Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
JACE
I slept better with Layla beside me.
That was the simple truth of it, and I’d stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the third night we’d shared a bed. Something in me that usually ran a low-level scan of the room quieted when she was within arm’s reach, which made no operational sense and was apparently happening regardless.
Convincing her to stay at Sutter House on Christmas Eve had taken some negotiation. She didn’t want to intrude. I insisted it wasn’t intruding. She was used to her own space. I pointed out that Sutter House had plenty of space. She’d given me the look and said, fine, and I’d counted it as a win.
I woke before she did, which was unusual.
Though it wasn’t yet light out, I recognized the pre-dawn hush when all the night creatures went to bed in advance of the day.
Layla snuggled warm against my side, her hair loose across the pillow, her breathing deep and even.
I lay still and looked at the ceiling and thought about the woman asleep next to me and the seventeen things I would rather be doing than lying here thinking.
They all seemed like fantastic ways to start Christmas Day. A gift to both of us.
So thinking, I lightly trailed a finger along her arm.
She stirred a little. I knew there was a fine line between seducing her awake and risking her coming up swinging.
There’d be no sneaking beneath the covers to feast her awake.
Someday. Maybe. In a hazy future I wasn’t letting myself imagine.
For now, I was content to touch and stroke her skin, along the lines of the tattoos it wasn’t yet bright enough to see, but that I’d memorized all the same.
A low hum rumbled from the back of her throat, and she shifted toward me, her pebbled breasts pressing into my chest, my already hard cock notching between her thighs.
I couldn’t stop myself from arching, shifting myself higher as my hand slid from her shoulder, down the curve of her back to her firmly muscled ass.
As my fingers cupped the shape of it, her hips canted toward me, her legs widening just enough that my erection slid through her wet folds.
On another hum, she opened her eyes.
“Merry Christmas,” I murmured.
“Merry Christmas.” Her voice was rough with sleep, thick with fresh desire.
I dipped my head to take her mouth. On a sigh, she melted into me.
Neither of us shifted to change the angle or speed up, though I ached to be inside her.
We just kept at the easy, patient rocking back and forth through her wetness, just over her clit.
I felt the tension gathering in her body and wanted to draw it out, take her up again—
The thud of footsteps pounded down the hall, and Willa’s voice rang out, “It’s Christmas!” at a volume that suggested she’d been awake for some time. “Jace! Layla! Wake up! It’s Christmas!”
With a groan, I buried my face against Layla’s shoulder. “It’s not like Santa came.”
Her laugh started somewhere in her chest and worked its way up. “No, but if Sawyer woke up in the same mood as you this morning, Willa might have. She might feel that’s reason to celebrate.”
“Hush, you.” I lifted my face. “I’m trying very, very hard not to think about the fact that my sister has a sex life.”
She was laughing properly now, her hand moving through my hair with an easy affection that I felt all the way down. “Later, sailor. We can always slip out to my place to finish this later.”
“That is a plan.” I kissed her, slow and deliberate, and then cursed Willa thoroughly in my head because the timing was genuinely unreasonable. “That is absolutely a plan.”
We got up. Got dressed. Navigated the bathroom in the comfortable overlap of two people who had figured out how to occupy the same space, and made our way downstairs.
Willa was already at the fireplace in her robe, practically vibrating.
The stockings hung from the mantel—mine, Willa’s, Sawyer’s—and at the end of the row, hanging slightly crooked, one that hadn’t been there last night.
LAYLA had been somewhat clumsily embroidered onto it.
I watched her come down the stairs and stop at the bottom and see at it.
Willa turned from the fireplace and clocked her expression, and immediately looked pleased with herself.
“Good morning,” Layla said. She’d come down with a robe over the pajamas I’d talked her out of last night, her hair fully loose around her shoulders in the way it rarely was unless we were alone together.
Willa stared at her in consternation. “Okay, you just got up. How is your eye makeup that perfect?”
Layla laughed. “Because it’s tattooed on.”
Willa’s mouth opened, then closed again. “That is the most practical thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I thought so.”
Sawyer appeared from the kitchen with coffee and handed cups around.
I had to appreciate a man who had correctly identified the most useful contribution he could make to Christmas morning.
I accepted mine and stood next to Layla at the fireplace as she took in the stocking with her name on it.
Emotions flickered over her face that she didn’t quite manage to put away before I saw them.
She reached out and touched the edge of it.
Just briefly. Then she picked up her coffee.
The morning had the quality of Christmas mornings I’d forgotten.
Not the ones from childhood with my parents, which had their own texture, but the ones that felt chosen.
Willa had clearly been awake for hours constructing this.
Cinnamon rolls somewhere, by the delicious, yeasty smell of it.
Roy had a new toy that he was transporting from room to room with great ceremony.
Koa had found a bag of treats with his name on it and was sitting in front of it with an expression of profound dignity, waiting for someone to acknowledge this development.
“Koa,” Layla said. “Down.”
He lay down. She gave him a treat that he received with the grace of a dog who had never once been undignified in his life.
The gift giving was unhurried and warm and exactly what Willa had clearly intended it to be.
She’d thought about all of it—a book for Sawyer that he immediately started reading the back of, something small and right for each person, a ridiculous ornament for next year’s tree for me that made me laugh because it was exactly the kind of thing she’d have gotten me at twelve when she was trying to get under my skin.
The print I’d found for her in Manteo, the wild horses at dawn, made her go quiet in the way she went quiet when something hit her exactly right.
Layla had settled in the corner of the sofa with her coffee and her loose hair and the stocking in her lap, working through its contents with the careful attention of someone who had not expected to have a stocking this morning and was taking each thing in properly.
I watched her without making anything of it.
When it was her turn, I handed her the box.
She looked at me once before she opened it.
Inside the tissue paper, a tiny hummingbird rested.
The pendant was made out of a twist of silver, with the bird on one side and a trumpet vine on the other.
The inset sea glass wasn’t quite as vibrant as the tattoo on her wrist, but I remembered what she’d said about the birds reminding her of joy, and I’d wanted to give her that feeling.
She stilled, one finger hovering just above the necklace.
She looked at it for a long moment, and then she looked at me, and what was in her face was not performed and not managed, and was clearly costing her something to let me see.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
She leaned across and kissed me, and Willa made a sound from across the room that I chose to ignore entirely.
“Pancakes,” Sawyer said from the kitchen doorway, with the timing of a man who understood exactly when a room needed redirecting.
I knew better than to ask why there would be pancakes when there were clearly already cinnamon rolls. I was an equal opportunity carb lover when presented a choice.
When Layla offered me the box, I gently picked up the necklace and fastened it around her throat. Then everyone moved toward the kitchen. The dogs followed. Willa was already telling Sawyer something about the batter while he listened with the complete attention he always gave her.
My phone buzzed.
I pulled it out expecting nothing in particular and saw Dax’s name.
Dax: Merry Christmas. Check your secure email.
I looked at the kitchen doorway—the noise of it, Willa’s laugh, the scent of bacon starting on the griddle—and stepped out to the deck.
The sky was caught somewhere between blue and gray, as if it was trying to give us a little color. To the east, the sun was just cresting the horizon, stretching fingers of light across the otherwise gray ocean. I opened the secure app and pulled down the file Dax had sent, and I started reading.
Edmund Ashmore’s holdings were substantial and complex, built over decades to look like exactly what they were—old money carefully stewarded, real estate and finance, and the philanthropic apparatus that came with names on buildings.
Legitimate. Visible. The architecture of a family that understood the best cover was simply having enough real activity that nothing stood out.
My father’s name appeared in the fourth document.
Then the sixth.
Three times in the seventh.
Professional connections—overlapping board memberships, development projects where John Hollingsworth’s capital had moved alongside Ashmore money, a real estate venture along the North Carolina coast from eight years ago with both their names in the filing documents.
I kept scrolling.
Halston Ashmore appeared in two of the more recent documents.
One from four years ago. One from eighteen months ago.
Both showing direct professional connections to my father, not through overlapping boards but through a shared LLC, registered in Delaware eighteen months ago, with both their names as managing members.
I stood on the deck in the December cold and looked out at the Atlantic as that sank in.
My father and the senior Ashmore in business wasn’t a surprise.
Old money tended to attract old money. But the thing with Halston Ashmore a year and a half ago?
Yeah, I was gonna need Dax to pull that shared LLC apart before I understood what it actually was.
This was the public layer. Dax had said himself it was what you found moving fast across the right databases.
Underneath was another layer, and probably another beneath that, and he was still digging.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Halston was just stepping up now that his own father was aging.
I didn’t know enough yet. All I had were professional connections between my father and the Ashmore family, some predating Halston’s graduation by years and some very recent.
And on their heels, a question getting louder about a man I’d thought I understood and apparently hadn’t.
Was our father even worse than I had imagined?
I wouldn’t tell Willa yet. Not until I had something more than connections on paper, not until Dax came back with what was underneath and I understood what I was actually looking at.
She was in there making pancakes on Christmas morning with Sawyer and Layla and the ridiculous tree she’d decorated exactly how she wanted, and I was not going to blow that up unless and until I had something real to blow it up with.
Suspicions weren’t sufficient, and she’d been through enough.
I closed the app and put my phone in my pocket.
Through the window, Willa laughed at something Sawyer had done with the batter.
Layla leaned against the counter with her coffee mug in both hands, her hair still loose around her shoulders, watching them with an expression somewhere between gratitude and grief and something else she hadn’t named yet.
I went inside.
“You’re on fruit,” Sawyer said, pointing at me, and handed me a cutting board and a knife.
Understanding my role here, I got to work.