Chapter 14 – Rowan
Chapter Fourteen
Rowan
Alittle more than two hours on the plane and two and a half more in the car have been enough to test my patience.
Tessa hasn’t stopped talking since she stepped out of her apartment.
The flight started with her spilling coffee, arguing with the attendant about Waffles’s carrier, and asking if dogs needed motion sickness medication.
When turbulence hit, she talked to the dog to calm him, which only made him louder.
She thanked the pilot when we landed, loud enough for people to stare, and never noticed.
The car ride has been worse. She’s touched every button on the dashboard, adjusted the air vents six times, and spent ten minutes rearranging Waffles’s carrier to give him more room.
Every few minutes, she turns to check on him, whispers something, and apologizes when he whines.
The entire trip has been noise and motion with no pause between them.
I should have sent a driver, but I didn’t trust her to make it on time, and I didn’t want to risk her showing up unprepared. Now I’m stuck with her, and my patience is gone.
The road narrows as the car moves farther from the city. I check the clock, knowing we’re close enough that she’s about out of time to fix anything.
“Get changed,” I say, keeping my eyes on the road.
Her head turns toward me fast. “Now?”
“Yes.”
She frowns. “Why?”
“Your outfit isn’t appropriate.”
Her voice rises. “Excuse me?”
“You’re about to meet senior partners,” I say. “You’re wearing leggings, a glittery T-shirt, and a hoodie. You need to change.”
She stares at me, waiting for me to take it back. “You could have told me that before we left.”
“I assumed you’d know better.”
She blinks hard. “Wow. That was rude.”
I shrug. She knows how I am.
“Pull over, then.”
“No.”
Traffic piles up behind us, but I don’t look back.
She doesn’t understand that appearances here aren’t optional.
They decide everything. These men read posture and price tags; one glance tells them who’s disciplined and who’s not.
If she walks in looking careless, they’ll assume I am, too, and that assumption could cost me the position I’ve been building toward for three years.
She turns toward me, tight-jawed. “You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t repeat myself.”
This isn’t a discussion. It never was. Every minute of this weekend has already been planned, and she’s part of that plan whether she likes it or not.
How she sits at dinner, how she smiles when someone’s wife asks how we met, how long she holds eye contact when Hale starts her polite interrogation—none of it can go wrong.
“Unbelievable.” She jerks the seat belt free and lets it snap against her shoulder. “One of these days, I swear, I’m gonna stab you with one of your own pens.”
I don’t react. She’s waiting for it—for irritation, amusement, anything that shows she still has access to me. She doesn’t. I learned a long time ago not to hand Tessa Whitmore the satisfaction of a reaction.
She climbs into the back seat and the car rocks slightly as she drops into place beside the dog.
“Sorry, buddy,” she says to him as she pulls a sundress from her bag. “Apparently, modesty’s a luxury now.”
The sound of rustling fabric fills the silence. A zipper slides, shoes hit the floor, and she keeps talking loud enough to make sure I hear.
“I hope the entire state of New York enjoys this strip show. Why doesn’t this car have tinted windows? Isn’t that, like, standard for uppity people like you?”
I keep my eyes on the road. I don’t answer, don’t look, don’t breathe any louder than necessary. The alternative is watching her undress, and I already know how close I am to losing focus. My control has boundaries, and Tessa Whitmore testing them in the back seat pushes against every single one.
But the second her hoodie comes off, I feel the shift.
The temperature spikes. The cabin shrinks around us. My lungs forget how to expand properly. The air turns thick, charged with tension that has nothing to do with traffic or timing.
I hear the rustle of fabric behind me. The soft whisper of cotton sliding against skin.
I can feel her presence becoming more exposed.
My body responds without permission. My fingers grip the steering wheel until the leather creaks under the pressure.
Three years of careful distance and practiced indifference are threatening to collapse because she’s changing clothes.
Focus. Eyes forward. Don’t be that man.
Except I’ve always been that man when it comes to her. The one who loses composure. The one who forgets his own rules.
“This dress better not wrinkle or I’m blaming you personally, King.”
A muscle twitches in my jaw. The sound of her voice sends heat crawling up my spine.
I hear her sharp intake of breath as she struggles with something. The sound is intimate, unguarded. It makes me think of other times she’s made that sound, in different circumstances, when my hands were the reason for her breathlessness.
I keep my eyes on the road for an entire three seconds longer than I want to.
Then I glance in the rearview mirror.
And everything stops.
Her back is completely bare. She’s twisted in the seat as she shimmies out of her leggings, fighting gravity and her own stubborn pride.
The afternoon light streams through the windows, turning her skin golden, highlighting the elegant curve of her spine, the subtle shift of muscle beneath skin as she moves.
The movement reveals the curve of her waist, the smooth skin that disappears beneath her bra strap, the long line of her legs as they stretch and bend.
I shouldn’t look. I know better than this.
I’ve built a career on restraint, on reading people without letting them read me. But Tessa Whitmore has always been my exception. My complication. The one variable I can’t quite control.
My hand moves toward the mirror before I catch myself, and my mouth goes dry, the impulse too familiar to be anything but dangerous.
Every careful wall I’ve built starts to fracture as I watch her move, beautiful in ways that make disciplined men reckless and smart ones forget they ever valued control.
“This strapless thing is a joke,” she mutters, twisting to adjust the fabric. “If my tits fall out in front of some partner’s wife, you’re the one getting sued.”
Her bra isn’t provocative. It’s gray, cotton, practical.
There’s something devastating about the intimacy of it, about seeing her like this again: unguarded, ordinary, wholly herself.
The kind of honesty I used to earn in pieces and squander all at once.
I remember how it felt to slide that strap off her shoulder with my mouth, to hear her whisper my name.
Before she left.
Before she decided I wasn’t worth an explanation.
And now she’s back here, half-dressed and fearless, moving with the same thoughtless confidence that once made me believe she’d never walk away.
The wanting comes fast, and absolute, threaded with the memory of skin I used to touch and the sound of laughter that used to belong to me.
I remember mapping every inch of her body like I was claiming land, knowing I’d lose it anyway.
She reaches for the sundress, the fabric sliding over her arms and torso, the yellow cotton clinging in ways that feel deliberate, not accidental.
The motion is painfully familiar; I’ve watched her dress before—slow mornings, tangled sheets, sunlight cutting through blinds while she hummed under her breath and pretended not to notice me watching.
The memory blindsides me: her standing in my dorm room, laughing at something stupid I said, pink fabric pooling at her feet instead of covering her. That was before everything went wrong, before we learned how silence can sound like betrayal.
She smooths the bodice now, fingers trailing down her ribs with practiced ease. She knows exactly what she’s doing. None of this is innocent. It’s strategy.
She looks up and catches my eyes in the mirror. She doesn’t flinch. She just lifts her chin and smiles the kind of smile designed to test the tensile strength of my restraint.
The expression is pure Tessa: innocence wrapped in a challenge. It’s the same look she used to give me when she wanted a fight just to see if I’d rise to meet her. It’s the same look that made me forget every rule I ever wrote about staying composed.
“Are you watching, King?”
Her voice is soft but sharp underneath, teasing and testing in equal measure. The question hangs between us, loaded with every memory we’ve buried and each one that refuses to stay dead. The air feels heavy, waiting for the first spark to catch.
I don’t move. I don’t look away. When I finally speak, my voice comes out rougher than I intend.
“Trying to figure out if this is strategy or self-sabotage.”
Strategy would be safer. Strategy I can counter with logic and planning. But if this is just Tessa being Tessa—impulsive, reckless, beautiful in ways that undo me completely—then I’m in trouble.
“Why not both?”
She leans forward to grab her lip balm, the movement slow and careless, the neckline of her dress dipping just enough to steal my breath.
Her perfume drifts through the car, a mix of vanilla, citrus, and something that belongs only to her.
I haven’t been able to forget that scent, no matter how many years I’ve tried.
The smell brings everything back. Late nights in her dorm room. Her laugh against my throat. The way she used to curl into me after we’d argued about case law for three hours straight, sleepy and warm and mine in ways that felt permanent.
I should have known then that she’d destroy me.
Her gaze flicks down, brief but unmistakable, to my lap. To the evidence of just how thoroughly she still affects me. The shift in fabric. The tension in my body. The proof that years of silence haven’t erased what we were.
I don’t flinch. I don’t explain. I don’t offer her an apology for being human. She wanted proof that she still matters, that she can still reach me, and now she has it. Every defense I’ve built is a wall she still knows how to climb, and she does it effortlessly.
Her eyes widen slightly. Her lips part. For just a second, the mask slips, and I see something raw underneath. Want. Fear. Recognition of what we’re walking into and what it might cost us both.
She swallows hard, the sound audible in the charged silence.
“Rowan—”
“You got what you wanted,” I say quietly. My voice is controlled, but there’s an edge to it. A warning. “Now sit back and let me get us there in one piece.”
She doesn’t argue. She just leans into the seat, folding her legs beneath her, trying to look composed while her breathing betrays her.