Chapter 8
LEX
The board meeting is a massacre. My kind of massacre.
I stand at the head of the Morrison Pharmaceuticals conference table on the forty-second floor of our San Francisco headquarters and dismantle the panic Victor Kane spent six months building.
I present the FBI evidence. The SEC filing.
The financial trail connecting Kane's fund to Whitfield's betrayal.
I show them the stock manipulation timeline Sully constructed, the communication intercepts, the arrest warrants.
Twelve board members sit in leather chairs and watch me perform the kind of corporate surgery I was built for.
Clean cuts. Precise excisions. I remove the tumor of doubt Kane planted in their minds with data, strategy, and the unwavering authority of a woman who built this company from the ground up and will be damned if a hedge fund parasite takes it from her.
By the time I finish, the vote of confidence is unanimous.
David Ostrowski, who Warren's investigation confirmed had been feeding information to Kane's CFO, resigns before I have to fire him.
Janet Liu seconds the motion to pursue an aggressive legal counterattack against Meridian Capital.
The stock ticks up three points before the market closes.
I win.
I've been winning for three days. The FBI executed a search warrant on Kane's personal offices yesterday.
Diane Keane, my Chief Innovation Officer, turned out to be exactly what I suspected: a target, not a traitor.
She's been cooperating with the investigation and providing testimony that strengthens the case.
Warren tells me criminal charges against Kane are likely within the month.
My company is safe. My board is stabilized. My stock is recovering.
I should feel triumphant.
I feel hollow.
My penthouse is cold when I get home. Not temperature cold. The thermostat is set to seventy-two, same as always. The cold is something else. The absence of pine-scented air and wood smoke and a man's steady breathing against the back of my neck at three in the morning.
I set my bag on the kitchen island and pour a glass of wine.
The penthouse looks exactly the way I left it two weeks ago.
Chrome and marble and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Bay.
Everything I chose. Everything I earned.
The furniture is modern, expensive, curated by a designer I hired because I didn't have time to pick out my own couch.
There are no wooden blocks on the side table. No apron hanging on the kitchen hook. No dog-eared paperback open on the arm of the sofa. No warmth. No evidence that anyone lives here except a woman who uses this space to sleep between board meetings.
I take my wine to the window. The city glitters below. Thousands of lights, millions of lives, and I stand above all of it in a penthouse I bought with my own money and feel absolutely, devastatingly alone.
My phone sits on the counter. I haven't called Hayes. He hasn't called me. Three days of silence that I asked for and received and hate with every cell in my body.
I asked for space to figure out if what I felt was real.
It's real. I knew it was real before the SUV cleared the compound gate.
I knew it when I reached for my reading glasses on the first night and they weren't on the nightstand because I left them in his cabin.
I knew it in the board meeting today when I gave the most commanding performance of my career and the only person I wanted to see was a thirty-three-year-old man with dimples and steady hands who would've been sitting in the back of that room grinning at me.
I wanted him there. Not as a bodyguard. As mine.
The wine tastes expensive and empty. I set it down.
My phone rings. Warren.
"Kane's head of security was arrested an hour ago," he says. "He's cooperating. Full disclosure on the surveillance operations, the penthouse break-in, all of it. The FBI says the physical threat to you is effectively neutralized."
"Effectively."
"Kane's people are done, Lex. The ones who aren't in custody are scattering. It's over."
Over. The threat that sent me to a mountain compound in Nevada, that put me in a cedar cabin forty yards from a man who changed everything, is over.
"Good work, Warren."
"It wasn't just me. That tech specialist at Guardian Peak, Sully, is the reason we have a case.
And the operative who ran your detail...
" A pause. "Hayes Donovan. His threat assessment and tactical recommendations were critical to the FBI operation.
Cross sent me his after-action report. It was the most thorough, strategically sound piece of security analysis I've seen in twenty years. "
My throat constricts. "I'm not surprised."
"Lex." Warren's voice shifts. Personal. Careful. The voice of a man who's known me for six years and is about to step over a line. "Whatever happened up there, I've never heard you sound the way you've sounded in the last three days. Like something's missing."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're performing fine. You're excellent at that. But you're not fine."
I close my eyes. "Goodnight, Warren."
"He's a good man, Lex. Whatever's holding you back, it isn't his age."
I end the call. Stand at the window. The Bay glitters. The wine sits untouched.
Warren's right. It isn't his age. It was never his age.
It's mine.
Lines at my eyes. Softness at my jaw. A body that's healthy and strong but not twenty-five, not thirty, not the taut perfection that magazine covers tell women men want.
I looked in the mirror this morning and saw a woman who is aging, and the small, cruel voice in my head whispered that Hayes will wake up one day and see it too.
That the seven years between us will stretch into a canyon.
That he'll realize he chose a woman already halfway through her life when he could have someone with all of it still ahead.
That's the fear. Not proximity. Not adrenaline. Not professional compromise.
The fear that I'm not enough time.
The intercom buzzes.
I frown. It's after ten. The doorman knows I don't accept visitors without prior arrangement. I press the button.
"Ms. Morrison, there's a gentleman in the lobby. He says his name is Hayes Donovan and that he has something that belongs to you."
My hand drops from the intercom.
I stand in my penthouse kitchen, barefoot, in the silk robe I changed into after the board meeting, and my heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
He's here. In San Francisco. In my building. A thousand miles from his mountain and his cabin and the world where he makes sense, standing in my lobby at ten o'clock at night.
"Send him up."
The elevator takes forty-five seconds. I know because I count every one of them, standing in my open doorway, gripping the doorframe, watching the numbers climb.
The doors open.
Hayes steps out wearing dark jeans, a gray henley pushed up at the forearms, and hiking boots that have no business on the marble floor of a forty-second-floor penthouse.
He's carrying a small case in one hand. His hair is messed from travel, his beard is three days past his usual trim, and he looks like he hasn't slept.
Its the sexiest thing I've ever seen.
He stops three feet away. Reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out my reading glasses. Holds them up.
"You left these."
My laugh comes out broken. Half sob, half joy, cracked right down the middle. "You flew a thousand miles to return my reading glasses."
"I drove, actually. Nine hours. The glasses were the excuse.
" He slides them back into his pocket. "I'm here because you asked for three days to figure out if this was real outside the mountain.
It's been three days. I'm outside the mountain.
And it's real, Lex. It was real in my cabin and it's real in your lobby and it'll be real anywhere on earth you want to test it. "
"Hayes."
"I'm not done." He takes a step closer. "Deck pulled me from your detail.
You're right, it was because of us. And I sat on my porch for about six hours being pissed about it before I walked into the lodge and told him he was right.
My judgment was compromised. Not because I'm too young or too reckless or too anything.
Because I love you, and loving someone makes you a liability in the field. That's not a failure. That's a fact."
"What did he say?"
"He said he got shot protecting Vivian and proposed to her while bleeding from the wound. Then he told me to get my ass off the mountain and go get my woman." The corner of his mouth lifts. "His words."
The tears come. I don't fight them. For the first time in twenty-six years, I stand in a doorway and let tears roll down my face in front of another person.
"I'm forty years old," I whisper.
"I know."
"I have lines on my face and gray roots every three weeks and a body that's not what it was at thirty."
"Lex."
"I'm scared that one day you're going to look at me and see an old woman and wish you'd chosen someone younger."
He closes the distance. Both hands on my face. Thumbs wiping the tears. Those hazel eyes six inches from mine, gold flecked and unwavering and absolutely certain.
"You are the most brilliant, challenging, beautiful woman I have ever known.
Your lines are from years of saving lives and building an empire.
Your body makes me lose my mind every time I look at it.
And if you think some hypothetical younger woman could ever come close to what you are, you're not as smart as I thought. "
I grab his shirt and pull him through the doorway.
The door slams behind us. His mouth covers mine and the three days of silence and distance and aching loneliness collapse into this.
His arms around me. His body against mine.
His tongue sliding against mine with the hunger of a man who has spent seventy-two hours thinking about nothing but this moment.