25. Serena
Serena
Tonight was a disaster.
I couldn’t sleep, staring out the window.
Erik. Mama. Jenese. Lush. The weight of all those judging eyes and opinions felt crushing, like a physical force bearing down on me. Dealing with their expectations, criticisms, and need to control me was draining.
I was tired of trying to be what everyone wanted.
After threatening the Lush Chronicles with Mama’s wrath and a threat to town funding, I managed to get them to pull that Dear Dahlia section from the newspaper, with a vow to keep quiet about it.
Tossing back the sheets, I jumped out of bed and padded across the room, and I counted back from five before opening the door and peering out.
It was a dark hallway, and it had been for hours since we got home.
I held my breath as I tiptoed out, and to my office door. Should I knock? But what if I woke him up? What if he wasn’t asleep?
Do it.
I turned the knob—luckily he hadn’t locked it—and peered inside.
Miles was actually up, sitting. Staring out the window, and in his lap was a copy of a thriller I had started to read but abandoned. He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked up from the book, our eyes locking.
“You’re awake,” I breathed.
He wore nothing but a pair of black shorts slung low on his hips. His chest was bare—cut and golden in the moonlight, his skin smooth except for the faint scar slicing across his collarbone. A silver chain glinted at his throat. His braids were hidden under a black durag, tied clean and tight.
He tilted his head. “Couldn’t sleep.”
I stepped inside, trying not to stare, but my gaze dropped to his chest anyway, the slow rise and fall of it pulling heat through my body.
Behind him, on the pullout bed, Doughboy was stretched out on his back, all four paws in the air, snoring like he owned the place.
Miles’s gaze stayed on me, slow and steady, like he could see right through the thin night slip I’d thrown on without thinking.
I cleared my throat, folding my arms. “I—uh…I thought I heard something in my closet.”
“In your closet.”
“Yeah.” I nodded, too fast. “Like scratching. Or…movement.”
He glanced over at Doughboy then back to me. “You sure it wasn’t him or his toy?”
I shook my head. “No I just heard it now.” Why the hell are you lying?
A smile pulled at his mouth, slow and dangerous. “You want me to come check your closet at”—he glanced at the time on his phone—“two forty-six in the morning?”
“Can you do it?” I snapped.
“Be nice,” he said, standing up and stretching like he had all the time in the world.
My eyes dropped, involuntarily, to the way his abs flexed when his arms went up. The stretch revealed even more of that deep cut along his hips, the waistband of his shorts hanging criminally low.
“Show me,” he said.
I turned before he could catch the flush creeping up my neck and led him to my bedroom.
Pointing toward the closet—casually, like my heart wasn’t thudding against my ribs. “It was coming from there.”
He gave me a look like Really? but said nothing.
Just moved toward the door. I crawled back onto the bed, sitting cross-legged near the pillows, pretending not to stare while his broad back stretched and shifted.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark and the light from the moon shining through the window gave me a lot to see.
I tried not to squeeze my thighs together.
He bent slightly to open the closet door and peered inside, muttering something under his breath as he leaned forward—tattoos flexing, abs tightening. Miles had to be one the finest men I’d ever laid eyes on.
Serena. Get it together.
After a moment, he straightened. “Nothing here. Closet’s clear.” He turned back toward me, brushing his hands together like the job was done. “No ghosts. No monsters. Just clothes and expensive shoes.”
He walked toward the door, and started to open it.
“Wait,” I said suddenly, sharper than I meant to.
He paused. Looked over his shoulder.
I swallowed. My fingers curled in the sheets.
“Can you…stay?”
He didn’t move at first, just stared at me—those eyes unreadable, like he was trying to figure out what game I was playing. Then his voice came low and warm, a little teasing, but softer than before.
“You scared again?”
I shrugged.
He stood there for a beat longer, then pushed the door shut and turned. “Make room.”
I scooched to the side, and Miles pulled the sheets back, lying down on his back. I watched him for a few seconds longer before I did the same, staring up at the ceiling.
“I’m pretty easy, if you wanted me in your bed, all you had to do was say so,” Miles finally broke the silence.
I let out a breath of a laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
But the warmth in my chest betrayed me.
He didn’t say anything, just shifted slightly—his body was so much bigger than mine, his heat radiated like a low-burning fire beside me. The mattress dipped more on his side, and I could feel the brush of his arm against mine.
“When you proposed…six years ago. Did you mean it?”
He turned his head slowly. “You really gotta ask me that?”
Everyone said we made sense. Serena King and Miles Whitmore. Two legacies. Two names. But if you looked closer, if you really looked, we weren’t built the same.
He lived out loud—messy, charming, bold. I lived in silence and strategy. I thrived on control, while he trusted instinct and chaos and that reckless gut of his that always somehow worked.
But we weren’t opposites, not really.
We were mirrors. Just…cracked in different places.
We both carried too much on our backs and smiled like it didn’t weigh anything. Both so desperate to prove we weren’t our parents’ shadows that we didn’t see how much we were already replicating them.
I stared up at the ceiling. “I didn’t know. Back then, everything between us happened so fast. One minute we were sneaking around, the next…you were asking me to be your girlfriend, and I thought—” I stopped. My voice dropped to almost nothing. “I thought it was a joke.”
He shifted again, facing me now. “A joke?”
“You’re Miles Whitmore. You flirted with anything that had legs and a smile. I didn’t think you were serious at first.”
“I was.”
“I know that now,” I said quickly, like I owed him that. “But back then? I was so used to people not choosing me. Or wanting me for the wrong reasons. And then you showed up at my house, looking like that”—I gestured vaguely to him—“and talking about forever like we even had a shot.”
“You said yes.”
“I panicked.” My laugh was bitter. “I was scared not to. Because a part of me thought , What if this is it? What if this is the only time someone ever sees me like that? ”
His voice was quieter now. “And then my father’s scandal hit.”
I nodded. “And suddenly I had to choose between the only man who ever really looked at me…and the family I’d spent my whole life trying to prove myself to.”
“And you didn’t choose me.”
“I couldn’t.” My throat tightened. “But it didn’t mean I didn’t love you.”
He was quiet. The silence was so long, I almost wished I’d kept quiet.
“I wasn’t ready either,” he admitted. “I think part of me proposed just to keep you. Lock it down before you changed your mind.”
It was my turn to look at him.
“You can do a lot better than me, in fact, you can do it now. I… You didn’t just treat me like the ditzy best friend to the most popular guy in town.
You saw something in me that no one else ever has.
You pushed me. Why you think I kept stealing all those clients from you over the years?
I wanted to be your equal. But being with you back then—it felt like the first thing I got right,” Miles said.
I turned fully toward him, the sheets rustling between us. His face was half-shadowed in the dark, but I could still see the tension in his jaw.
“You inspire the hell out of me, Sunny. You always have.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t choose us,” I said quietly. “I was scared. Of losing my family. Of choosing wrong. Of how much I loved you and how fast it all happened. I thought if I held on, everything I’d imagined for myself would fall apart, but when I got it… It really wasn’t what I needed.”
His gaze flicked to mine, something raw in it now. “You did what you had to.”
“No,” I whispered. “I did what was easiest. You were right.”
He stared at me for a long, loaded moment. Then his hand reached across the space between us, his palm brushing the side of my neck.
“You still taste like pomegranate,” he murmured, the memory flickering behind his eyes. “Sweet, a little sharp…”
I let out a breath, and he forced me to meet his eyes.
Then he kissed me.
His mouth moved slow at first, patient, but hungry. His tongue teased along the seam of my lips until I opened for him, and then there was no patience left. Just heat. Pressure. Memory. His tongue slid against mine. I moaned into his mouth, and let myself melt into the mattress.
I kissed him like I’d never stopped. Like I’d always meant to come back.
His hands found my hips, drawing me closer till I was flush against with him. Miles let his lips fall from mine, across my jaw and cheek, and down my neck, where I knew he would feel my pulse beating out of control, and I gripped his shoulders.
“Miles,” I gasped.
He didn’t stop. One hand slid beneath the hem of my slip, dragging it up slowly—inch by inch—until the fabric pooled at my waist.
Then he shifted, lowering himself between my thighs, guiding one of my legs over his shoulder.
His breath grazed the inside of my knee.
“I missed this,” he murmured, voice husky. “Missed you.”
I felt him pull my panties to the side, and kiss once at my clit, making me jolt.
His eyes locking on to mine from between my thighs, then his fingers slid inside, slow and sure, working me open like he was tracing the map back to myself.
I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been in a position like this—with someone who saw all my broken edges and still wanted me.