Chapter Three
Logan
The envelope has been in my jacket for two days.
I find him on the second floor with a stripped-out door frame and a chisel. He doesn’t stop working when I come up the stairs, which by now I recognize as a policy rather than rudeness.
“Wilder.”
“Blake.”
I hold it out. He looks at it long enough that I have time to feel ridiculous, standing in a hallway in a four-thousand-dollar suit holding a bank envelope like a man paying off a bookmaker.
“Rent’s paid,” he says.
“It isn’t rent.”
He sets the chisel down and takes it. Doesn’t open it. Turns it over once, feeling the thickness through the paper, and that’s the whole inspection.
“What’s it for?”
“Whatever the building needs.”
He looks at me properly then, and I get the sense of being read by someone who has done a lot of it in places where getting it wrong was expensive.
“You know what most people want when they hand me money,” he says.
“No.”
“Yeah, you do.”
I don’t answer, because he’s right. I’ve been on both ends of that transaction my entire adult life. Money is never money. It’s a claim, a lien, a thing you’re buying an option on. The only variable is how long it takes the other man to name his price.
He puts the envelope in his back pocket. “Boiler’s twenty-six years old,” he says and picks the chisel back up.
That’s it. No thanks, no questions. I get halfway down the stairs before it occurs to me that he’s the first person in seventeen years who’s taken something from me and not started calculating what he owes.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
***
The apartment is four hundred square feet, and I’ve been in it eleven days.
My bag still isn’t unpacked. There’s a suit on the back of the bathroom door, three shirts over a chair, and a laptop on a table that came with the room. That’s the entirety of my presence here. I could be gone in nine minutes. I’ve timed it, not on purpose.
That’s the arrangement. A room where nobody can find me, for as long as it takes to establish what’s happening to my father. Then a flight, and back to my life exactly as it was.
I’ve been back to that house four times in eleven days.
The refusal is still sitting in my chest, three days old. Take it. Just until I’m stable. Seventeen years, and the first thing he asks me for is the thing he took away.
I said no because it was the true answer.
I’ve been saying it to myself since Tuesday like a mantra.
***
There’s a knock on my door at four in the afternoon, and I know who it is before I open it. Only Jax has this address, and Jax texts. He doesn’t drop by.
Kiera.
She’s come straight from the office. Tailored trousers, cream blouse, heels, the whole apparatus, standing in a hallway with a water stain on the ceiling and looking exactly like what she is—the only person in this building with somewhere to be.
I’m in a T-shirt, fresh off a set of punishing plank and crunch exercises, and I haven’t shaved in three days.
Her eyes come up. Then down.
They stay down, but I see a flush start creeping across her chest.
“See something you like?”
Her gaze snaps back to my face, and the color goes straight up her throat. “I…no. I mean—”
I let her hang there. It’s the most enjoyable thing that’s happened to me all week.
“What are you doing here, Kiera?”
I step back to let her in without waiting for the answer, and she goes past me too quickly, too aware of the space. I watch her clock the room—the bag, the three shirts, the fact that nothing in here belongs to me.
“I came to talk to you,” she says, turning as the door shuts.
“About?”
“Your father.”
That takes the amusement out of it.
“Sit.”
She sits.
“Coffee?”
“Yes.”
I don’t say anything as I grab two pods from the box and make two cups. I don’t ask if she wants anything in it—I don’t have any milk or sugar anyway.
She takes it like something to hold onto rather than something to drink.
“Garth asked you to take over the company,” she finally says.
“He asked. I said no.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t come here for that.” I come back around and set my cup down. “I came to see him. That’s it.”
“But the company—”
“Will survive.”
“It won’t. Not like this.”
That stops me. She’s got her chin up, and she’s meeting my eyes. There’s nothing rehearsed in it, which is the thing about her I keep failing to be ready for.
“There’s no one leading,” she says. “Decisions are delayed. People are unsure. It’s already starting to show.”
“And you? Where do you fit into that?”
“I do what I can. But I’m not in charge. I don’t want to be.”
“You don’t want it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She hesitates, then says, “Because it was never mine.”
I wait.
“He always talked about you,” she says, quieter. “About finding you. About giving it back to you one day.”
Talked about me. Present tense, presumably. Seventeen years of a man saying his son’s name into a room with nobody in it.
“There’s an office on the fourth floor,” she adds.
“End of the corridor. It’s been empty since before I started. There’s a desk in it under a sheet that nobody has ever sat at. Nobody’s allowed to put anyone in there, and in all these years, no one has told me why.”
She looks up. “I worked it out eventually.”
I don’t say anything because something is happening in my chest I’m not prepared to deal with right now—especially in front of her.
“I don’t want to take that from you,” she finishes.
“You’re asking me to step into something I walked away from.”
“I’m asking you to help him,” she corrects.
The room is very quiet. She’s sitting on a borrowed couch in a borrowed apartment holding a coffee she hasn’t touched, and she has just described a room that has been kept for me since I was seventeen years old.
“Fine,” I say.
Her head comes up. “Really?”
“Temporarily. Until he’s stable. That’s it.”
“That’s enough.”
She says it too fast, and I hear the thing underneath it—the for now she doesn’t add—and I let her have it.
Interim. That’s the word. It goes into me and sets, and I notice that I am now temporary in two places. At a company that was once my future, in a room I could clear out of in nine minutes.
“One condition,” I say. “I want the books. All of them—not the pack that goes to the board. Ledgers, vendor files, the portfolio-company accounts.”
Her brows draw together. “Why?”
“Because I’ve spent seventeen years being paid to read other people’s books before I put money into them. I’m not sitting in that chair blind.”
She’s quiet for a second, and something crosses her face that isn’t reluctance.
“There’s a set of advisory fees,” she says slowly.
“Billed out of two of the portfolio companies. I flagged them last year and got told they were legacy arrangements from before my time. I let it go because I couldn’t make it make sense, and Garth was going into scans.”
Her jaw sets. “I’ve thought about it since.”
“Then that’s where I start.”
“I’ll get you everything.” She looks up. “Garth will want you to. He said as much on Tuesday, after you left. Fresh eyes.”
She stands to go, her bag on her shoulder, but she doesn’t move toward the door.
“Kiera.”
“Yes?”
“Was that the only reason you came here?”
Her pulse jumps at her throat. “I…yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It is.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m not—”
“You are.” I cross the room. Three steps, taken slowly enough that she has the entire time to lift her bag higher and say something about traffic and be gone. “I haven’t stopped thinking about that kiss.”
“Neither have I,” she whispers, and I can see it cost her.
I stop close enough that she has to tip her head back, and I cup her jaw, thumb under her cheekbone.
And I stop there.
“Tell me to stop,” I say.
She doesn’t.
“Logan—”
“Tell me.”
She shakes her head.
That’s all it is. A fraction of an inch, her face turning into my palm. I take it.
She kisses like someone who has nothing to compare it to. There’s no technique in it at all—it’s just want, undiluted, and it’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened to me in a decade.
I get a hand in her hair and tilt her head back. She comes up on her toes, both hands fisted in the front of my shirt. I walk her backward until the couch catches the back of her knees. She goes down, and I go with her.
Her hands come up to my collar and start tugging.
“Slow,” I tell her. I take both her wrists in one hand and hold them at her side.
Her eyes open. “Why—”
“Because I said.” I let go, one finger at a time, and watch her decide whether to move them. She doesn’t. “Leave them there.”
She leaves them there. And something in her face changes when she does. I file it to examine later.
I take my time. Blouse, a button at a time, my mouth at her throat and under her jaw and along her collarbone. She arches up every single time, making a sound I’ll be hearing for the rest of my life.
She’s astonishing, and that’s the problem. Every response feeds my desire.
“Logan?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t… I don’t know what to—”
“You don’t have to do anything.” I get the last button. “Keep your hands where they are.”
She does, still trembling, and I keep going.
I get her trousers open, my hand sliding to where I’ve been thinking about putting it for days. The noise she makes is so completely unguarded that I have to stop and put my forehead against her shoulder. I have to remember that I’m thirty-five years old, and this is my father’s stepdaughter.
Then she says my name in a voice I’ve never heard from her, and I stop caring about any of that.
She comes apart faster and harder than she should, wrists still down where I put them, her whole body bowing off the couch, saying my name the entire way through like it’s the only word she knows.
I hold her through the end of it.
And I’m already reaching for my belt with the other hand when something registers.
It’s the way she moves afterward.
Not shyness. She isn’t shy—she just came apart in a near-stranger’s apartment with her hands where she was told to keep them. It’s that she doesn’t know what happens next. Her body has stopped supplying instructions, and she’s watching my face to find out what she should do next.
Nobody has ever done anything to this woman.
I take my hand off my belt.
“Kiera. How many?”
It takes her a second. Then her eyes open properly, and color blooms across her chest. I watch her consider lying and decide against it.
“None.”
“None as in not many.”
“None as in none.” Her chin comes up, which under the circumstances is magnificent.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t think it mattered.”
“It matters.”
She looks away. “I didn’t want you to change your mind.”
“You think I would’ve?”
“Yes.”
“Not a chance.” I take her chin and bring her face back. “Not once I started.”
“Then why did you stop?”
“Because you’ve had one man’s hands on you in twenty-five years. It’s been less than five minutes, and I’ve got a belt in my hand.” I sit back. “That’s not how you’re doing this.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“It is tonight.”
She sits up fast, and her hands finally come up. “I’m not fragile.”
“I know you’re not. If I thought you needed protecting from me, you’d be out that door.” I hold her eyes. “This is so that when it happens, you’re sure it’s the thing you wanted and not the thing that happened to you. You get to be sure. That’s all.”
Whatever she was building goes out of her.
“Okay,” she says. Then, quieter: “That’s not what I thought you’d say.”
“What did you think I’d say?”
“I thought you’d stop and be kind about it.” She does up a button, not looking at me. “You weren’t kind about it. I liked that better.”
Christ.
“Friday,” I tell her. “Here. Eight.”
Her hands stop.
“Between now and then, you can decide it was a bad afternoon and never mention it again. I’ll take the interim chair anyway. Nothing changes.”
“And if I come here on Friday?”
“Then this isn’t a one-time thing,” I say. “And I’m not letting go.”
She does up the rest in silence, picks up her bag, and gets as far as the door.
“Logan.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody’s ever told me to leave my hands somewhere before.”
And she’s gone.
I stand in four hundred square feet with the door shut for quite a long time. It’s still temporary.
All of it. A bag I haven’t unpacked. A flight I haven’t booked. A month in a chair with my father’s name on it and my own name on the door of an office nobody’s been allowed into.
And a Friday.
Everything about my life in this city is temporary. I’ve been extremely clear with myself about that.
But I’ve just made an appointment four days out in a room I’m supposed to be leaving.