10. Chapter 10
Graham
The tablet screen is a glowing rectangle of malice in the pre-dawn shadow of my kitchen.
Sterling's Secret Sweetheart: Is the Nanny the New Mrs. Sterling?
Below the headline, a grainy shot of Jade and me from yesterday's photo shoot. The one where I let my guard drop just enough for a lens to find the gap.
I flip the tablet face-down on the granite. The stone is cold. The heat crawling up the back of my neck is not.
The soft scuff of slippers sounds on the stairs. I don't have to turn around.
"You're up early. Or did you never go to sleep?"
"I slept enough." A lie. I dozed for an hour in the leather chair in the study, woke at four, and the dream was waiting for me again. The same one. I am beginning to think the only thing that will end it is the version that happens awake.
I slide the tablet toward her. "The tabloids found your name. They're digging into your background."
She picks up the device, her thumb scrolling through the vitriol with a detached clinical speed. Her jaw tightens by a fraction of a millimeter as she reads. The only crack in her composure.
"The help," she repeats, voice dropping an octave. "Is that how you think of me, Graham? A variable in your PR equation?"
"I think of you as the woman I'm paying to help me keep my daughter. But the press doesn't see the contract. They see a target."
"My past? You mean the background check you already ran?"
"Files don't lie. People do."
"My mother cleaned your father's townhouse for fifteen years. She saw the bottles you broke. She heard the arguments. She was the one who picked up the pieces when the Sterlings decided a problem was too messy to look at."
I go still.
"I am not my father. I'm trying to be better. For Iris."
"Then prove it. If we're going to lie to the world, do it with more humanity than a legal contract."
She's right. I hate that she's right.
"Pierce called at six. Halloway swapped out the home investigator. Reeves did the preliminary. Halloway has now appointed someone named Crandall to handle the full proceeding. Track record with the Whitlocks' charity board."
Jade sinks onto a barstool. "So, she's bought."
"Bought, or friendly, or biased. End result is the same." I stop just outside her space. "Which means we have to be the kind of couple that shares a bed. The kind that doesn't have a carriage house as a fallback."
She looks up at me. "You're saying I need to move into the main house. Into your room."
"The investigator will check the closets. Two toothbrushes in the master bath. Your clothes mixed with mine. If they see a divide, they see a lie."
Jade laughs, brittle. "A very expensive, very dangerous lie. And now you're asking me to sleep next to you and pretend it's the truth."
"I'm asking you to help me save my daughter. Whatever it takes."
She stands up. Her chest nearly brushes mine.
We stand there for a long beat. Then she steps back.
"I'll move my things in tonight. But this changes nothing else."
"Understood."
She walks out. I stay where I am, looking at the cold coffee in my mug.
I have just won the argument and lost something else I don't have a name for yet.
By seven that evening, the wedding is being planned at my kitchen table.
Jade has commandeered the table with fabric swatches, a cracked-spine notebook, and a box of crackers she's been eating methodically for the last hour. She cross-references local vendors on her laptop with the focus of a general preparing a campaign.
I sit across from her with my own laptop open and do approximately no work.
She has a pencil behind her ear that she reaches for and replaces without noticing. Her yellow cardigan is pushed up to her elbows.
At some point she reaches into her bag for a hair tie. Her hand stills. She pulls out her small pill case instead, flips it open, and looks at it for a second. Then she snaps it shut and slides it back to the bottom of her bag without a word.
I don't ask.
"White lilies. Local. Reads like we care about the town."
"Fine."
"And the caterer from the diner. The Bramble Special for appetizers."
"The deep-fried pickles?"
"The board will survive."
She looks up. The grin that crosses her face is the unguarded one. The one she doesn't deploy as a weapon. The one that shows up when she's forgotten to be careful around me.
It hits me somewhere behind the sternum and stays there.
"Good. Let them."
She goes back to her notebook.
An hour later, Iris is in bed.
I hear the bedtime story from the hallway. I stop at the doorway without going in, my shoulder against the frame.
"Once upon a time, there was a very stubborn giant who lived in a castle made of glass and spreadsheets."
Iris giggles. "Is the giant Daddy?"
"The giant was definitely Daddy. He thought he could keep the whole world out by building walls of ice. But then a very small, very brave knight arrived with a stuffed owl and a magic puppet."
I lean against the doorframe and let the story wash over me. Iris's questions get slower and further apart until they stop entirely.
Jade comes out and finds me in the hallway. She doesn't startle.
"A castle of spreadsheets."
"You're the one who brought the spreadsheets." She pulls the door closed behind her with a careful, practiced quiet. "She liked it."
"She likes you."
Jade doesn't answer that. She just looks at me for a beat too long, then past me, down the hall toward the stairs.
"We should practice."
"Now?"
"Six days."
She's already moving. I follow.
Downstairs, the living room is dark except for the moonlight coming off the lake.
Jade pulls up the music on her phone. The slow orchestral piece she's chosen for the first dance. I take her hand because there is a wedding in six days and we cannot afford to look like strangers on a dance floor.
My right hand finds her waist. Her left settles on my shoulder. She steps into the frame, close but not too close.
"You're stiff."
"I'm aware."
"Three. Then back. Don't lead with your shoulders."
I lead with my shoulders.
She huffs a small laugh against my collarbone and repositions my hand lower on her waist. The contact is brief. Professional.
It registers anyway.
By the third pass, we've stopped counting. The music slides into a slower section. Strings, mostly. The kind of swell that asks a couple to stop pretending they're somewhere else.
Her hand drifts from my shoulder to the back of my neck. Not fast. Not deliberate. Just a slow migration. My thumb finds the strip of bare skin where her cardigan has slipped off her shoulder.
I leave it there. Neither of us says anything about it.
"Focus on me. Not the logistics. Not the contract. Me."
I focus on her.
We aren't really moving anymore. She's close enough that her skin is a heat source I can't ignore.
Close enough that I can smell the vanilla again, mixed now with something warmer that belongs only to her.
The small scar near her eyebrow. The exact moment her expression shifts, the performance dropping away.
Her breath catches. Just once.
I don't step back.
She tilts her chin up. Not much. A fraction of an inch. But she does it before I do anything, and that fraction changes everything.
She is choosing this.
I close the last distance and kiss her.
It isn't tentative. The first contact is the cracking of something that has been under pressure for weeks. I taste the espresso she was drinking earlier and something darker beneath it.
My hand tightens at her waist. She makes a small sound against my lips that lands in my chest and stays there.
I walk her back toward the couch. When her knees hit the edge she goes down and I go with her, and the silver light off the lake turns everything slow and unhurried.
I get her shirt untucked. She gets her fingers into my hair and pulls, hard, and I feel that pull everywhere.
I find the clasp of her jeans. She lifts her hips without me asking.
I push the denim down and off and she's watching me in the dark, those dark eyes giving everything away while pretending to give nothing. I press my mouth to her hip, her stomach, the soft skin just below her navel. She exhales through her teeth and her stomach tightens under my lips.
I drag my mouth lower.
Her thighs are warm and she's not as composed as she thinks she is, her breathing already ragged, her fingers already sliding back into my hair.
I take my time. I learn the sounds she makes when I find the right pressure, the right rhythm, how her hips tilt up when I don't let her control the pace.
She tastes like heat and something sweet and I do not rush any of it.
"Graham." Her voice is stripped down to nothing but the word.
I keep going.
Her grip on my hair tightens. She's trying to hold herself together and losing.
I can feel it in the tension of her thighs against my shoulders.
I don't let her pull back from the edge.
I work her to it slowly and then not slowly at all, until her back arches off the cushion and the quiet sounds she's been fighting to contain break open into something real, her whole body shuddering against my mouth while she says my name like a confession.
I press a kiss to her hip and pull back.
She lies there for a moment, chest rising and falling fast, staring at the ceiling.
I sit back on the couch and wait.
When she finally pushes up onto her elbows and looks at me, her eyes are dark and unreadable.
"You're not..."
"No."
"Graham."
"The first time is going to be a decision. Not an accident in a dark room. Not because a song played and we weren't being careful. A choice we both make standing up, when there's nothing else to blame it on."
She stares at me for a long beat.
"That's very principled of you, Sterling."
"Don't mistake principles for patience. I have very little of the second one."
She laughs, low and unsteady. I press my forehead against hers and breathe.
Her hands are still in my hair. Mine are on her ribs. We stay there in the dark, neither of us moving toward the stairs and neither of us letting go.
My phone lights up on the side table.
A text from Pierce.
Crandall confirmed for Friday walkthrough. Nine days. Make it count.
I read it twice.
Nine days.