38. Dominic
Dominic
Landon James is midway through explaining why his new boat is technically a research vessel when I feel my wife look at me from forty feet away, and every instrument on my dashboard goes red at once.
To anyone else she looks perfect. Champagne in hand, spine straight, face doing its flawless corporate expression.
But I have nearly a decade of field notes on Jenna Pemberton, and the smile she’s aiming at me right now is the one she gives during crisis meetings when a company Mercer is acquiring pushes back against the contract terms. Something has happened between now and when Willa stole her, and whatever it is, it has my name on it.
“Excuse me, Landon. I think my wife needs me.”
“Of course.”
Fuck, I love calling her that—my wife.
I cross the blue room without hurrying and steer us into the quiet alcove by the service corridor.
We stop near the wall, my body shielding her from the main room.
I place one hand on her hip, and the other retrieves the glass from her fingers, because I need her looking at me and not scanning for escape routes.
“What’s going on, sweetheart?”
“Did you know?” she hisses.
“Know what?” A server walks past and I hand off the champagne.
“How I got my invite. Audrey wrote to Willa. Layla called Landon—they lobbied on my behalf.” Her voice stays level and quiet, and it’s the most frightening sound I’ve heard all year.
“The reason I’m in this room isn’t because I earned it all by myself.
It was arranged, Dominic. So I’m asking you once, and I need the real answer, not the cocky one you normally give.
Just straight-up truth. Did. You. Know?”
“No.” I say it immediately because it’s true. I had no idea Audrey and Layla put her name forward for this. But I do know that she earned it regardless of who brought her work to the attention of Willa James.
“Dominic,” she warns.
I take her hand and put it flat on my chest, over the steady beating of my heart. “Look at me. On my heart, Jen. On us. I swear it. I found out you were invited when you did.”
She goes still. She knows there are exactly two things in this world I don’t joke about—my family and our relationship.
Her fingers tighten, feeling for any hint of a lie. Finding none, she lets out a long, brittle breath and tips her head, forehead pressed to the lapel of my suit like she’s daring herself to spill or shatter.
“I hate this, Dominic,” she says, voice small as she lifts her head again to meet my eyes.
“I hate that it’s never . . . enough. That even in rooms where I finally—finally—feel like I belong, there’s this invisible asterisk next to my name.
Special consideration. A favor called in.
I spent the entire walk down that carpet thinking I had built every step with my own hands, and now I don’t know if it was ever really mine in the first place. ”
She says it soft, the way injured animals make no sound but ragged breathing. She’s so fucking brave it guts me.
“That’s not how it works,” I tell her, thumb rubbing circles over the bones of her wrist. “This place? These people? Everybody’s here because they were lobbied for.
That’s the system. Credentials open the door, but recommendations keep it from shutting on your face.
You belonged before Audrey and Layla made a single call, or you wouldn’t have stayed on the list once Willa set her eyes on you. ”
Jenna shakes her head, not angry, just exhausted. “That’s not how it feels.”
“So tell me how it feels.”
“Like I’m a pet project. Like I’m only interesting because I’m adjacent to the real players.
” She shrugs. “Tonight, I actually believed for a second that it wasn’t that way.
That I was more than who I married, or whose friend I was, or who signed my alumni recommendations.
But apparently, even for a room this blue and this expensive, I get here and it’s still .
. . an angle.” She chokes a laugh. “And the angle wasn’t mine. ”
I want to find Audrey and Layla and Willa and shake them but also hug them and thank them and buy them lunch.
I want Jenna to see what I see—her competence, her clarity, her goddamn bravado.
The way even Landon wouldn’t dare patronize her.
And how Bennett would never second-guess her.
But I know that isn’t what tonight is about.
She isn’t asking for reassurance. She’s asking what’s real.
I brace her chin, tilting her face up, and lower my forehead to hers.
“There is no room in this goddamn city where you don’t belong, Jenna Pemberton.
There is no ‘asterisk next to your name’ unless it’s that you got here faster than the rest of them.
You know what a favor gets you in these circles?
Five minutes and a handshake. You made it past the handshake.
” My thumb glides under her jaw. “You’re not a pet project. You’re the blueprint.”
Jenna stares at me, and I can feel her fighting it, the urge to dismiss or deflect or joke. But I duck my head to catch her eyes and hold them.
“NeuraTech sat approved but functionally unavailable. People who needed that device were waiting on a supply chain everyone called unfixable—including the foundation downstairs whose entire mission is getting technology like that to people who can’t reach it.
You unstuck it. Willa didn’t invite Dominic Cruz’s wife, and she didn’t invite Audrey and Layla’s friend.
She invited the woman who fixed the pipeline her own foundation has been praying over.
The letter got you read, sweetheart. The work got you in. ”
“OK.” She lets herself breathe, and I watch the riot under her skin slow to a dull, manageable mutter. I hold her, thumb mapping the hinge of her jaw, until she runs dry and her eyes lose the panicked, searching edge.
She leans into the touch, not all the way at first, then more fully, like the decision exhausts the last of her battery and she’s calling in a generator.
I’d strip power from every grid in the city if it meant her feeling even an ounce lighter.
I could fix this in a hundred other ways—buy the hotel, host a second gala with her as the only name on the program, ask Logan to hack the event registry and overwrite her title with The Architect—but she doesn’t want fixing.
She wants to stand upright in the wreckage, and maybe have an arm around her when she does.
“You good?” I ask, my voice quiet and soft.
She doesn’t answer straight away. She closes her eyes, nods her head just enough to move against my skin, and then she opens them again, looking at me like she’s waiting for the next thing and no longer afraid it won’t come.
I lean in and kiss her.
I have to.
It’s not even a choice, just a command sent from the part of my brain that’s gotten used to being rewired by her.
I kiss her in the side alcove of a room full of power brokers and legacy money, and she receives it like a benediction, mouth soft and grateful.
“I mean it,” I murmur against her lips, the words a contract between us. “You are every bit as qualified to be here as anyone in this room. Stop doubting yourself.”
She smiles—shaky, but it’s there. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Cruz.”
“It better,” I say, and thumb away a shimmer of wetness at the corner of her eye. “That’s my whole plan.”
I watch her recalibrate in real time, pulling herself upright and recentering like someone who refuses to be misplaced, even by kindness. She smooths her dress, squares her shoulders, and I can see her ready to go back out there and own every last motherfucker in the Azure Room.
Except the quartet has gone quiet, and a muted tide of voices surges in its wake. The main ballroom doors have opened, and the first notes of the big band—strings, then a piano, then some brass—spill in from the main hall. The gala is shifting gears.
I lace my fingers through hers, feeling the steady thrum of her pulse against my palm.
“Come on,” I murmur, stepping back just enough to admire the way the midnight silk drapes over her curves.
“Let’s go show you off on the dance floor.
Let this room see exactly who they’re lucky enough to host tonight. ”
Jenna arches a brow, the sharp, brilliant version of my wife fully restored. “You just want an excuse to put your hands on me in public.”
“I never need an excuse for that, Pemberton,” I say, bringing her knuckles to my lips. “But I will absolutely take the opportunity.”
I guide her out of the quiet alcove and into the grand ballroom.
The space is a sprawling sea of tailored tuxedos and designer gowns, but the moment I pull her against my chest and we catch the rhythm of a slow, sweeping jazz number, the rest of the world falls away.
My hand settles firmly on her lower back, fingertips finding the bare, warm skin where the silk dips low.
She exhales softly, rests her free hand on my shoulder, and steps into my space. It just feels fucking right.
Thursday. The deadline Logan unknowingly woke me up to ticks relentlessly in the back of my mind. I pull her a fraction closer, breathing in her expensive perfume. I’m not just showing her off to the room tonight. I’m proving to her that this—us—is exactly where she belongs. Permanently.
“Your hand is very low,” she murmurs after a while.
I smile. “My hand is exactly where the dress code permits.”
“The dress code permits black tie. It does not specify strategic fondling.”
“It’s a gala, not a monastery.” I guide her through a turn, and the silk catches the light, midnight breaking open over her hips. “Besides, if the city didn’t want me touching you, it shouldn’t have invited you in a dress designed by a benevolent pervert.”
Her laugh hits me directly in the sternum.
It bubbles up sudden and low, and makes her eyes go bright.
“Benevolent pervert,” she repeats, shaking her head. “I’m writing that into the post-event feedback survey.”
“Please do. Willa loves specificity.”