20. Juliette #2
“They don’t care.” I step closer, close enough to smell his cologne, close enough to see the tension in his shoulders. “Nicole thinks if she makes it public before you can react, you’ll go along with it to avoid embarrassment. She’s counting on you being the man you’ve always been.”
“The path of least resistance.” His voice is bitter.
“Her words.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “You overheard this?”
“The powder room. They didn’t know I was there.”
“And you came to warn me.” His eyes search my face. “Why?”
Because despite everything, I don’t want to watch you get ambushed. Because somewhere between the bookmarks and the worktable, I started being on your side again.
“Because you deserve to know what they’re planning.” I keep my voice steady. “Do with it what you want.”
“What I want-” He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. “What I want is to burn the whole thing down. Walk into that tree lighting and tell everyone exactly what my mother has been doing for six years. What Nicole’s been doing. What I’ve been too much of a coward to stop.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“I’m feeling dramatic.” His mouth twists. “They’re trying to use you as a weapon against me. They’re counting on you being humiliated.”
“I know.”
“And you’re standing here warning me instead of-” He breaks off. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Probably not.”
“Definitely not.” He moves closer. The railing is behind him, the harbor lights glittering in the darkness, and we’re standing too close for a public terrace. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to not let them win.”
“That’s vague.”
“Fine. I want you to stand up there during the tree lighting and make them look like the scheming, manipulative-” I stop. Breathe. “I want you to choose a path that isn’t the easy one. For once.”
“The easy path is going along with them.”
“No.” I step closer. Our chests are almost touching. “The easy path is disappearing. Not showing up. Letting them make their announcement to an empty space where you should have been standing.”
“And the hard path?”
“The hard path is being there. With me.” My voice drops. “Making a different announcement.”
His eyes darken. “What kind of announcement?”
“The kind that ruins their photo op.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then his hand comes up, brushes a strand of hair from my face, tucks it behind my ear. The gesture is achingly familiar.
“You want to crash their fake engagement,” he says slowly, “with a real one?”
“I want to crash their fake engagement with the truth.” My heart is pounding. “Whatever that truth is.”
“And what is the truth?”
We shouldn’t do this. Not here, not now, not with his mother’s scheme hanging over us like a guillotine.
“The truth is I’m still wearing your shirt.” The confession slips out before I can stop it. “From the night that didn’t happen. I sleep in it every night and I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Does it mean anything?”
“I don’t know.” My voice cracks. “I don’t know what anything means anymore. I just know that I heard them planning to humiliate us both, and my first instinct was to find you.”
“Your first instinct.”
“My only instinct.” I look up at him. “I thought I was done being on your team. Turns out I was wrong.”
His hand cups my jaw. His thumb traces my cheekbone. The terrace is dark, the party noise muffled by distance, and we’re standing close enough that I can feel his breath on my lips.
“Together?” he asks.
His thumb is still on my cheekbone. Below us a halyard clinks against a mast, patient as a metronome, and the party noise behind the glass belongs to a different country.
“Together.” I lean into his hand. “If you’ll have me.”
“I’ll always have you.” His voice drops to a whisper. “I’ll have you in whatever way you’re willing to give. Whatever way you’ll let me.”
“That’s a lot of have.”
“I’m a greedy man.” His mouth curves. “When it comes to you.”
The distance between us shrinks to nothing.
His lips brush mine, soft and questioning. I answer with my hands in his jacket, pulling him closer, and the kiss deepens into something that isn’t appropriate for a public terrace.
“We have a week,” I breathe against his mouth.
“A week.”
“To plan our counter-attack.”
“Is that what we’re calling this?”
“We’re calling this whatever we need to call it.” I pull back just enough to meet his eyes. “But in one week, we’re walking into that tree lighting ceremony together, and we’re making sure Eleanor and Nicole’s little performance blows up in their faces.”
“One condition,” I say.
“Name it.”
“Whatever you’re planning to say up there - I don’t want to know the words. I’ve spent six years reading your silence. I want to hear you say something I couldn’t have predicted, in front of everyone, with no chance to rehearse my face.”
His eyes go dark and bright at once.
“Deal,” he says. “God help me, that’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever demanded of me.”
His grin is sharp and dangerous, and it does things to my chest that I’m not ready to examine.
“I love it when you’re scheming.”
I walk back into the ballroom flushed and rearranged, and Margaret Whitfield clocks me from across the room with the practiced eye of a woman who has attended forty years of parties and cataloged every kind of exit and re-entry there is.
I lift my champagne to her, unhurried, across the crowd.
She turns back to her conversation with remarkable speed for her age.
“Get used to it.” I step back, smoothing my dress. “I’m just getting started.”
I turn and walk back toward the party, leaving him on the terrace with the harbor lights at his back.
One week until the Christmas Stroll.
One week to turn their ambush into a reckoning.