CHAPTER 23
Julian
It’s been a very long time since I’ve been this excited about the beginning of a new year.
For the past several New Year’s Eves, midnight has felt less like a celebration and more like a benchmark that comes and goes without much fanfare.
Another year gone. Another twelve months placed firmly between me and the life I once had.
I attended the parties because attendance was expected.
I shook hands, raised the champagne, watched the ball descend over Manhattan while privately feeling nothing beyond the exhaustion of surviving another orbit around the sun.
But tonight is different. Tonight, Harper’s beside me.
The black Town Car glides down Fifth Avenue through the sea of lights and bundled tourists. Harper turns her face toward the window as we pass the towering Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, her eyes widening.
She’s stunning tonight.
Her blond hair falls in soft waves around her bare shoulders, glossy and impossibly touchable after the appointment I arranged for her this afternoon at Laurent et Cie, a salon where Hollywood’s most glamorous actresses routinely spend obscene amounts of money pretending beauty is easy.
Her black silk gown skims every curve of her body, and the blinding diamond earrings I gave her catch the passing city lights every time she turns her head.
And then of course there’s her scent. Warm vanilla and jasmine. I can see her relaxed and rejuvenated from the massage at the wellness boutique in Flatiron where I sent her earlier today.
This last day of the old year has been one long exercise in spoiling her.
Not because I think she requires luxury to be happy, but because I enjoy seeing what happens when someone who has spent most of her life taking care of everyone else is finally cared for properly.
Harper catches me looking at her now and smiles.
“What?” she asks softly.
“You’re beautiful.”
A blush rises into her cheeks, and despite the elegance of the gown and diamonds and Manhattan glitter surrounding us, that reaction remains wonderfully unchanged.
“You’ve made today really special,” she says. “The salon and the massage and…” She laughs, shaking her head. “Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been this relaxed in my entire life.”
“Oh, come on,” I say.
“I’m serious,” she insists, turning more fully toward me now. “I didn’t realize how tense I always am until today.”
Harper carries so much external weight—Dylan, work, bills, responsibility, survival. She moves through life braced for impact and still somehow manages to remain warm and open and generous beneath it all.
I take her hand lightly in mine as the car slows.
“Well,” I say, brushing my thumb across her knuckles, “I intend to make relaxing a more regular occurrence for you.”
The Rainbow Room occupies the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center, and even after years of attending events here, the space still carries a certain grandeur impossible to replicate anywhere else in the city.
The elevator opens directly into gold light and music and old New York elegance—the chandeliers, the dance floor, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan glittering beneath the winter sky.
The room is already full when we enter.
Power moves easily through spaces like this. Finance, media, politics, real estate. Power players from all walks of life—all of them wrapped in tuxedos and couture, gathered beneath one ceiling.
The second we step inside, all eyes swing not toward me but toward Harper.
“You’re a head-turner,” I murmur near her ear.
She glances up at me. “Yeah, yeah.”
I smile faintly. “You belong here more than half the people in this room.”
Before she can respond, a familiar voice cuts through the crowd.
“Julian!”
Jon Roth barrels toward us with the confidence of a man who has spent forty years bulldozing Manhattan into whatever shape best benefits him financially.
He’s in his early sixties now, silver-haired and broad through the shoulders, still carrying the swagger of a real estate magnate who knows half the skyline bears his fingerprints.
If a gleaming glass tower appeared in Midtown during the last twenty years, odds are Jon Roth had his hands on it.
Beside him glides his third wife, Vanessa, who looks like she was assembled entirely from luxury labels and expensive contempt. Hermès clutch. Versace gown. Diamonds the size of ice cubes framing a face pulled slightly too tight by modern cosmetic science.
“Happy New Year,” Jon says, clasping my hand before his eyes dart toward Harper with open curiosity. “And who is this?”
Harper tenses beside me.
“This,” I say, “is Harper Hawthorne.”
Vanessa’s gaze sweeps over Harper in one quick, assessing pass. Judgment disguised as observation.
Ordinarily, I’d ignore it. Tonight, I dislike it intensely.
But Harper, to her immense credit, simply smiles warmly and extends her hand.
“Nice to meet you both.”
Vanessa smiles politely.
Jon grins broadly. “Well, Julian, you’ve been holding out on us.”
“I wasn’t aware I owed you updates regarding my personal life.”
Jon laughs loudly while Vanessa continues studying Harper with thinly veiled interest.
“You look incredible, dear,” Vanessa says finally, though the compliment seems carefully engineered rather than sincere. “Who dressed you?”
“Julian arranged for the dress to be delivered this morning. It’s from a local boutique I love.”
Vanessa seems perturbed that rather than wear an expensive label, Harper wears what makes her comfortable.
Jon and Vanessa eventually drift away toward another cluster of billionaires pretending not to compete with each other, and immediately a new couple approaches us.
Harper leans toward me and whispers, “Why do they care what I wear? It’s weird.”
“It’s high society,” I say with a shrug. “Trust me, people will be clamoring to find out about your little boutique.”
“So weird,” she mutters, and I squeeze her hand.
The man is tall and aristocratic in that distinctly European way, balding at his crown with immaculate posture and a face that suggests generations of inherited confidence. Beside him stands his wife, equally elegant in deep emerald silk.
“Julian,” the man says warmly in a thick Italian accent. “Happy New Year, my friend.”
“Count Belladonna,” I reply with a smile as we clasp hands. “Good to see you.”
“And you.” His eyes move briefly to Harper. “Ah. Bellissima.”
The countess smiles approvingly at Harper before turning back to me. “We heard rumors you might not show,” she says. “But New York society enjoys inventing stories.”
“Usually bad ones,” I reply dryly.
They laugh.
The conversation drifts easily after that—Rome, development projects in Milan, the upcoming auction season at Sotheby’s. The count speaks with animated hands while the countess occasionally corrects details with the grace of a woman who has spent decades refining wealthy men publicly.
Outwardly, Harper handles it beautifully.
She smiles when appropriate, responds politely when included, even laughs at one of the count’s dramatic stories about Venetian politics.
But I feel it beside me. The subtle withdrawal, a bit of tension.
By the time the Italians finally excuse themselves toward the bar, Harper looks more uneasy.
“You all right?” I ask quietly.
She gives a small nod too quickly to be convincing. “Yeah.” Finally, she glances down at her drink. “I’m a little awkward here.”
I lean closer so she can hear me over the orchestra beginning another jazz tune across the room. “Why?”
She gives me a look that practically says Are you serious?
“Julian,” she says, “I just got introduced to actual Italian royalty.”
“They’re not actual royalty anymore.”
“That doesn’t help.”
I laugh beneath my breath.
Harper shakes her head and looks out across the glittering room. “Everyone here seems so… aristocratic… like they were born understanding rooms like this.”
“And you think you weren’t?”
“You and I both know I wasn’t.”
I take the champagne glass gently from her hand and set it on a passing server’s tray before turning fully toward her.
“Harper,” I say evenly, “you need to stop caring what other people think.”
She stares at me for a beat before letting out a soft incredulous laugh. “Easy for you to say.”
“You belong as much as anyone. Anyone here making you uncomfortable is just insecure.”
I slide my hand lightly along her bare back beneath the open line of her dress, drawing her closer instinctively.
“For what it’s worth,” I murmur, “you’re the most interesting person in this room by a significant margin.”
And because I can tell she’s still untethered, I spend the next half hour keeping her close, weaving us through conversations without abandoning her inside them, quietly translating the rhythms of rooms like this the same way I once explained hockey to her.
By the time the orchestra shifts into “Fly Me to the Moon,” she’s relaxed again, laughing and at ease.
Then midnight approaches.
The energy in the Rainbow Room changes all at once as people migrate toward the windows for the countdown and fireworks over the city.
I take Harper’s hand. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“The best view in Manhattan.”
She laughs softly. “Modest.”
“I’m serious.”
I guide her through the crowd toward the western side of the room where the windows stretch floor to ceiling above the glittering skyline.
Harper steps beside the glass and her breath catches as she takes it in. “Oh my God.”
I smile, satisfied. “Told you.”
And then another voice arrives to interrupt us. “Julian.”
I turn.
Giselle Von Enck moves toward us, tall and impossibly elegant in a black satin dress. Dutch by birth, educated at the Sorbonne, and yes, gorgeous.
She reaches me and kisses both my cheeks lightly. “Happy New Year, darling,” she murmurs.
“Giselle.”
Her eyes drift briefly toward Harper, assessing quickly before returning entirely to me. “You disappeared after I saw you in Milan last fall,” she says. “I was beginning to think you’d become boring.”
“That would be a first.”
She smiles slowly at that.