Chapter 11
Jace
She was knotting my tie and she was too close.
I could count the distance between our mouths.
I did count it, because my brain doesn’t know how to exist in a moment without quantifying it.
Four inches. Maybe less. She was standing right there, her fingers working the fabric at my collar, her eyes focused on the knot, her lower lip caught between her teeth while she concentrated.
I looked at that lip. At her teeth pressing into it. And I thought, with a clarity that should’ve horrified and surprised me, that I wanted to replace her teeth with mine.
With other women, the thought of this kind of proximity would have shut me down entirely.
Shared breath. Shared moisture. The biological reality of what happens when two mouths meet, the bacteria, the exchange, the absolute absence of anything sterile.
My brain had run that calculation a hundred times before and the answer was always the same.
Revulsion. Complete, non-negotiable, conversation over.
But this time, my brain was not producing revulsion.
It was producing something that bypassed the germaphobia and the conditioned recoil and went somewhere animal and hungry and completely without hygiene standards.
I wanted to taste her. The thought arrived without apology, fully formed, and my body didn’t flag it as contamination.
My body flagged it as desire. A need I wasn't familiar with.
Dr. Adler’s voice from our last session rang in my head: Don’t act on it yet. Don’t push it away either. Just notice it. If an impulse arrives that isn’t rooted in fear, follow it.
I’d followed it in the car. I’d held out my hand in the parking garage, gloved, careful, and she’d taken it.
Her fingers against the leather and the warmth of her skin bleeding through to mine.
My pulse had gone sideways but not because of panic.
For the first time in my adult life, my heart rate spiked because a woman touched me and I liked it.
The revulsion never came.
And now she was four inches from my face with her lip between her teeth and smell of vanilla was everywhere. Dr. Adler could take his "don’t act on it" advice and send me the bill because I was leaning so far toward this woman I was about to fall.
"Almost done," she said. Her breath was warm against my chin. I swallowed. The sound was louder than it should have been in the empty store.
She pulled the knot tight, smoothed the tie flat against my chest, and then her fingers stopped moving. They just rested there, on the knot, on my chest, and she looked up.
Her eyes were dark brown, and up close there was amber near the iris, like light learning her shape and forgetting how to leave.
Lashes cast faint shadows when she blinked. Her lips were slightly parted, still glossy where she'd just pressed them together, and I couldn't seem to look away.
The thought came uninvited—simple, raw, and disarming. I wanted to close the distance. To know what it would feel like to be closer than this. To find out if she still carried that faint trace of vanilla, or if that was just my mind trying to turn her into something it could understand.
Something safe.
"Everything alright in there?" The sales clerk’s voice came from outside the fitting area, bright and oblivious, and the moment broke apart.
She stepped back and cleared her throat.
The sales clerk appeared around the corner, clipboard in hand, asking about alterations, and I answered her questions while my pulse came back down from wherever it had gone.
"I have to make a call," Anna said, holding up her phone. "Give me a minute?"
I nodded.
She walked toward the entrance, phone to her ear, her flats quiet on the polished floor. I watched her go. The way she moved, her curls bouncing. She didn’t look over her shoulder.
But I wished she had.
The sales clerk asked if I needed anything else. I told her no.
I didn’t need anything else.
My mom had another episode that evening. Not a heart attack, the cardiologist was clear about that, but chest pains and shortness of breath.
Her medication was adjusted again. Higher dose. She was resting but she wanted her children, all three, which is how I ended up sitting at her bedside at eight in the evening.
She was propped up on pillows, pale but alert.
Probably checking her children’s faces for signs of distress she could worry about later when we were gone.
Mona was cross-legged at the foot of the bed, eating grapes from a bowl.
Miles leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded, doing his job, which was making sure nobody got too sad for too long.
"I’m fine," Mom said for the fourth time. "Stop looking at me like I’m dying. I had a bit of chest pain. It’s not the end of the world."
"Your cardiologist disagrees," Miles said.
"My cardiologist is a pessimist."
"Your cardiologist went to Harvard."
"Pessimists can go to Harvard, Miles."
"You know what would make me feel better," she said, staring at me, and I knew what was coming before she finished the sentence. "Grandchildren."
Mona pointed at me. "Wrong person to ask, Mom. He probably thinks the entire process of making children is disgusting. He’d need to sanitize the whole situation from start to finish and honestly the logistics are impossible."
Miles laughed. Mom swatted Mona’s ankle. "I can’t exactly put my hopes on you either, can I?"
Mona grinned. "My future wife might have something to say about that. Don’t count me out."
"I don’t care who gives me grandchildren," Mom said. "I just want someone to. Soon. Because my cardiologist says stress is bad for my heart and the absence of grandchildren is very stressful."
"That’s emotional blackmail," I said.
"Forget the kids, just bring someone home. I’ll be happier knowing you all have someone looking after you. Especially you, Jace." She said it looking right at me.
Mona snorted.
After she fell asleep and Miles went to call her doctor, I walked through the gallery with Mona.
The hallway was lined with paintings, Mom’s work from another life.
Seascapes, mostly. Oils on canvas, the blues deep and layered, the kind of paintings that made you feel the salt air if you stood close enough.
She hadn’t picked up a brush in years. The last one hung at the end of the hall, a storm rolling in over water. She painted it the year after I came back from London. I’d always thought it looked like the inside of her head during that time.
Mona stopped in front of it. Stood there for a moment, her usual energy gone quiet.
"You’re different," she said.
"Different how?"
"You used to make a face whenever Mom brought up grandchildren. Or relationships. Or anything involving another human body within arm’s reach of yours.
Like someone had waved something rotten under your nose.
" She looked at me. "Tonight you just sat there. Normal. You didn’t flinch. You didn’t shut down. You just let her talk."
"She’s ill. I wasn’t going to make it about me."
"That’s not what I’m saying and you know it." She folded her arms. "Miles told me you went shopping. With a woman. And nobody died."
"Miles talks too much."
"Miles tells me exactly as much as he should and I’m still the last to know everything important." She bumped her shoulder against my arm. "Who is she?"
"My assistant."
"Since when do you take assistants shopping?"
"Since she destroyed my suit with vomit and insisted on replacing it."
Mona’s eyebrows went up. Then she grinned. The grin that meant I’d just handed her ammunition that would last for months.
"There’s nothing to see, Mona."
"There’s always something to see. You’re the best show running, Jace. I want front-row seats."
I told her goodnight. She gave me the look that said she wasn’t done pestering me.
"Later, Jace. I’ll have to meet this assistant of yours soon." She winked.
My voice came out low. "Don’t even think about it."
The next day, in the office, I could hear her laugh from my room.
I looked up from my laptop. Through the glass, Miles was leaning against her desk, saying something with that practiced charm of his. Anna’s head was thrown back, her hair falling loose behind her shoulders, and the laugh coming out of her was relaxed. Happy.
Something moved through me that I didn’t recognize.
Hot. Fast. Entirely irrational.
It settled in my chest and wouldn’t leave. I watched my brother lean closer to say something else and I watched her break into another easy laugh. Something unreasonable inside me wanted to walk out there and stand between them.
This wasn’t jealousy. Can't be.
I didn't get jealous. That would require attachment, and attachment wasn't something I allowed myself.
Except I was sitting behind my desk watching my brother make my assistant laugh and I wanted to break something. Preferably Miles.
I pressed the intercom. "Ms. Wilson. My office."
She came in, still smiling from whatever Miles had said. The smile faded when she saw my face, replaced by the careful professionalism she wore around me.
She was wearing the indoor flats. The ones she changed into for me. Her blouse was tucked in and her curls were loose and when she stopped in front of my desk my eyes dropped to her mouth for half a second before I caught myself and dragged them back up.
For fuck’s sake.
The curse sat behind my teeth. I swallowed it back.
How can a fully grown adult CEO of Hunter Interactive have a biological crisis over a woman’s lower lip in the middle of a work day?
Grandfather would have been appalled. Dr. Adler would have been delighted. And I was somewhere between losing my mind and maintaining professional composure.
I cleared my voice and spoke. "I need the Jackson’s file delivered to Legal. Fourteenth floor. In person."
She looked at me in confusion. "You want me to walk a file to the fourteenth floor."
"Is there a problem with that?"
"You could email it."
"I’m aware of the existence of email, Ms. Wilson. I’d like it delivered in person."
She held my gaze for a second longer than was comfortable. Then she nodded, took the file, and left.
Miles appeared in my office doorway and watched her go. Then he turned to me with one eyebrow raised and a grin that could power the Miami grid for a week.
"Should I call Mom? Tell her you might be bringing someone home soon?" he asked, with a smug grin.
"Get out of my office," I shot back.
Instead he walked close and his gaze dropped to my laptop. Her desk was still visible on the security camera feed.
"Really smooth, Jace. Send the woman on a fake errand because she was laughing with your brother. Should I be concerned about you?"
"The errand is not fake."
"You have never once in seven years hand-delivered a file to Legal. You email everything. You email people who sit ten feet away from you."
"Perhaps I’m evolving."
"You’re jealous."
"I don’t get jealous."
"You just sent your assistant to a different floor because I was at her desk. If you didn’t have a thing about physical contact, I’m fairly certain you would’ve punched me."
I imagined it for half a second. My fist connecting with Miles's jaw, the satisfying crack of it, and then the blood—warm, wet, on my knuckles—and my stomach turned so fast I nearly tasted my breakfast. Couldn't even fantasize about hitting my brother without my own brain shutting it down on hygiene grounds.
Miles was watching my face. "You just imagined it, didn’t you?"
"No."
"You did. And then you got disgusted by the blood part." He was grinning. "I know you, Jace." He paused. "Her interaction with me is very normal," he said. "People do that, Jace. It’s a thing humans do. It doesn’t mean she’s in love with me. It means I’m funny."
"You’re not funny."
"I’m hilarious and you know it." He paused at the doorframe. The grin changed. "She’s beautiful, by the way. Anna. Really beautiful. And if you keep being this slow about whatever this is, I’ll have no choice but to go ahead myself.
" He tilted his head. "And you wouldn’t like that, would you, dear brother? "
He held my gaze for exactly long enough to make his point. Then he winked, whistled something obnoxious, and walked out.
The office went quiet.
I sat at my desk. The cube was in my hand but I wasn’t solving it. I was turning it slowly, absently, the way other people fidget with pens.
Jealousy. Miles called it jealousy. I turned the word over in my head the way I turned the cube, examining each face of it, looking for the flaw in the logic.
I'd never been jealous. Jealousy demanded possessiveness. Possessiveness meant proximity. Proximity meant trust. Trust meant contact. And contact, for me, only ever led to one place.
Alone. Clean. Safe.
Except I’d held her hand in a parking garage and my skin didn’t revolt.
Except I’d stood four inches from her mouth and my brain didn’t scream.
Except I’d watched my brother lean against her desk and make her laugh and the feeling that went through me wasn’t rational or logical or anything I could file under a category I recognized.
It was hot. It was primitive. And it was aimed at Miles, who was my brother, who was harmless, who was being friendly to a woman he’d known since university, and none of that context made the feeling smaller.
And you wouldn’t like that, would you, dear brother?
No. I wouldn’t.
Damn. I really needed to talk to Adler.