going to melt…
at least a little. I thought maybe I owed you a grand gesture.
Something to match your whole gift-of-a-deadly-secret thing.
And then you ghosted me. So don’t expect me to be rolling out the red carpet tonight. ”
His jaw tightened, but he nodded once. “I deserved that.”
“And so much more.”
“I’m here now,” Marcus said softly.
“But why?” she pressed. “What’s left to say? You’re dark. I’m light. You’re an asshole. I’m a delight.”
His lips twitched. “The idea of living without you broke me.”
The words smashed open the box she’d locked her heart in and wrapped it in an infuriating hug. She tried to deflect, but the truth clung, messy and maddening.
“I couldn’t function,” he admitted. “I went full hermit mode.”
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” she muttered. “Haven’t you ever been to therapy? You can’t just bottle this crap up. That’s how people end up yelling at interns.”
“After I ignored their calls for a week, my brothers tracked me down. Showed up with booze and some pithy bullshit about getting on with life.”
“You were moping?”
“Of course not. I was drinking. And hitting things.”
“So…moping.”
He scowled. “After I told them to fuck off, they pivoted to Game Plan Z.”
“Z?” She leaned in. “As in you already burned through twenty-five other options?”
“Something like that.”
“And that is?” she asked, arching a brow. Ziggy hadn’t even had a Game Plan B. His advice had been I never liked him much anyway.
“They decided the status quo we’ve been living under since moving to the States was no longer viable.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going to have to use smaller words.”
He exhaled. “I told you the woman who adopted me and my brothers was behind Nippleton becoming Gi Gi’s Crossing. She left us each honey-do lists. Mine was the manor.”
He paused, meeting her gaze.
Frankie gave a slow blink, feigning nonchalance while her chest squeezed tight. Of course she remembered. That was the night they’d swapped secrets. The night he’d changed her mind about foreplay. The night she’d started to fall.
“In her will, Gi Gi also left a letter to be opened once we’d completed our lists,” he said, his voice dropping low. “We rebelled and read it early. In it, she explained she bought the town hoping we’d bond with the locals. Build a life. A family.”
“And?” Frankie asked when he stopped talking, as if he’d gotten lost in a memory.
He ran a hand through his hair. “Long story short, for years, we all lived in the shadows. Always hiding. Always looking over our shoulders, waiting for someone from my father’s past to find us and finish the job.” He paused, his jaw flexing.
She couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been to live a life in constant fear of letting something slip that lead to the bad guy tracking you down. “And now?” she asked.
He hesitated before meeting her gaze. “According to Gi Gi, my father’s last remaining enemy, the one you read about in the paper, the one who threatened to finish the job if he ever discovered we survived the fire, died in prison. There’s no one left to care if we exist.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “Not even your father?”
“He’s probably dead. And if he isn’t…he was never the one we were in danger from.”
“Other than the fact his career path wasn’t exactly child friendly.”
A short laugh escaped him. “You have a point.”
Frankie crossed her arms, telling herself not to get all emotional.
Yes, she wanted to throw her arms around him and tell him how happy she was he was safe from monsters, but sad childhood or not, he still had a lot of explaining to do.
“So let me get this straight. You’ve decided it’s time to step into the light, and you want me there with you, so you showed up with a gift, hoping I’d forget you manipulated my life like I was some sort of fashion-forward chess piece? ”
It came out sounding very much like the old Frankie, and maybe that wasn’t terrible. If the old Frankie and the new one could learn to coexist, she might actually be okay with that.