3. Quin
— ? —
Quin
Six years ago, I was worth about twelve million dollars. I owned a penthouse in the city that I never slept in, and I was slowly losing my goddamn mind.
The penthouse should have felt like victory.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown.
Furniture that cost more than my father’s entire ranch had been worth.
A kitchen with advanced appliances I didn’t know how to use.
I’d worked my ass off to get here, clawing my way up from that struggling patch of dirt my old man left me, taking every risk, seizing every opportunity, until Mr. Sutton saw something in me worth investing in and suddenly I had the capital to build an empire.
But none of it mattered.
Because Clara wasn’t there.
We broke up before she’d left for the city eight months ago, when her family’s ranch finally went under.
Her parents had sold most of their land to developers and moved to Arizona for her father’s health, but Clara stayed behind to work off the remaining debts.
Proud woman. She’d rather break her back at some gray office building than let me help her.
I’d offered. I practically begged her to let me pay off the debts. Told her it was nothing, pocket change, I wouldn’t even notice it was gone. But she’d looked at me with those fierce green eyes and said “I’m not your charity case, Quintus Fleming” and I knew there was no changing her mind.
So I did the only thing I could do.
I haunted the city like a ghost.
Every coffee shop, every park, every bus stop. I made up excuses to have meetings downtown, rescheduled my whole damn calendar around the chance of catching a glimpse of her. My assistant probably thought I was insane. Hell, maybe I was insane.
Months passed. I saw her exactly twice. Once from across a crowded street, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Once through the window of a coffee shop, hunched over a laptop, lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Both times, I didn’t approach. I told myself it was because she’d asked for space. Told myself I was respecting her boundaries. But really, I was terrified. Terrified that if I walked up to her and she told me it was permanently over, I wouldn’t survive it.
Then I got a call from Danny. He’d grown up on the ranch next to Clara’s, had watched me make a fool of myself over her since we were fifteen years old.
He was there the day I finally worked up the courage to ask her to that first picnic by the lake.
He was there when she said yes and I nearly fell off my horse in shock.
“Saw your girl yesterday,” he said casually, like he wasn’t dropping a bomb into the middle of my afternoon.
“She’s not my girl,” I said, even though that was the biggest lie I’d ever told. We’d been together for years before she left. She would always be my girl.
“She was buying cheap noodles at the grocery store. Like, the cheap kind. The college student kind.”
My hand tightened on the phone. “Where does she work?”
“Dude, I don’t know if I should…”
“Where, Danny?”
He gave me the address of a marketing firm on the east side of downtown. Small, he said. Not great, but they paid on time and they had health insurance. Clara had worked her way up from receptionist to junior account manager in six months.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my oversized bed in my oversized penthouse and stared at the ceiling and thought about Clara eating cheap foods in some tiny apartment, working herself to the bone to pay off debts she shouldn’t have to carry.
The next day, I bought a ring.
Not a small one, I’m not an idiot. Clara would have thrown a small ring back in my face and told me she didn’t need my pity. No, I bought something that would make her speechless. Something that said this isn’t charity, this is the rest of my life.
I showed up at her office at seven p.m. on a Tuesday, banking on the fact that she’d still be there because Clara was always the last one to leave. The security guard tried to stop me at the desk.
“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t just walk in.”
I walked past him like he wasn’t there. Confidence had always been my currency. Even when I’d had nothing else, I’d had the ability to make people believe I belonged wherever I was.
The office floor was mostly empty, just a handful of late workers scattered at distant desks. I could see a light on in the back corner. I walked toward it, my heart pounding harder than it had during any business deal, any negotiation, any risk I’d ever taken.
Clara was at her desk, her shoulders hunched over a stack of papers, a cold cup of coffee beside her. She looked exhausted. She looked beautiful. She looked like everything I’d ever wanted.
She looked up, and her face went through different emotions in three seconds flat.
“Quin? What the hell are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t do it anymore,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Stay away from you.” I stepped closer, close enough to see the shadows under her eyes, the way her blazer hung loose on her frame like she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. “I tried, Clara. God knows I tried. But I can’t.”
“Quin…”
“I love you.” The words came out rough, nothing like the smooth delivery I’d practiced in my head a hundred times.
“I’ve loved you since we were kids racing horses through the back fields.
I’ve loved you through every month we spent apart.
And I’m going to love you for the rest of my life whether you want me to or not. ”
Clara stood up, her chair scraping against the floor. “You can’t just barge in here and…”
“I know you don’t want my money. I know you think accepting help means you’re weak.
But Clara.” I dropped to my knees right there on the industrial carpet, and I watched her eyes go wide.
“You will not be my charity work. You will be the wife I am providing for. You don’t have to do this anymore. I want you home. With me.”
I opened the ring box.
The diamond caught the fluorescent light and threw rainbows across her face. For a long moment, she didn’t say anything. Just stared at the ring like it might bite her.
“You’re insane,” she finally said.
“Probably.”
“We haven’t talked in eight months.”
“Felt like forever.”
“You can’t just propose to someone in their office building.”
“Apparently I can, because I’m doing it.”
She laughed, and it cracked in the middle, and then she was crying, the kind that made her nose run and her mascara smear.
“Yes,” she said.
I almost didn’t hear her. “What?”
“Yes, you impossible man. Yes.”
I was on my feet and she was in my arms before either of us could take another breath. I kissed her like I was starving for it, which I was, and she kissed me back the same way, her hands fisting in my shirt, her tears wet against my cheeks.
“I hate you. I don’t want that big diamond,” she said against my mouth.
“No, you don’t.”
“I hate that I can’t stay away from you.”
“Good. Don’t ever try again.”
I carried her out of that office building past the scattered late workers who stared and the security guard who looked like he wanted to call someone but wasn’t sure who.
In the car, she sat in the passenger seat with the ring still unboxed in her lap, turning it under the streetlights like she needed to prove it was real.
I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh, and every few blocks I looked over just to make sure she was still there.
She was watching me. Her mouth still kiss-swollen. Her pulse visible at her throat.
“Look at the road,” she said.
“I am but I have eight months to make up for.”
Her hand covered mine on her thigh and stayed there the rest of the way.
I don’t remember parking. I remember the elevator.
The way she leaned into me, her face against my collar, breathing me in like she’d been waiting for the smell of me.
The way my hand spanned the small of her back and she arched into it without thinking.
The way neither of us spoke, because anything we said would have been smaller than what was already happening.
We barely made it through the door.
I had her pressed against the wall of my entryway before the latch even clicked, her back to the plaster, my mouth on hers again.
Slower this time, deeper. I wanted to learn her all over.
The shape of her bottom lip. The little sound she made when I sucked on it.
The way her body remembered mine even after all those months apart.
Her legs wrapped around my waist. I held her there easily, one arm under her, the other braced beside her head, and I kissed my way down her throat while she tipped her head back and let me.
“Quin.” My name, low, but not a plea. A claiming.
I found the spot beneath her ear and lingered there until she shivered. “I know, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”
Her blazer hit the floor. Then my jacket.
I worked the buttons of her blouse one by one, not rushing, because I wanted to watch her come undone in pieces.
The blouse opened. I pushed it off her shoulders and looked at her in the dim entryway light.
Black bra, the faint shadow of her collarbones, the rise and fall of her chest. Thinner than I remembered.
Still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I kissed the hollow of her throat. The top of her breast. The warm skin just above the lace.
“Bedroom,” she gasped.
“In a minute.”
I carried her through the penthouse like that, her legs around me, her mouth on my neck, and I didn’t put her down until we reached the couch. I laid her down on it and immediately did not give a single goddamn about whether we ruined it.
I sat back on my heels between her thighs and just looked.
Clara, in my home. Hair coming loose. Blouse gone. Green eyes dark and steady on mine. Eight months of cheap foods and fluorescent lights and stubborn pride, and she was still looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth seeing.