6. Harper
HARPER
I’ve been at Thorne Estates for four days and I have a problem.
Three of them, actually. Technically. In the biological sense.
The good news is that I’ve barely seen any of them since the first night.
Sophia and I have been working. Real work, locked-in, coffee-and-spreadsheets-until-midnight work, because her boutique pitch is this afternoon and it needs to be airtight before she walks into a room with her father.
I’ve been helping her tighten the financial projections, restructure the market positioning slides, and talk her down from redesigning the entire deck three separate times.
It’s been productive and grounding and an excellent reason not to think about anything else.
The bad news is that every time I stop moving for more than four minutes, my brain immediately goes somewhere it has no business going.
Specifically to voices like velvet and smiles like something that should come with a warning label.
All three of them. That’s the part I can’t get past. Not one.
Not even a respectable two. All three men walked into my life in the span of one afternoon and my body apparently decided it was done listening to reason and would be conducting its own evaluation from here on out, thank you very much.
Asher with his warm eyes and those forearms and the way he just quietly feeds people like it’s breathing.
Maddox with that smile that lands like he already knows something you haven’t said yet. And then Killian.
Killian Thorne.
I was dripping wet from the pool. Literally dripping.
Hair plastered to my neck, chlorine, a towel held together by hope and good intentions.
And he was standing there in a full suit at nine o’clock at night looking like every naughty book in every bookstore I have ever walked past and pretended I wasn’t going to buy.
Just hearing his voice made me feel like I needed to sit down and reconsider my life choices.
He’s Sophia’s dad.
Sophia. My best friend Sophia. The person who has kept every secret I’ve ever trusted her with, talked me through every bad decision I’ve ever made, packed my luggage while I sat in my pajamas arguing with her, and dragged me across an ocean because she knew I needed to be dragged.
Her dad.
I am going to hell. I have reserved a spot. I expect the confirmation email shortly.
Dammit. Dammit, dammit. I press my palms against the suite vanity and look at myself in the mirror and have a very direct internal conversation about getting it together.
They’re Sophia’s family. Her dad and her godfathers.
They are fully, completely, categorically off the table.
Whatever my nervous system thinks it’s doing every time one of them looks at me, it can stop. Immediately. We are not doing this.
I just need a mental image. Something to overlay whenever my brain decides to editorialize.
Like maybe Killian wears a Willy Wonka costume to bed.
Full hat. Maybe he collects decorative spoons.
Maybe Maddox talks to houseplants in baby voices.
Maybe Asher has a deeply embarrassing fan account for something unhinged. I don’t know. I’ll workshop it.
For now I need to get dressed and be a functional professional person who helps her best friend nail the most important pitch of her career.
I turn back to the bed.
The dress is asymmetrical, black, blazer-fitted through the shoulders with a bodycon skirt that hits mid-thigh.
Clean, architectural, the kind of thing that reads professional in a boardroom and interesting everywhere else.
I’ve been saving it for a client presentation that no longer exists, so it might as well earn its keep in France.
I do my hair. I do my makeup. Foundation, a little bronze, a berry lip that says I’m here on purpose without announcing it. I step into my red bottoms and stand in front of the mirror and assess.
Professional innocence. That’s what I’m going for. Competent. Credible. Absolutely not thinking about anyone’s voice or forearms or the way Killian Thorne looked at Raphael’s hand on my back like it personally offended him.
I’m not thinking about that.
I pick up my black-framed glasses from the vanity and slide them on and that’s it, that’s the look, done.
A knock at the suite door.
I grab my tablet, already cued to the presentation, and open it.
Sophia stands in the doorway in a pinstripe sleeveless blazer, black tailored shorts, white sleeveless blouse, layered gold chain, diamond studs, black pumps. She’s got her portfolio under one arm and her other hand raised mid-knock and she’s staring at me.
Her jaw drops.
“Do a spin,” she says.
“Sophia—”
“Do the spin, Harper.”
I do the spin.
She makes a sound that is somewhere between a gasp and a judgment. “How. How did you take professional innocence and make it clickbait. That is genuinely not fair. I’m pitching today and you look like that.”
“You look amazing,” I tell her, because she does.
“I look like a businesswoman. You look like a businesswoman who someone wrote a novel about.” She gestures broadly at my glasses. “And then you put on the glasses.”
I slide them up my nose. “Shall we?”
Sophia collapses against the doorframe in a full theatrical faint, one hand to her forehead, portfolio clutched to her chest. I grab her free arm and pull her upright before she actually slides down the wall, which she is genuinely committed enough to do.
“You’re so dramatic,” I tell her.
“I learned from the best,” she says, completely recovered, and loops her arm through mine.
We head down the hallway together. Sophia is already talking through her opening lines again, running them the way she does when she’s nervous, the rapid-fire polish of someone who has rehearsed something so many times it’s started to sound like a script and she knows it.
I tell her to breathe, that she knows this inside out, that the numbers are solid and her instinct for the market is better than anyone in that room.
She nods. She straightens. She looks like her father for half a second and I look away.
Not thinking about it.
The hallway intersects the main corridor near the east guest wing and we’re halfway through it when a suite door ahead of us opens.
Maddox steps out.
He’s in dark jeans, a fitted black crew neck, a leather jacket, and he stops when he sees us the way someone stops when they’ve walked into a room and the floor plan has changed since they were last in it. Just stops. Completely. Hand still on the door handle.
His eyes go to me.
They do a full inventory. Not subtle. Not a glance. The kind of look that starts at the shoes and takes its time getting anywhere else and doesn’t pretend to be doing something other than what it’s doing.
I don’t move. I don’t think I’m breathing.
Then he seems to remember where he is. The corner of his mouth pulls up and he lets go of the door handle and turns to Sophia.
“You look great, Soph.” He pulls her into a side hug, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Breathe.”
“I’m breathing,” she says, a little too fast.
“Breathe slower.” He falls into step on her other side, arm around her shoulders, steering us down the corridor like he’d been planning to walk this way all along. Like he wasn’t just standing completely motionless in a hallway thirty seconds ago.
Just what we were missing. A chaperone that makes me want to misbehave.
I keep my eyes forward. I hold my tablet against my chest. I walk with the focused composure of a woman who has her life fully under control and is not, in any way, aware of every single inch of space between herself and the man to her left.
“You ready?” Maddox says.
It takes me a beat to realize he’s talking to me.
I look up. He’s watching me with that easy, knowing look, the one that suggests he has more information than he should, and there’s something underneath it that I don’t examine too carefully because I’m already operating at capacity.
“Always,” I say.
His smile deepens by exactly one degree.
I face forward again.
Willy Wonka costume, I remind myself. Decorative spoons. Whatever it takes.
I’ve got a pitch to help win.