Chapter 10
She didn’t belong here.
I watched Willa try to navigate my world and felt the familiar guilt gnaw at me, the kind that lingered for weeks and never quite loosened its grip.
She sat at the small desk Rebecca had set up for her in the reception area, dark hair falling across her face as she concentrated on updating client files.
Against the steel and glass, the clean lines and cold surfaces, she looked painfully out of place, and the sight made my chest ache.
This wasn’t where she belonged. Not in this cold, corporate environment I had built to prove I could succeed, to show the world that the foster kid with nothing could become someone who mattered.
This place was all sharp edges and measured silence, designed for control, not comfort.
She belonged curled up between me and Jude on our ratty couch, watching movies, laughing at something ridiculous on the screen, stealing popcorn from the bowl, and not caring that our apartment was falling apart around us.
She belonged somewhere warm. Somewhere real.
But every time I looked at her—every time we were in the same room—I fought the urge to go to her.
To circle my arms around her waist from behind while she worked, to bury my face in her hair and breathe her in.
To turn her around and finally taste those lips again, to finish what we started three years ago in that moonlit quad.
The clothes I delivered to her—simple dresses, soft sweaters, jeans that fit her perfectly—looked better on her than they had any right to. Everything looked good on her. And that led to thoughts I had no business thinking, wondering what else I could put on her body, what else I could take off.
I shook my head and forced myself to look away, focusing on spreadsheets and client reports and anything that wasn’t the way her eyes lit up when she smiled or the delicate curve of her neck, where her pulse fluttered when she was nervous.
The work blurred together, numbers and words losing meaning as I tried to anchor myself to something safe and impersonal.
No. I couldn’t ruin her. Not after what she had been through.
She was broken when I found her in that alley—shot, bleeding, and running from a monster who had spent two years teaching her that love was supposed to hurt.
I hated that I hadn’t made him pay, that I hadn’t even sent him to jail.
But the last thing she needed was another man trying to take what he wanted from her, another man who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
Even if having her in my space, in my world, slowly drove me insane with need.
“Mr. Cross?” Rebecca’s voice cut through my thoughts, and I realized I had been staring at Willa for far too long. “Your ten o’clock is here.”
“Right. Send them in.”
I forced myself to focus on the meeting, on the potential client who wanted Cross Security to handle protection for his family’s vacation home in the Hamptons.
I talked through threat assessments and security protocols, my voice steady and professional.
Still, part of my attention remained on the woman sitting thirty feet away, filing contracts and pretending she couldn’t feel my eyes on her.
I told myself it was about her health, but that was a lie. Filing was harder on her body than marketing. The truth was, I couldn’t handle working that closely with her, not without losing control.
Everything I had built—the company, the penthouse, the reputation, the carefully curated life that screamed success—was a performance. A role I played to prove I was worth something, that the system hadn’t broken me the way it broke so many others.
But when Willa laughed at something David Martinez said, when she tucked her hair behind her ear as she concentrated, when she stood at my office window and looked out at the city spread below us, everything else faded into background noise. She made my world feel human again.
Which was exactly why I needed to keep my distance.
I built my empire partly to prove I could protect the people I cared about—to never be powerless again the way I was as a kid.
But seeing her here, small and displaced among my designer furniture and corporate achievements, made me feel like I had failed before I even started.
The distance between who I had been and who I had become suddenly felt useless, ornamental.
She didn’t need my money or my influence or the kind of protection I specialized in. She needed someone who could help her remember who she was before Dex Hartwell tried to destroy her. Someone who could give her space to heal, to grow, to become whoever she was meant to be.
Someone who wasn’t me.
Because I wanted her too much. Because I had been in love with her for years, and that love was selfish and hungry and completely inappropriate for someone in her situation. She needed safety, stability, and the assurance that she could trust the people around her to put her needs first.
And I needed her in ways that had nothing to do with what was best for her recovery.
The meeting ended. My client was satisfied with our preliminary security assessment, and I found myself alone in my office with nothing but paperwork to distract me from the woman working just outside my door.
I tried to focus on quarterly reports, on the merger discussions with Blackstone that could transform Cross Security into a national powerhouse, on anything that wasn’t the way Willa’s laugh sounded when David made some joke about corporate coffee.
Even numbers blurred when her voice carried down the hall.
That night, I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling and wondering who I could call.
Not for business—I had plenty of contacts for that—but for the kind of distraction that might help me forget that Willa was sleeping just down the hall, close enough that I could hear the soft sound of her breathing if I strained my ears.
The house felt too quiet, as though it were listening.
My phone sat on the nightstand beside me, contacts full of women who had been happy to provide exactly that kind of distraction in the past. Sophisticated women who understood the rules, who knew that anything between us would be temporary and mutually beneficial.
Women like Sophia Blake, who moved in the same circles and expected nothing more than dinner, conversation, and a few hours of forgetting whatever problems had brought us together.
But the thought of calling any of them—of having anyone else in my space while Willa was here—felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.
Like betrayal, even though I had no claim on her, no right to feel possessive about a woman who saw me as nothing more than her brother’s friend doing his duty.
Instead, I found myself thinking about her proposal, still sitting on my desk where I had left it after she walked out of my office.
Brilliant work that I had dismissed not because it wasn’t good enough, but because it was too good.
Because accepting her help would mean working closely with her, spending hours discussing strategy and vision, watching her mind work in ways that would only make me want her more.
I built this empire partly to prove I could protect the people I cared about, but what good was power if I couldn’t use it to give Willa what she really needed?
Not protection—she was safe enough here—but purpose.
Recognition. The chance to be seen for who she really was instead of what had happened to her.
But every time she smiled at something David Martinez said, every time she tucked her hair behind her ear while concentrating on some mundane task I gave her, I had to force myself to look away. To remember that she wasn’t ready for the kind of attention I wanted to give her, and might never be.
She deserved someone who could love her without the complicated history we carried—someone who didn’t spend years wanting her when wanting her was forbidden. Someone who could see her as more than Jude’s little sister without the weight of guilt that came with that recognition.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that in trying to protect her, I was probably hurting her in different ways.
Making her feel unwanted when the truth was that I wanted her so much it became difficult to function.
Making her think she was a burden when she was the only thing that made my carefully constructed life feel real.
But keeping her at arm’s length was safer for both of us.
Safer than admitting that finding her in that alley felt like getting back a piece of myself I had thought was lost forever.
Safer than confessing that I had been half in love with her since she was seventeen and completely gone from the moment I saw her again at that gallery.
My phone buzzed with a text from Marcus Webb, following up on our interrupted dinner conversation, and I stared at the message for a long time before responding.
Business I could handle. Meetings and mergers and the kind of strategic thinking that built Cross Security into what it was today—that was familiar territory.
But lying there in the dark, knowing Willa was close enough to touch but might as well have been on another planet, that was the kind of problem I had no idea how to solve.
Especially when the solution I wanted most was the one thing I couldn’t allow myself to have.