Chapter 20
Jace
The city swallowed us back whole.
Returning to Miami after the cabin felt like putting on a suit that didn’t fit anymore.
Same office. Same desk. Same glass walls.
Same seventy-one degrees on the thermostat.
Everything was exactly where I’d left it.
The cube on the desk, the sanitizer in the drawer, the coffee machine untouched because nobody used it but me.
But I wasn’t the same. And the disconnect was disorienting.
Anna was at her desk. She looked like my assistant and nothing more. I hated every second of it because three days ago she was in my bed wearing my shirt with her hair across my pillow and now she was filing expense reports with twelve feet of carpet between us.
The distance was a physical ache I wasn't prepared for.
Dr. Adler warned me about this. Our session yesterday, the emergency one I'd called after I returned to my penthouse, had been what he would call productive, which meant he told me things I already knew in a tone that made me feel marginally less insane for feeling them.
"You’re moving fast, Jace."
"I asked her to be my girlfriend. She said yes."
A pause. "And how do you feel about the pace?"
"Terrified. Exhilarated. Like I’ve stepped off a building and I’m either flying or falling and I won’t know which until I hit the ground."
"That’s a very honest answer."
"I’m paying you eight hundred dollars an hour. Dishonesty would have a poor ROI."
He told me the feelings were valid. That the intensity was proportional to the deprivation.
That a man who’d spent so many years avoiding human connection and then suddenly found it was going to feel everything at full volume because there was no insulation, no calluses, no learned tolerance.
He told me to be careful. Not with Anna.
With myself. Because the crash, if it came, would be proportional to the height.
I told him I understood. Then I drove to the office and sat twelve feet from her and found that I understood nothing.
Miles was insufferable. He appeared in my doorway at nine-fifteen with a wide grin. "Glad to see you again. How was the cabin?"
"Productive."
"I bet it was." He leaned against the frame. "Very productive. Several days of uninterrupted productivity. In the mountains. With your assistant. During a storm."
"One more comment and your dental plan will need upgrading."
"Ah. Love has made you violent." He folded his arms. "Mona wants details, by the way. She called me three times yesterday. I told her I knew nothing. She didn’t believe me."
"Because you never know nothing. You’re constitutionally incapable of minding your own business."
"True. But in this case I genuinely don’t know the details. I just know you went to the cabin alone and came back not alone and you’re sitting in your office with an expression I’ve never seen on your face before."
"What expression?"
"Happy." He said it simply. "You look happy, Jace. It’s unsettling but I’m supportive."
He left whistling.
The morning moved. Meetings. Emails. The Meridian co-production was moving forward, casting finalized, the production meeting scheduled here at Hunter Interactive for Thursday. Two days away. I had notes to review, contracts to sign.
I should have been reviewing the Meridian contracts.
Instead I was watching her through the security feed.
The way she organized files. The way she tilted her head when she read.
The way she tucked her hair behind her left ear with two fingers, the same gesture I’d drawn from memory in charcoal, and my fingers itched for the pencil again.
Dr. Adler’s voice: Be careful. The crash, if it comes, will be proportional to the height.
I was very high up. And I could not bring myself to care.
At eleven forty, she knocked.
"Mr. Hunter, the eleven-fifty with the Meridian team starts in ten minutes."
She was standing in my doorway in her work clothes, professional face on, indoor shoes, looking every bit like my assistant, and I wanted to wreck it. All of it. The professionalism. The composure. The twelve feet.
"Close the door," I said.
She hesitated, reading my face. Then she closed the door.
I was across the office before she’d turned back around. My hands found her waist and I pulled her against me and kissed her. The sound she made against my mouth, surprise melting into desire, was the best thing I’d heard all morning.
"Jace." She put her hand on my chest. "The meeting starts in ten minutes."
"I’ll be quick."
"You’re never quick."
I bit her earlobe. Gentle. Just enough. She jerked. "Is that a compliment, Ms. Wilson?"
She didn’t answer. I kissed the spot below her ear—the one I’d discovered at the cabin that made her lose her train of thought. Then her neck. She leaned into me and the moan that came out of her was low and soft.
It went straight through me and every rational thought in my head caught fire.
I pressed her against the desk. My mouth on her neck, her fingers in my hair, her breathing rapid and uneven and I was hard, painfully hard, and twelve feet of distance and four hours of professionalism had been foreplay I didn’t plan but my body absolutely appreciated.
A knock.
We both froze. My mouth was on her collarbone. Her hand was under my shirt. The knock came again, followed by Miles’s voice, bright and cheerful and timed with the precision of a man who lived to ruin my life.
"Jace! The Meridian team just arrived early. Meeting’s moving up. Conference room in five."
Anna shoved away from me so fast she nearly tripped over the desk chair. She was flushed from her neck to her hairline, her blouse askew, her hair displaced from where my hands had been in it.
"Five minutes!" Miles called again, the glee audible through the door.
"I will kill him," I said.
"You can’t kill him. He runs your PR department."
"I’ll outsource it."
She disappeared into my bathroom to fix her hair. I stood behind my desk, adjusted myself, steadied my breathing, and tried to become the CEO again instead of the man who’d been three seconds from taking his assistant on a desk in the middle of a workday.
I opened the door. Miles was still there. Grinning.
"You look flushed," he said.
"The thermostat is off."
"The thermostat is at seventy-one. Where you set it. This morning. Because you set it every morning."
"Perhaps seventy-one is too warm."
"Perhaps." His eyes drifted past me to the bathroom door, where the sound of running water was clearly audible.
"Is Anna fixing her hair because of the thermostat too? Because her hair looked perfectly professional when she walked in here, and now she’s in your personal bathroom with the door closed while you stand there looking like a man who was interrupted doing something he had no intention of stopping. "
I adjusted my glasses.
"Miles. If you don’t walk away in the next three seconds, I’m going to make you a permanent Meridian liaison. In their Mumbai office."
"You wouldn’t." He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, grinning like a man who knew exactly how safe he was.
"Try me."
"You love me too much."
"I tolerate you at levels that fluctuate depending on your proximity to my office door. Current levels are critically low."
He raised both hands in surrender but the grin didn’t fade. He backed away slowly, like a man retreating from a bear he’d poked for sport and didn’t regret it.
"The conference room. And Jace?"
"What."
"I’m happy for you. Genuinely. Even if you just tried to deport me to Mumbai."
He turned and walked away, whistling again. That bastard.
Anna
The Meridian team filled the conference room. Producers in expensive suits, agents with tablets, executives who spoke in jargon I was still learning to translate. I sat behind Jace with my notebook open and my pen ready, every inch the composed assistant, and did my job.
The meeting was about the Ethereal Vanguard film adaptation. Final casting confirmations. Production timeline. Budget approvals.
The cast was Meridian's choice, their big announcement. The door opened for the final arrival and every posture in the conference room changed at once. Attention redirected. Energy reorganized around the person in the doorway.
I didn’t look up from my notes. I was mid-sentence, writing a budget figure.
Then I heard his voice.
The conference room, the notebook, the pen in my hand—all of it receded like a tide pulling back, leaving me exposed on a shore I’d been running from.
My pen stopped moving. My hand went still on the page.
I looked up.
Tobias Hart was standing in the doorway of the conference room at Hunter Interactive, and my body time-traveled to Charlotte.
He looked exactly the same. Tall, golden, polished to a shine that existed specifically for consumption, the kind of face that belonged on magazine covers because it had been designed for them.
His smile was on, the one the world loved.
I'd seen it turn on and off like a switch, watched him scream at me in a kitchen and answer a phone call thirty seconds later sounding like the kindest man alive.
The transition was seamless. Practiced. The work of years spent perfecting the gap between who he was and who he performed.
He shook hands around the table. Producers.
Executives. Everyone charmed, everyone impressed, the A-list actor gracing their conference room with his golden presence.
Nobody in this room knew what I knew. They saw an award-winning leading man, a philanthropist, a feminist ally who wore the right pins and said the right things on the right days.
I saw the man who ran over a kindergarten teacher and paid to make it disappear. Who isolated me from everyone I loved until I had no one left to tell.
He sat down across from me.
Our eyes met for half a second. His smile didn’t change. Nothing on his face acknowledged that the woman taking notes across the table was the same woman who’d run from her old life because of him.