5. Kiara
— ? —
Kiara
It’s been a week since the bar, and Jensen has kept every inch of the distance I threw at him on that sidewalk.
That’s the part that won’t leave me alone. I told him to stay out of my life, and instead of making a deal out of it, he just did it.
No itineraries carried up by hand. No dark shape in my doorway.
His assistants handle everything now, courteous and forgettable, exactly the arrangement I demanded.
I keep waiting for him to break it, to test the line, to turn up somewhere he isn’t wanted.
He doesn’t. And somehow the not-turning-up trails me around all day like a held breath I can’t let out.
So naturally, the one day I finally stop bracing for him, everything else falls in.
The sprinkler system fails during the Hartwell wedding.
I’m in my office when the call comes. Water is pouring from the ceiling in the grand ballroom. Thousands of dollars in floral arrangements. And the bride is screaming.
I run.
The ballroom is chaos. Water cascades from three separate points in the ceiling. Guests scatter toward the exits, clutching plates and champagne glasses. The bride stands in the center of the dance floor, her white dress soaked, her veil plastered to her face, shrieking at anyone within range.
“Get maintenance,” I tell Theo as I push through the crowd. “Shut off the main water line. Find every staff member you can and get them in here with towels and mops.”
“The cake,” I hear someone say, and I’m already moving.
“Move the cake first. Get it to the kitchen. Go.”
I wade through the growing puddles toward the bride, and here’s the thing I’ll be ashamed of later. Even now, with the ceiling coming down and a bride in hysterics ten feet away, some traitorous corner of my mind is running a second track underneath the first, and the second track is him.
A week ago, he’d have been at my shoulder before I finished asking. Now he’s a floor away in a suite I arranged for him, and I notice it, I actually notice the exact shape of where he isn’t, in the middle of a flood, and I could scream.
I shove it down. I’ve had five years of practice shoving things down.
“Mrs. Hartwell.” I take her hands. They’re shaking. “I’m so sorry. We’re handling this. I need you to step into the anteroom with your guests while we contain the damage.”
“Contain the damage? My wedding is ruined!”
“Your wedding isn’t ruined. We’ll relocate you to the rooftop terrace. The ceremony is complete. The reception can continue.”
“In this dress? Look at me!”
“We have a contract with a boutique nearby. I’ll have them send options right away. You’ll change into a dress that’s dry and beautiful and rejoin your guests. This will become a story you tell at dinner parties.”
“I don’t want a story! I want my wedding!”
“You’ll have your wedding. I promise you. Trust me.”
She stares at me with wild eyes. Then the certainty on my face convinces her. She nods once and lets her mother guide her toward the anteroom.
I turn back to the chaos. Maintenance has arrived. The water is still flowing. Someone is yelling about electrical systems.
And Jensen Cole is standing in the doorway.
A week of nothing. A week of him honoring every line I drew in the concrete. And now, of all the moments there are, here he is, like that second track in my head summoned him just by refusing to shut up.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I heard the commotion. Do you need help?”
“No.”
It comes out before I’ve even thought about it, and I watch it land on him.
“Kiara. Half your ceiling is in the ballroom. Let me put my people on it. Whatever you need moved or lifted or carried, they’re standing around doing nothing.”
“I said no, Mr. Cole.” I don’t have the time for this. “This is my floor. My disaster. My fix. I don’t need your staff, and I don’t need you. What I need is for you to step out of my doorway so my people can get through it.”
A flicker crosses his face. Not offense. Closer to respect, which is worse. He steps aside.
“Then I’ll stay out of your way,” he says. “I’ll be here if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
And I don’t.
What follows blurs into a single sustained emergency, and I run every piece of it myself.
The main line finally shuts off. I pull housekeeping, maintenance, every warm body on my own payroll, and I move a full reception up to the terrace on the fly.
The ballroom damage is extensive but contained.
The cake survives the relocation with one bruised tier.
The bride changes into a cocktail dress from the boutique, and although she’s not happy, she’s stopped screaming.
By the time the relocated reception is in full swing on the terrace, I’m soaked to the waist and running on nothing but adrenaline and spite.
Jensen finds me in the service corridor, leaning against the wall, catching my breath. He’s still here. Of course he’s still here.
“The bride’s dancing,” he says. “The groom looks relieved. You saved it.”
“I know I did.”
“You did it alone. You wouldn’t let me lift a single finger, and you saved the whole thing alone.” There’s no sting in it. If anything, he sounds a little undone. “You were always like that.”
“I need to check the cleanup.”
“You need to sit down. You’ve been on your feet without a break.”
“Sitting isn’t in my job description.”
“Neither is drowning in ballroom water, and you managed that.”
I almost laugh. The sound gets out before I can stop it, and I clamp down on it, but not before he catches it.
“There it is,” he says softly. “I’ve been waiting for that.”
“For what?”
“A crack. Any sign you still exist under all that ice.”
“I’m not ice.”
“You’ve been frozen solid since I walked into this hotel. I understand it. I do. But just now, for half a second, you were the Kiara I remember.”
“She doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t have to.”
We’re standing too close. I don’t remember closing the distance, and I don’t think he does either, but it’s gone, collapsed, and I can see the pulse going in his throat.
“Kiara,” he says.
Just my name. But he says it in the voice, the low one, the one that used to live against my ear in the dark, and it goes straight through every wall I’ve spent five years building and lands somewhere I was sure I’d sealed off for good.
“Don’t.” It comes out unsteady. I hate that it comes out unsteady.
“Don’t what?”
“Say it like that. You don’t get to say it like that anymore.”
“How am I saying it?”
“The way you used to. When it was just us. When you wanted...” I stop so hard my teeth click shut.
His eyes go dark. He doesn’t let it go. “When I wanted you,” he says.
It isn’t a question. I press my back teeth together. “It doesn’t matter what you wanted.”
“It’s the only thing that’s ever mattered to me.
” He takes a step. The corridor’s already too small, and he makes it smaller.
I should move back. There’s a wall right there, cool tile at my shoulder blades, and I don’t use it.
“I’ve spent five years trying not to look for you in crowds.
Do you understand that? Five years not knowing if you were safe.
If you were happy. If you were even alive.
Reading every face in every crowd for yours and never, not once, finding it. ”
“You should have looked harder when it counted.” My throat’s tight, and I force the words through it anyway. “You had one day where it would have made a difference, and you weren’t there for it.”
He flinches like I’ve hit him. “I tried. God, Kiara, you have no idea what I...” His jaw clamps down on the rest. His hands curl into fists at his sides. “I can’t. Not yet. But I will, and when I do, you’ll understand every part of it.”
“I don’t want to understand you.” The truth’s uglier, and I give him that one too. “I want to forget you.”
“Have you?” His eyes hold mine and won’t let go. “Have you forgotten?”
I should lie. I’ve kept myself alive on lies smaller than this one. I open my mouth to tell it, and the truth falls out instead, quiet, ruinous.
“No,” I say. “Not one single thing.”
His hand comes up between us, slow, and stops just short of my face, hovering there, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off his palm against my cheek without a single point of contact.
“Neither have I,” he says. “Not your laugh. Not the way you go quiet right before you win an argument. Not the way you look at me when you think I’m not watching. I kept all of it. It’s what I’ve been living on.”
“Don’t.” It comes out of me hard, not soft, not a plea.
My anger is the only thing holding me up and I grab it with both hands.
“Don’t say things like that to me. You left.
That’s the entire truth I have about you.
You left me standing there, and now you want to stand this close and murmur about my laugh like you kept the right to any piece of me. You didn’t. You threw it away.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive it.”
“Then get out of my corridor.”
“I’m not asking you for that either.”
And then he stops talking, and he moves.
He steps into me, all the way, and his hand comes off the air and lands flat on the wall by my head, and the other one lands on the other side, and just like that he’s got me boxed in, caged between his arms and the cold tile with nowhere to go that isn’t straight through him.
My pulse detonates. I should be shoving him off. I’m furious enough to.
“Move,” I tell him.
“Make me.” It isn’t a taunt. “You want me gone, Kiara, put your hands on my chest and push. I won’t stop you.”
So I put my hands on his chest.
And I don’t push.
My fingers curl into his shirt instead, both fists gripping the fabric, and instead of shoving him back, I’m dragging him down, and I feel the exact moment he understands it, the way his breath goes ragged against my forehead.
I hate myself. I hate him. I lean in anyway.
My eyes fall shut. His forehead drops to mine, and I let it happen.
His breath is on my lips, warm, and I tip my chin up to take the last of the distance, shaking with rage and want tangled so tight I can’t tell them apart anymore, everything I swore I’d never feel again roaring straight up through the middle of me.
Half an inch. Then almost none. His nose brushes mine. I feel the heat of his mouth a hair from my own.
A door bangs shut somewhere down the corridor.
It goes through me like a bucket of ice water.
I shove him. Hard, both hands, every bit of the strength I should have used the second he caged me in, arriving all at once now that it’s nearly too late.
He rocks back a step, hands lifting open, and I’m flat against the wall with my chest heaving and my mouth still burning for a kiss that never even landed.
What did I just do?
I stare at him and I have no idea who I am. A woman who despises this man for what he did to her. A woman who just fisted his shirt and dragged him toward her mouth. Both of those. Neither of them.
My hands are shaking so hard I press them flat to the tile behind me just to make them stop.
“Kiara.”
“No.” It tears out of me. “Don’t. Don’t you dare.”
I don’t wait to see his face. I don’t trust myself with his face. I push off the wall and I go, fast, down the corridor away from him, legs unsteady, hands ruined, mouth still hot from something that never happened.
He doesn’t follow.