Chapter 25 DANE
DANE
Leaving Penn’s office felt like walking out of a fire I’d willingly thrown myself into. My smirk was for show. The swagger? Habit. A trick I’d mastered young move like nothing can touch you, so no one sees the places already burned.
But her eyes…Christ. Her eyes stuck to me like grief with teeth.
I kept walking, boots heavy against the corporate carpet, pretending my pulse wasn’t lodged in my throat. Mail under my arm. Her softness under my skin.
Every time I blinked, I saw that envelope in her hands. His handwriting. Her tears.
I wanted to go back in there, pick her up, walk her straight out the front doors and home. My home. Where the world couldn’t touch her. Where I could ask why she still lets that man bruise her heart with paper cuts.
But I couldn’t.
Not yet.
So, I shoved open the stairwell door, leaning into the cool concrete air that always felt more honest than anything upstairs. I exhaled hard. The sound bounced off the walls.
“Get a grip,” I muttered. My voice didn’t listen.
My phone buzzed as I hit the stairwell, that cold concrete echo swallowing me.
Simone: Car is on the way. You need to be at the Wellington airport in forty. The sons confirmed. You can’t postpone again.
Right.
Australia.
The deal I’d been forced to pick back up after the old man died a man I’d actually respected. Now his sons were circling like sharks, and apparently the only thing they wanted more than money was my presence.
My jaw clicked tight.
Timing couldn’t have been worse.
I wanted to stay. To go back into that glass-walled office and drop to my knees beside her chair. To cup her face and tell her she wasn’t alone. To rip Blake’s damn envelope out of her hands and burn it until not even ash remembered his name.
Instead, I shoved the phone into my pocket, exhaling against the stairwell’s chill.
My past always tasted like metal. Like broken teeth and old bruises.
Today it tasted like her tears.
At home my Wellington penthouse apartment with its sharp lines and softer regrets I packed fast. Throwing suits into a bag. Checking nothing. Thinking only of her.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her knuckles white around that napkin. Saw her mouth tremble. Saw the girl I remembered in fragments, the one I’d watched from hallways all those years ago…slipping through my fingers again.
I dragged a hand down my face.
I shouldn’t have told her I’d carry her out of that office. Shouldn’t have kissed her. Shouldn’t have called her Peach in a place full of open doors and curious eyes.
But hell, if I could regret it.
She tasted like hope I wasn’t supposed to have.
The car ride to Wellington Airport was a blur of streetlights and memories I didn’t want.
My mother’s voice.
The men in the hallway.
Their hands in my hair as I tried to do homework by the fridge light.
Their smirks.
Their praise.
Your mum’s a star, kid. Really knows how to please.
I swallowed bile.
I’d spent years burying that boy somewhere no one could touch him.
Until Penn looked at me today and he clawed himself up again, raw and shaking, she made him feel seen.
The terminal loomed ahead. My jet waited, sleek and silent, engines humming like a heartbeat on standby.
I stepped inside, nodded at the crew, and took my usual seat by the window. Wellington lay glittering beneath us, a city of ghosts and survival.
My home.
My graveyard.
My battleground.
My throat tightened so sharply I had to pinch the bridge of my nose just to breathe.
The cabin hums around me, low and steady, the kind of sound that’s supposed to calm a man. It doesn’t. Not even close.
I sit back in the wide leather seat, one elbow braced against the armrest, staring at my phone like it might conjure her name again. Penn.
Jesus.
She has no idea where I am right now. No idea who I really am. No idea that the mail run I play off as a casual favour is the only part of my week that feels remotely sane, even though I’m the one who signs half the company’s bloody pay checks.
She thinks I’m just… Dane. Some guy who shows up. Some guy who sees her.
And I can’t…won’t ruin that yet.
“Penn,” I whispered into the humming cabin. “I’ll be back before you even have time to miss me.”
But the truth sat heavily in my chest
I was already missing her.
More than I ever missed anything.
More than I ever let myself need.
Leaving her, even for a day, felt like losing her all over again.
The jet engines hum beneath me, a low mechanical growl that vibrates straight through my ribs, but it’s nothing compared to the way she does.
Penn.
God, even her name feels like a bruise I press just to feel something.
I settle deeper into the leather seat, long legs stretched out, tablet idle in my hand, though I haven’t turned a single page. Numbers blur. Contracts blur. Australia, the boardroom that’s waiting for me, the sons whose father trusted me, it all blurs.
The only thing that doesn’t blur is her.
The way she’d stood there earlier today, arms wrapped around herself like she was holding her own pieces together.
The way her laugh snagged in her throat before sliding free. The way her eyes tracked me like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to step toward me or shove me away.
I should be thinking about the deal. The restructuring. The signatures waiting for me in Melbourne tomorrow.
I’m not.
The engines roar as we pick up speed, the runway stretching out in front of us, but all I can think about is her that soft, shy smile she tries to hide behind sarcasm, the way she leans her hip against a doorway when she’s nervous, the way her eyes go glassy when she talks about pain she doesn’t think anyone sees.
I saw it.
Hell, I felt it.
The plane lifts and Wellington falls away beneath us, shrinking into a small, glittering cluster of lights.
Somewhere down there, she’s walking through the end of her day, probably thinking I’m still nearby, somewhere close, not thousands of feet above the Tasman heading toward a boardroom full of suits waiting for a signature that’ll shift an entire company's future.
I scrub my hand over my jaw, jaw clenching.
Two days.
Two days away from her.
I fucking hate it.
My phone vibrates.
I look down so fast it’s pathetic.
“Are you working late?”
God.
If only she knew.
I stare at the message for a long moment, letting it soak through me like warmth in cold bones.
“Something like that.”
Another truth wrapped in silk.
I think about telling her. I think about stripping back the curtain and letting her see who I really am, the empire, the pressure, the business, the weight.
But then I imagine her looking at me differently.
Imagine the shift in her eyes. Imagine losing the one person who sees me without the power, without the name, without the fucking crown.
I can’t risk it.
Not yet.
The plane evens out.
The world settles.
My pulse doesn’t.
I tuck my phone into my palm and turn toward the window, watching the sky swallow the last of the city below.
She doesn’t know I’m gone. She doesn’t know who I am.
But I’ll come back to her anyway.
I always do.