Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
DOMINIC
New York never slept. It brokered, it bargained, and occasionally, it even berated. Just try insulting a taxi driver or a hot dog vendor.
Even at three in the morning, someone somewhere was closing a deal, signing a contract, bleeding money, or making a mistake that would cost them far more than they realized. I liked that about the city. It was honest about its hunger.
My office looked out over a slice of midtown that never really went dark.
The lights from the buildings across the street cut into the room in long, pale bars, glinting off glass and steel and paper.
My desk was a mess of files, contracts, and coffee cups—evidence of a day that had been both lucrative and exhausting.
I won three cases this week.
I hadn’t slept much.
I checked my phone.
No new messages.
I told myself I hadn’t been expecting one. That was a lie I’d gotten very good at.
My practice kept me busy. Wealthy families, creative clients, people who needed things done quietly and done right. I wasn’t owned by any of them. That was the point. I chose my clients. They chose me. Control flowed both ways.
Frankie was one of them.
Her career was a minefield of contracts, touring logistics, image rights, and the kind of attention that could eat someone alive if they didn’t have the right protection. I made sure she did. Not because she paid well—though she did—but because she was family in every way that mattered.
She was important to Rachel. That alone would have made her important to me. But Frankie also had people, a home, and a life that she kept coloring in despite being in school, despite the tragedies in her past.
Frankie Curtis wasn’t waiting to tackle her dreams, she was going after them full throttle. I envied her for it more than I liked to admit.
My phone buzzed. My heart kicked stupidly hard before my brain caught up.
Rachel.
It was a voice note.
I didn’t open it right away. I never did. There was a small, ridiculous part of me that liked knowing it was there, waiting. A kind of private promise.
When I finally tapped play, her voice filled the quiet office.
“Hey,” she said softly. “Tonight was… perfect.”
I closed my eyes.
“As tired as I am right now, I know I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.”
There was a yawn, unguarded and real, and I smiled despite myself.
“I am also dead tired. So, sleeping now. More stories later.”
The message ended.
I didn’t move.
There was something about hearing her like that—unpolished, half-asleep, happy—that made the distance between us feel both unbearable and somehow survivable. She wasn’t pretending with me. She never did.
That was what I loved most. Rachel didn’t censor herself. She just was. She didn’t try to be someone she wasn’t. She never made me any promises.
None.
I wanted to be where she was. In her mornings. In the rooms where she hung her photographs. In the space between her thoughts when she wasn’t performing for anyone.
Paris had her now.
I tried not to resent that. I really did.
She sounded alive there. Lit from the inside. Hungry in the way people only got when they were becoming something.
I wanted that for her.
I just didn’t know where it left me.
Frankie had four men planning a future around her. A whole orbit of devotion. I’d listened to Coop explain it once, earnest and unguarded, like it was the most natural thing in the world to build a life around the person you loved.
Honestly, I agreed with him. I just didn’t know if Rachel would ever want to build one around me.
I replayed her message.
Just once.
Then I set the phone face down on my desk and went back to work, because that was the only way I knew how to keep from wanting something I couldn’t reach.
Still, as the city negotiated and the night stretched on, one thought refused to let go. Will Rachel ever choose me?
The bar Ezra picked was too loud and too polished, the kind of place that smelled like money and bad decisions in equal measure. Low lights, glossy surfaces, cocktails that cost more than they had any right to.
Ezra was already three drinks in when I arrived.
He grinned when he saw me, wide and reckless. “There he is. The responsible one.”
“I’m late,” I said, sliding into the booth across from him. “You’re early.”
“I’m eager,” he countered, lifting his glass. “You should try it sometime.”
I signaled the bartender for something uncomplicated and watched him instead. Ezra had my family’s dark hair and sharp features, but where I was controlled, he was frayed around the edges. His eyes always looked like they were watching something no one else could see.
“What are we drinking to?” I asked.
“Survival,” he said lightly. “Same as always.”
That wasn’t a joke.
We talked about nothing for a while. Work. Clients. A mutual acquaintance who’d self-destructed in a way that was almost impressive. Ezra drank like he could outrun his own thoughts, each glass emptied faster than the last.
Eventually he leaned back, studying me with a crooked smile.
“So,” he said. “You look like hell. In a tragic, but still handsome way.”
“Thanks,” I replied dryly. “I work hard to look this good.”
“Sure you do.” He took another swallow. “We should do something about it.”
“Do what?”
“Find ourselves a pretty girl,” he said. “Or three. Rent the penthouse somewhere. Make a night of it. You know.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Recreational forgetting.”
I stared at him for a beat.
“No.”
The word came out calm. Absolute.
Ezra blinked. “No?” The echo of disbelief in his voice was enough to make me shake my head.
“No.”
He tilted his head, squinting at me like he was trying to solve a puzzle. “Since when?”
“Since always.”
“That’s not true,” he said, frowning. “You used to—”
“I know what I used to do,” I cut in. “I don’t want that.” It was also not me anymore.
Ezra’s grin faded, replaced by something tired and strangely wounded. “You’re telling me you don’t want beautiful women and a hotel suite with a view?”
“I’m telling you I don’t want anyone who isn’t her.”
He stared at me, bleary and searching. “That girl,” he said. “Photographer.”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence between us, filled only by the noise of the bar and the clink of his glass against the table.
“Man,” Ezra murmured, almost sadly. “You’re screwed.”
“Probably.”
“But you’re not going to chase anyone else.”
“No.”
He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Must be nice. Wanting someone that much.” For all the melodrama, there was a very real pain in his voice.
“It is,” I said quietly. “And it isn’t.”
Ezra lifted his glass again, eyes still carrying that old, broken look. “Well,” he said. “Here’s to complicated women and men who don’t know when to quit.”
I clinked my drink against his.
“And to the ones we can’t stop loving,” I added.
He grimaced, eyeing his drink after tossing it back, he said, “We’re going to need more alcohol.”
Ezra disappeared into a car that he’d called after I turned down the offer of a ride home. It wasn’t that far to my apartment, and I didn’t mind the walk. The city had settled into its late-night rhythm—traffic thinned, lights softer, everything breathing a little slower.
Inside, my place was exactly the way I’d left it. Clean, orderly, faintly impersonal. My mother wanted me to hire a decorator. I just had my assistant order what I needed after I pointed to a couple of pictures in a magazine.
Cynthia was incredibly efficient. I did not deserve her.
I kicked off my shoes, loosened my tie, and dropped my jacket over the back of a chair. My phone buzzed as soon as I did.
Speak of the devil.
Three messages from my assistant.
Nothing urgent. Calendar updates. A reminder that there was no court the following day. I made a mental note to catch up on briefs from home. I’d earned that much.
London was looming.
Flights, meetings, contracts that required my presence and attention. And, if I was lucky, maybe a train ride after. Rachel would tell me if she was free enough. If her schedule had a crack I could slip through.
I was going anyway.
Even if all I got was coffee across a small Parisian table, it would be worth it. Seeing her. Hearing her voice without a delay. Watching her hands move when she talked.
I shook my head at myself, a faint smile tugging at my mouth. Pathetic, I thought fondly. Absolutely pathetic.
My phone buzzed again.
Rachel.
This time it was a photo.
It took a second for my brain to catch up to what I was seeing.
Her—tired, intent, utterly herself. Camera in hand, eyes focused on something just out of frame, her head tipped slightly as if she were mid-sentence or giving direction. There was wonder on her face. Not performative. Not posed. Just… real.
The caption beneath it read:
Bleary-eyed photographer at four in the morning. Sexy, huh?
I stared at the image longer than I meant to. She was wildly sexy and devastating to all of my senses.
Not in the way magazines sold. Not in the way I used to chase. She sucked all the oxygen out of a room and left me gasping for air.
I didn’t answer right away.
I just let myself look at her—at who she was becoming, at the way she stood inside her own work—and felt something fierce and steady settle in my bones. Whoever took this picture of her understood her and dear god I was jealous as hell of that person.
I saved the photo.
Not to my main gallery—never there—but to a private folder I kept buried two layers down on my phone.
It was filled with Rachel. Candid snaps she’d sent me.
A couple of blurry selfies of the two of us, pressed together and laughing, taken on nights that felt like they would last forever.
A picture of her asleep on my shoulder on a flight once, hair in her face, mouth soft with trust.
I opened the folder and slid the new image into place.
She fit there.
She always did.
God, I missed her.
Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. In a quiet, persistent way that threaded itself through everything I did. I missed her voice when she was half-awake. The sharpness of her tongue when she eviscerated one of my arguments. The way she got excited about the weirdest details.
The way she made space feel warmer just by being in it. But she needed Paris.
She needed the work, the light, the hunger of becoming someone new. She needed the version of herself she was finding there.
And I needed to not be the man who stood in her way.
Even if it meant loving her from three thousand miles away.
I typed back, fingers slow and careful.
Sexy is absolutely the word I could use, but I prefer beautiful. You are.
Refusing to overthink it, I sent the message, then set the phone down and went to shower, letting the hot water pound the day out of my shoulders and the bar out of my hair. It didn’t erase the ache, but it dulled the edges enough to breathe.
Afterward, I toweled off, pulled on a clean T-shirt and pajama pants, and stood for a moment in the middle of my bedroom, unsure what to do with the rest of the night. The television stayed dark. There was nothing I really wanted to watch.
So, I returned to the living room and grabbed my briefcase instead.
Files, contracts, notes for London—paper and ink and other people’s problems. Things I could control. I settled into the chair by the window and began to read, city lights cutting across the pages in pale lines, Rachel’s face still lingering somewhere behind my eyes.
There wasn’t much else to do right now.
But that was okay.
Waiting, I was learning, was its own kind of work.