Chapter 6 #2
That part wasn’t entirely true. He was plenty intimidating, tall and with that face hard enough to resemble a stone gargoyle ferociously guarding a castle or a fort.
If gargoyles were hot and had the most intense blue eyes on the planet.
But I couldn’t let him know any of that, so I just stared coolly back at him.
“What’s your plan with Will?” he asked pointblank, his voice clipped and harsh.
I stared at him for another beat before laughing. “My plan? With Will? I’m not sure I follow.”
“You heard me, Kate. What are you doing with him?”
I leaned back in my chair, spinning it to face him directly. “I’m going to need you to be wildly more specific.”
His jaw flexed, his shoulders tightening. “He’s not someone to mess with.”
“Why is he not someone to mess with?” I asked, folding my arms to mirror his defensiveness. “Is he secretly a serial killer or something?”
Nate blinked once, hard enough to make him look like he was mentally recalibrating his personal opinion of my sanity, but then he scoffed. “No. He’s not a serial killer, but he is as good as married.”
“Okay.” I frowned. “First, I wasn’t flirting with him and I don’t have any plans to either, but even if I was, he hasn’t mentioned a girlfriend. If he’s taken, he should be clear about that. That’s on him, not on me.”
Nate gave a short, humorless laugh. “It figures that you’d stubbornly avoid taking any responsibility whatsoever, but it’s not that. He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“Then what is it?” I tilted my head. “A fiancée he keeps in your family vault?”
“No. We don’t keep fiancées in the vault, but we do keep our money there.
Along with all sorts of priceless heirlooms and knickknacks.
Our fiancées are all free to walk around out there in the world somewhere, but they’re chosen for us in order to make sure all the money and the knickknacks get to stay in the vault, and be joined by lots of friends with every new generation. ”
My jaw suddenly felt decidedly less firmly attached to my body when all I saw looking back at me was complete and total sincerity. “Are you talking about… arranged marriages? Is that what you meant when you said your fiancées are chosen for you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. Every last one of us will be married off for the good of the family and to protect what we’ve been building for decades. No one is getting out of it.”
“That’s…” I trailed off in a desperate search for the right word, but shit. It took me a few seconds to land on one that actually felt accurate. “That’s archaic.”
His expression cooled several degrees. “Seeing as your previously old-money family never put faith in that system and consequently failed at keeping their wealth, maybe archaic isn’t the worst thing in the world.”
My spine straightened. “Excuse me?”
“Three generations of your family name resting in the dirt,” he said evenly. “Your father had to pick up the pieces and build a hedge fund from scratch. That’s never happened to us, so it might be archaic, but it works. The evidence is irrefutable.”
My heart thudded against my ribs, heat shooting to my cheeks. “That’s rich. Truly. Nothing says healthy relationship like a legally binding business merger with occasional kissing privileges. Although I’m assuming those are strictly reserved for when procreation is required.”
His teeth ground, a knot forming at the back of his jaw. “It ensures stability.”
“No, what it ensures is that your family stays stuck in the stone age.”
“It’s called tradition.”
“I think you spelled suffocation wrong.”
His jaw flexed again and he took a step closer, close enough that I could see the darker ring around those stupidly striking blue eyes. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I have every idea,” I retorted. “I just won’t romanticize it.”
In the aftermath, silence crackled between us, tight and electric. I tilted my chin when I remembered how we’d gotten onto this topic in the first place. “Wait, is that what this is about?”
“What?”
“Are you jealous of me talking to Will?” I asked. “Or is it that you’re jealous of him for being a lot more social and easygoing?”
His eyebrows shot up and he scoffed. Loudly enough that it was a little offensive, if I was being honest. The idea that he could be jealous of his brother or of me flirting with his brother wasn’t that ridiculous, but he’d made it sound like I’d asked if he wanted to go horseback riding with an alien.
“Trust me,,” he said firmly. “I am not jealous. I was simply doing you the service of telling you the truth, because my brother won’t pay you the same courtesy. He’s still harboring the illusion that he’ll be the exception to the rule.”
“Oh, please. You’ve been sulking like someone canceled your favorite sport ever since you came in here and I started talking to him. Don’t pretend it was a favor.”
“I don’t sulk.”
“Okay. You brood, then. Very dramatically. So dramatically, in fact, it’s almost like you’re sulking.”
“I wasn’t brooding either,” he said, his voice dropping lower. “If I were, it sure as hell wouldn’t be about you.”
“Good, because you’re the last person on earth I’d want to be with.”
His answering laugh was harsh, the sound ringing with disbelief. “Trust me, Kate. The feeling is mutual.”
“Fantastic.”
“Incredible.”
I shook my head and finally rose from the chair, taking a step closer so I could look him right in the eyes. “You really are exceptionally arrogant, do you know that?”
Those blue eyes clashed with mine. “I might be arrogant, but you’re insufferable.”
“At least I’m not emotionally constipated. You, on the other hand, need a laxative for your feelings.”
“And you feel so many things so very obviously that you weaponize eye contact.”
I scoffed. “I don’t even know what that means. You’re just making stuff up now.”
“No. It means you stare at people like you’re deciding whether to ruin their lives or reorganize them chronologically.”
“I organize by color,” I snapped, my chest heaving when I realized how close we were now.
Too close.
So close that the air between us felt like it was crackling like a lightning strike waiting for permission. I could feel the heat rolling off him, see the pulse ticking in his throat, and for one completely traitorous second, I wondered what would happen if—
He let out a soft snort. “Oh, yeah. How could I have forgotten? Purple, right? Do you know that’s the color of—”
The door flew open and Alex came in without knocking, then stopped dead, his eyes flicking between us. We were standing practically nose to nose, both of us visibly seconds away from committing a felony.
“Is this a bad time?” he asked, his voice suspiciously calm given what he’d just walked in on. “I can come back.”
“No,” Nate and I said simultaneously. Then we glared at each other for agreeing.
Alex raised an eyebrow, but it only a beat before he focused on Nate. “I need you. It’s not Hinds-related.”
Nate didn’t move immediately, his gaze still locked on my face, and for a brief, unsettling moment, something flickered in his eyes. Confusion, maybe. Curiosity. Something unguarded enough to make my heart stutter in response.
He stepped back and spun away from me before I could even begin to make sense of it. He cleared his throat and nodded at his brother. “Right. Let’s go.”
Alex gave me a quick, almost apologetic smile before he left and Nate followed, neither of them looking back.
My heart was thundering like I’d just sprinted ten blocks as I moved back to the table and dropped into the chair, my nails automatically starting to drum against the armrests in a sharp, uneven rhythm.
My pulse refused to slow, irritation and something significantly more inconvenient entwining under my skin. I reached for my phone, unlocking it and opening the email from this morning again.
The familiar tone of it grounded me almost instantly, soothing the internal havoc Nate Westwood seemed determined to inflict on my nervous system. I reread it slowly, letting the words settle over me like a steadying hand.
Finally, as my lips curved into a smile, my breathing evened out and my shoulders lowered. Nate and the Westwoods could take their judgment and their archaic traditions and shove them where the sun didn’t shine.
Thankfully, they weren’t the only men in the world or the only family. The rest of us did just fine over here in the twenty-first century and I didn’t even pity them for not being able to join us.