Chapter 16 Connection Established
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED
LUKE
Monday morning arrives with the kind of jarring insistence that makes me want to commit violence against whoever invented alarm clocks.
Except my phone isn't making noise, and the soft light filtering through unfamiliar curtains suggests it's barely past dawn.
I'm in Sage's bed.
The early November morning is crisp enough that I can hear rain pattering against the windows, but under this fortress of quilts—seriously, how many blankets does one person need?—everything is warm and perfect and slightly in disarray, just like the woman currently using my chest as a pillow.
Sage sleeps like she does everything else.
With complete commitment and zero regard for personal space.
One arm is flung across my torso, her leg is hooked over mine, and her soft dark red hair has somehow managed to be in my mouth, across my neck, and tickling my nose simultaneously.
I should move.
I have a company to run, meetings to attend, a security platform that's probably developing new and creative bugs as we speak.
Instead, I lie still, studying her in the pale morning light.
Her face is soft in sleep, the constant motion finally stilled. There's a small scar on her temple I hadn't noticed before, probably from some inn-related disaster.
Her lips are slightly parted, and she's making tiny snoring sounds that she would vehemently deny if awake.
And she’s so fucking beautiful.
Not in the polished, calculated way Veronica was beautiful.
Sage's beauty is accidental, unplanned, like wildflowers growing through concrete.
It's in the way her nose crinkles when she laughs, the determined set of her jaw when wrestling with plumbing, the light in her eyes when she won Pictionary.
My body is already responding to her proximity, fourteen years of muscle memory overridden by one night of her.
I shift slightly, trying to create some distance before I embarrass myself like a teenager.
She murmurs something that sounds like "spreadsheet" and burrows closer.
So much for distance.
"Are you watching me sleep?" Her voice is rough with sleep, but I can hear the smile in it.
"No," I lie. "I'm efficiently observing your REM patterns."
"Creeper." She stretches against me, and I have to bite back a groan. "What time is it?"
I crane my neck to see the clock. "Six twenty-three."
"Gross. Why are we awake?"
"Natural circadian rhythms?"
"Unnatural torture." She props herself up on an elbow, and the sheet slips dangerously low. "Hi."
"Hi."
"So... we did that."
"We did."
"Any morning-after regrets?"
I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. "Only that your goat probably ate my shoes."
"She has refined taste." Sage grins, then her expression shifts to something warmer. "Luke?"
"Yes?"
"I really want to kiss you, but I probably have morning breath, and I'm trying to be sexy here."
"Sage?"
"Yeah?"
"Shut up and kiss me."
She does, morning breath and all, and it's perfect. We're just starting to get interesting when my phone explodes.
Not literally, though given our track record with technology, that wouldn't surprise me. But it buzzes with the specific pattern that means Daniella is trying to reach me, which she only does for actual emergencies.
"Ignore it," Sage mumbles against my neck.
"I can't. That's my—" The phone stops, then immediately starts again. "Shit."
I fumble for it, nearly knocking over a tower of coffee cups in the process.
"Sterling."
“Excuse my language, boss, but…where the hell are you?" Daniella's voice could strip paint. "The board called an emergency meeting. They're here. Now. Waiting."
I bolt upright, dislodging Sage with an undignified "oof."
"What emergency meeting?"
"The one about SafeStay's latest bug causing a minor international incident? The one where our biggest beta site in Tokyo locked the ambassador in a bathroom for three hours?"
"The ambassador of what?"
"Japan. To France. It's complicated." I hear her typing furiously. "How fast can you get here?"
I look at Sage, who's now wearing the sheet wrapped around her lithe, sexy body, and looking concerned. Then I look at the window, where Alder Ridge is definitely not Seattle.
"Forty minutes if I break several traffic laws."
"Break them. I'll have legal on standby."
She hangs up, and I'm already moving, trying to find my clothes in the disaster zone of Sage's floor.
"What's wrong?" Sage asks.
"SafeStay apparently took an ambassador hostage." I find my shirt under a stack of inn invoices. "I have to go."
"Oh." She pulls the sheet tighter. "Of course. Yes. You should go."
Something in her voice makes me pause. "Sage—"
"No, it's fine. You have a company. Responsibilities. I get it." She's smiling, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "I have inn stuff anyway. Buttercup probably needs milking."
"Goats don't—you're joking."
"Little bit." She slides out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself more securely. "Let me find you a shirt that doesn't look like it survived a tornado."
"This shirt is fine."
"This shirt looks like you had athletic sex and then slept in it."
"That's... accurate, actually."
She laughs, some of the tension breaking. "Come on, Mr. CEO. Let's make you presentable."
She finds me a t-shirt from a stack of laundry. It's soft and smells like her detergent and has "Alder Ridge: Get Lost in Our Beauty" printed on it.
"Perfect," I say dryly.
"You'll start a trend. Billionaire chic."
I'm dressed and ready to leave in record time, but I can't resist pulling her close for one more kiss.
"I'll call you later?"
"Sure." She nods against my chest. "Go save your company from international incidents."
I'm halfway to Seattle, definitely breaking those traffic laws, when the full weight of the situation hits me.
I missed the warning signs.
Just like I'd missed them before.
I pass the familiar turn-off for Lakeview cemetery, a place I haven’t intentionally driven by in years, pressing harder on the accelerator.
Whatever bug caused the Tokyo incident, there should have been alerts, reports, something.
But I've been distracted.
For weeks now, I've been focused on Sage, on the inn, on this thing building between us, and I've let my actual company slide.
The board meeting is goddamned brutal.
Twelve faces staring at me with varying degrees of disappointment as I explain how our flagship product trapped a diplomat in a bathroom.
"The lock mechanism interpreted his repeated attempts to exit as a security threat," I explain. "It activated full lockdown protocol."
"For three hours," Board Chairman Barbara Todd emphasizes. "Three. Hours."
"The override system also malfunctioned."
"And where were you when this was happening?" Richard Stein asks. He's been gunning for my position since I started the company. "My understanding is you were... unavailable?"
"I was in a meeting." The lie tastes like ash.
"A meeting. At midnight Tokyo time. Which would be..." He makes a show of calculating. "Eight AM here. On a Sunday."
I was in Sage's bed at eight AM on Sunday.
Probably doing something that would make the board clutch their pearls.
"The important thing," I say, steering away from my whereabouts, "is fixing the bug and ensuring it doesn't happen again."
"The important thing," Barbara interjects, "is leadership focus. Lucas, you've built something remarkable here. But lately..."
She doesn't finish, but the implication hangs heavy.
Lately, I've been distracted. Lately, I've been absent.
Lately, I've been falling for an innkeeper instead of running my company.
The meeting drags on for two hours. By the time I escape, my head is pounding and my phone has thirteen missed calls.
I'm scrolling through them when Nana's ringtone fills my car as I drag my board-chewed ass behind the driver’s seat of my car in the Sterling Security parking garage.
"Hello, Nana."
“Hello, my precious. How are you?”
“Um, honestly? Not the greatest, Nana. Just came out of a meeting that didn’t exactly go my way.” I wait for my grandmother to continue on, but she doesn’t. “Did you need anything?”
“Define ‘need anything.’”
My heart rate ticks up to another level. “What’s wrong? Anything happen at the gala after I left? Or did—“
“Kevin called.”
Ice floods my veins. "Kevin called you?"
"This morning. Turns out he saw some of the news in the press about SafeStay. And about Sage. I’m…guessing he wants to talk."
"No."
"That's what I told him. But Lukas..." Her voice softens. "He sounds broken."
"Good." My jaw tightens. "He should be broken.”
“I know. I do. The thing is…he’s family.”
"Is he?” I'm gripping the steering wheel hard enough to hurt. "He was my brother in everything but blood. He stood next to me at my wedding and then—"
"I know what he did."
"Do you? Because you weren't there. You didn't see them together. You didn't have to identify Veronica's body while he was in the hospital. You didn't have to hear him sob about how sorry he was while I planned her funeral."
"Lukas—"
"He wants forgiveness? He can want it from someone else."
"He saw the article about you and Sage. That gossip piece from the gala. He says he's happy you're moving on."
My teeth grind inside my mouth. “Well, it’s a good thing that he doesn’t get to have opinions about my life.”
"I agree. Which is why I told him to lose my number." My grandmother pauses on the line. "But I thought you should know. In case he tries to contact you directly."
"He won't." My voice is cold. "He knows better."
"Does he? Desperate people do desperate things."
I think about Kevin, about the last time I saw him at Veronica's funeral.
How he looked—hollow, broken, begging for something I couldn't give him.
“Look, I have to go, Nana."
"Lukas—"
“Love you. I’ll talk to you later."
I hang up and sit in the parking garage, engine running, trying to push down the rage that threatens to consume me.
Kevin saw the article. Kevin knows about Sage.
The last time Kevin knew about someone I cared about, he take a demolition hammer to my life.
My phone buzzes with a text from Sage.
Hope the meeting went okay. Buttercup ate your shoe after all. I'll buy you new ones. Also, I miss you already. How dumb is that?
Not dumb at all, I think.
But maybe dangerous.
Because I'm realizing that I've let myself get distracted again.
Let myself care again.
And if there's one thing Kevin taught me, it's that everything I care about can be taken away.
My phone rings again—Daniella with another crisis—and I push the thought aside.
I have a company to save, bugs to fix, ambassadors to apologize to.
The rest—Sage, Kevin, this feeling that I'm standing on the edge of another catastrophe—will have to wait.