Chapter 10
TEN
Heath
I wake to the weight and warmth of her.
Sienna is sprawled across my chest as if she were poured there, bare skin tangled with mine, one thigh hooked over my hip, her hair a dark spill against my shoulder.
The room smells like her shampoo and us.
She breathes softly and evenly, her lips parted as she emits a tiny snore that shouldn’t be adorable but wrecks me anyway.
I don’t move. Can’t.
There’s a moment, the first heartbeat of morning, when everything inside me goes quiet and honest. No plans, no inheritance, no family. Just the truth.
I love her.
It’s brutal and simple and complete. I love the way she hums when she stirs a sauce.
I love the way she looks at a room and finds the perfect spot to set the flowers, so the entire space feels gentler.
I love the way she embraces the good things with her whole body, like she’s surprised the world can still hand them to her.
I should tell her before tonight. Before vows and witnesses. Before anyone else tries to define what this is. I don’t want to go into this marriage with only one of us thinking that this is real.
Her lashes flutter. She shifts, rubbing against me, making a sleepy little sound in her throat that causes my brain to short out. I press my mouth to her hairline, inhale, and force my body to be respectful when it wants to be feral.
“Morning,” she whispers, voice rough and sweet.
“Morning, baby.” I drag my knuckles down her spine, feel her shiver. “I have something to—”
The doorbell detonates with the force of a grenade. I growl as Sienna startles, pulling away from me.
“Too early,” I groan when the bell goes again, followed by my mother’s voice calling from outside.
“Heath? Darling? We arrived early. Let us in.”
Of course they did.
Sienna sits up, eyes wide. “Oh, no.”
“It’s fine.” I tuck her in because she’s naked and gorgeous, and the world doesn’t deserve that view. “Stay here. Lock the door if anyone comes wandering. I’ll handle them and be back in two minutes.”
“You can’t let them in while I’m—”
“Two minutes,” I promise, kissing her before I lose my mind and the schedule.
I shove on sweats and stalk downstairs. By the time I open the door, the elite invasion has already begun: bags, opinions, fur. I block as much as I can with my body and a smile that says try me, and herd them into the living room with coffee as a bribe, my jaw clenched so tight I can taste metal.
Two minutes become twenty. Elise needs steam for a dress.
Brandon needs Wi-Fi that “doesn’t feel like dial-up.
” My father wants to see the ceremony layout to “prevent surprises.” I redirect, deflect, deny.
When I finally get free and make it back to the bedroom, the bed is cool.
Sienna’s already slipped into her robe and disappeared with Jem to “get ready” at the lodge's bridal suite.
And that’s how the day goes.
We planned a “wedding at dusk.” Somehow, my family turns the hours between into a campaign.
A stylist arrives. A florist texts questions.
My phone becomes a grenade with a five-minute fuse.
Every time I go looking for Sienna, because I need to get to her, I need to say the words before the world gets to us, someone intercepts me with a clipboard or a “quick question.”
“How did they even find all these people on short notice?” I growl to myself as I lock myself in the bathroom for a moment of peace.
By late afternoon, I’m in the upstairs guest bedroom, knotting a black tie with hands that don’t usually shake.
The suit fits like a second skin. I look like the version of me my family prefers.
Crisp, controlled, lethal in a way that never smudges the cuffs.
But underneath is the man who woke up with a girl asleep on his heart and decided he wanted that every morning of his life.
I slide the ring into my pocket—Sienna’s band, the slim gold I’ll add to the diamond she wears—and head for the stairs.
I’m halfway down the hall when a voice older than winter stops me.
“Heath.”
I turn.
My grandma stands on the landing like a portrait that stepped off the wall. Eleanor Whitcomb, always immaculate, always the quiet blade no one sees until they’re bleeding. Silver hair swept back, a dark coat that swallows light, pearls that once belonged to someone who terrified a ship of men.
“Grandmother,” I say evenly.
She studies me, eyes sharp and amused. “You look like your grandfather when he thought he’d won.”
“I’m not him.” It comes out too fast.
“I should hope not.” Her gaze flicks down the hall toward the bridal suite door, where I know Sienna and Jem are getting ready. She lowers her voice. “Walk with me.”
I don’t want to. I do it anyway, because when Eleanor asks, most of Manhattan moves aside. We step into my office. She closes the door with a soft click that feels louder than the bell did this morning.
“I’ll be direct,” she says, taking the chair opposite my desk without asking. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I love her.”
It surprises both of us how easily it lands in the air. I don’t dress it up. I don’t hedge. I don’t apologize.
One of her eyebrows lifts a millimeter. “Do you?”
“I do,” I say, liking the way those words feel in my mouth. “When I met her, everything else fell away. I want to marry Sienna. I want to wake up with her and go to sleep with her, and relish all the dull hours between that belong to us. The money, the company—they’re footnotes. She’s the story.”
Silence. She could be carved from marble.
Then Eleanor exhales, almost a laugh. “You always were inconvenient when you were certain.”
“Is that a yes or a we’re-done-here?”
“It is an assessment.” She rests her gloved hands on her knees. “Your grandfather built this family’s power on leverage. He bound people tightly with what they wanted. He did it to me. To your father. To you. I refuse to continue his ghost’s work.”
I narrow my eyes. “Meaning?”
She tilts her head. “Meaning this, Heath. If you call off tonight’s wedding, I will wire the entirety of your inheritance to you tomorrow morning. No conditions. No performance. It is yours. Always should have been.”
It shouldn’t hit like a slap, but it does.
“Call it off,” I repeat numbly, as if I misheard.
“Yes.” Her gaze doesn’t waver. “If this marriage is some ill-considered bid to rip victory from a dead man, then let us excise the dead man from your choices. Take the funds. Walk away from the theater. Find a partner who—”
“No.” My voice is flat and absolute. The word burns clean on the way out.
Eleanor goes still. “No?”
“No,” I say again, and everything inside me settles. “I’m not marrying Sienna to spite a grave. I’m marrying Sienna because I can’t imagine breathing without knowing she’s in the next room. Keep the money. Burn it. Bury it with him. I don’t care. I’m marrying her.”
We stare at each other. Her mouth softens the tiniest fraction, like a curtain lifting in a locked house.
“Very well,” she says at last. “Then you may have both.”
I blink. “Both?”
She reaches into her bag, takes out a single page, and slides it across my desk. The Whitcomb trust authorization. The one my grandfather weaponized into a condition. My name is already filled in. The signatures are already there.
“I had this drawn up when he was first hospitalized,” Eleanor says, voice dry. “One must always have a failsafe for tyrants.”
I huff out something like a laugh. “You could have spared me a great deal of paperwork this week.”
“You could have spared me a great deal of worry this life,” she counters, but her eyes are warmer now. “Do not mistake me. I would have given you the funds if you had chosen to wait because love does not arrive obediently to our clocks. But I much prefer this answer.”
“You’re… okay with Sienna?” It feels dangerous to ask.
“I haven’t met her yet. Besides, I am not in the business of being ‘okay’ with the women you love,” she says.
“I am in the business of seeing straight. And I see the way you look at her. More importantly, I saw the way she looked at you when she thought you were not watching.” Eleanor rises, smoothing her coat.
“That girl will not spend your name. She will spend her life on you. There is a difference.”
Something tight in my chest loosens. “Thank you.”
She nods once, crisp. “Go. Earn the privilege of keeping what you’ve been given. And fix your tie; it’s half a line off.”
She leaves me with a pen, the paper, and a future that feels like it finally belongs to me.
I sign. Not because I need it to marry Sienna, but because it will be useful to build the life she deserves.
Homes and classrooms and a kitchen where she can dance barefoot at midnight.
A town with a library fund that doesn’t have to beg.
A bakery that might have her grandmother’s cinnamon rolls on the menu for free.
When I pocket the authorization, I catch my reflection in the office window, a man in a black suit with a stupidly soft expression. I don’t care. Let the records show that I was happy before the vows.
I head for the hall, my pulse a steady drum.
The house hums with voices, footsteps, and soft music drifting up from the living room as the first guests arrive.
I take the stairs two at a time and thread through the knot of Whitcombs clogging my foyer, ignoring Elise’s gasp and Brandon’s “fifteen minutes, cousin.”
I’m headed up the stairs when Jem steps out of the living room, nearly colliding with me. She braces a hand on my chest, eyes wide, then narrow.
“Are you going to make her cry or break her heart?” she demands, whisper-rough and fierce, the kind of friend who would fight me with her teeth.
“No,” I say, and I mean it with bone-deep certainty. “I would never do that.”
Jem studies me and nods once. “Okay. Good. Then I’ll be Team Heath.”
“Is there another team?” I ask, but she’s already turned and is jogging up the stairs to Sienna’s room.
I follow her, take a deep breath outside the door, and reach for the handle.