24. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
There were forty feet of hallway between my office and his, and it took me the better part of an hour to cross them.
Not because I didn’t know what I wanted. I’d known that for a week, lying awake in a bed too big for one person, hating him and missing him in the same breath, which is a specific kind of insanity nobody warns you about. I knew exactly what I wanted. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was Stan.
Because I’d wanted things before. I’d wanted a husband who loved me, and I’d stood at an altar at twenty-two and promised myself to a man who would one day watch the ocean close over my head and tell the captain to drive on.
I’d trusted my own judgment once, completely, and it had nearly killed me.
Every instinct that told me Reid was different was running on the same broken machinery that had told me Stan was safe.
How do you trust your own heart when your heart has a body count?
That was the thing nobody understood about what I was about to do.
Reid thought the hard part was his, the confessing, the groveling, the earning back.
But he’d already done his hard part. Mine was still in front of me, and it was worse, because it couldn’t be solved by honesty or paperwork or a house signed over in my name.
Mine was walking through that door with the full knowledge that I might be wrong again.
That I might be the kind of woman who couldn’t tell love from a well-built trap.
That I might be handing my heart, for the second time in my life, to a man who would eventually find a use for it and a way to dispose of it after.
I did it anyway.
That was the part I’d never be able to explain to anyone, least of all him, that walking into his office wasn’t the moment I forgave him. It was the moment I forgave myself. For being fooled once. For the terrible crime of having wanted to be loved.
I didn’t knock.
I just opened his door and walked in.
Reid was behind his desk, papers spread in front of him, pen in hand. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, shirt wrinkled, jaw rough with stubble, dark circles under his eyes. But when his head snapped up at my entrance, his eyes went wide with hope.
“Blythe.” He stood up so fast his chair rolled back and hit the wall. “Hi. I - hi.”
“Hi.”
We stared at each other across the office. The silence stretched between us, heavy with everything we hadn’t said. I could see him struggling, wanting to cross to me, wanting to explain, wanting to do something other than stand there looking lost.
But he didn’t move. He waited. Letting me set the terms. Letting me be in control.
“Can I help you with anything?” His voice was careful, controlled, like he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. “Are you okay? Do you need anything from me? Anything at all?”
I walked to the window. Pulled the blinds closed.
“Blythe?”
I walked to the door. Turned the lock.
“Blythe, what are you-”
“I found out about the company.” I turned to face him. “The equity transfer. The house.”
He swallowed. “I wanted you to have options. Whatever you decided, about us, about everything, I wanted you to have something that was yours, that nobody could ever take away.”
“You gave me twenty percent of your life’s work.”
“I’d give you a hundred percent if you asked for it.” His voice was rough, scraped raw. “I’d give you the world, Blythe. You just have to ask.”
I crossed the room slowly. Stopped in front of his desk.
“Reid.” My voice cracked, and I hated it. Hated how vulnerable I sounded. “I need to know something.”
“Anything.”
“Is this real?” I looked into his eyes, searching for the truth. “All of it, the way you look at me, the things you’ve done, the letters and the files and the company and the house, is it real? Or is it another manipulation? Another part of some plan I don’t understand?”
“No.” He came around the desk, stopped an arm’s length away. “No, Blythe. It’s real. All of it.”
“How do I know?” My eyes were burning. “How do I know you’re not just saying what I want to hear? How do I trust anything you say after everything you hid from me?”
“You can’t.” His voice was quiet. “Not right away. Trust is something I have to earn. But I can tell you the truth, right now, and hope it’s enough to start with.”
“Then tell me.”
He took a breath. Let it out slowly.
“I came to Newport for revenge,” he said. “That’s true. Fifteen years of it. And when I got here you were just a line in the-”
“Stop.” I held up a hand. “I read the file, Reid. All of it. I know what I was to you in the beginning, a line item, an access route, Chadwick’s wife with a useful address book.
I’ve read the memos where you called me exactly that, in your own words, and I’ve read them enough times to recite them.
So don’t stand there and confess the thing I already have on paper.
That’s not what I came here to hear.” My voice shook.
“I came to hear the part that isn’t in the file.
The part you can’t prove. Tell me when I stopped being a line item.
Tell me the exact moment, and don’t you dare lie to make it sound better than it was. ”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, there was no speech in it, no forty-one drafts, just a man reaching for something true.
“The first night. You were asleep on my couch in my clothes, and I’d watched you nearly die four hours earlier, and you were exhausted and furious even in your sleep, your jaw was tight, your hands were fisted, like you were still fighting something.
And I sat there doing arithmetic on a company I’d spent half my life planning to burn down, and I couldn’t make the numbers matter anymore.
That was the moment. Before I knew your middle name.
Before I’d heard you laugh. You stopped being a line item while you were unconscious and couldn’t even take credit for it. ”
“Reid-”
“And I hated it.” He stepped closer. “You have to understand that. It wasn’t some gift I was grateful for.
It was the single most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to me.
I’d organized my entire life around one purpose, and you walked into it half-drowned and undid it in a night, and I spent every day after that trying to have both, the revenge and you, because I was too much of a coward to choose.
And I told myself I’d explain it all later, when the timing was better.
” His jaw worked. “There was never going to be a better time. There was only ever going to be a worse way for you to find out. And that’s exactly what happened. ”
“You were afraid,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “This whole time. Of what?”
“Of losing you.” His eyes were bright. “Of watching your face do exactly what it’s doing right now.
I have loved you since the night I dragged you onto my boat, and I have known, every single day since, that loving you didn’t entitle me to a thing, not your forgiveness, not your trust, not five more minutes of your time. ”
I stared at him.
Forty-one drafts, I thought. He wrote that letter forty-one times, trying to find the right words.
“I read your files,” I said. “All of them. The memos where you called me Chadwick’s wife. The planning documents. The analysis.”
“I know.”
“You left them in on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you deserved the whole truth.” His jaw tightened. “Even the parts that made me look worst. If I’d hidden those pages, I’d just be lying to you again. And I promised I would never lie to you again.”
And that was the thing that undid me, not the apology, not the declaration, but that he’d handed me the pages that made him look worst when he could so easily have burned them. Stan had spent seven years making sure I never saw a single document. Reid had made sure I saw the ones that damned him.
“Reid,” I said. And my voice broke on it, and I hated that it broke.
And then this enormous man came around his desk and sank to his knees in front of me. Right there, on his office carpet, in the middle of a workday, without my asking for anything at all. He knelt and looked up at me like I was everything.
“I am irrevocably and profoundly in love with you, Blythe.” His voice was rough, certain, every word set down with care, forty-one drafts of it, finally spoken out loud.
“I loved you before I had any right to. I loved you while I was lying to you, which is the worst thing I’ve ever done, because you deserved a man who could do both - love you and be honest - and I was only brave enough for one.
” He took a breath. “I’m sorry. For every lie.
Every secret. Every moment I could have told you the truth and didn’t.
And I’m begging you. Give me another chance.
Let me earn your trust back. Let me spend the rest of my life making it right. ”
I looked down at him. This enormous man on his knees in front of me, his heart in his eyes, begging for something he wasn’t sure he deserved.
“Yes,” I whispered.
He was on his feet in an instant.
His mouth crashed onto mine and everything else fell away. The weeks of separation. The hurt. The anger. All of it burned off in the heat of his kiss, the desperate way his hands grabbed my waist, the broken sound he made against my lips, half relief, half pure hunger.
“God, I missed you,” he breathed. “Every fucking minute. Every second. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think. Just kept seeing your face when you slammed that door.”
“Then show me.”
He lifted me onto his desk in one smooth motion. Papers exploded everywhere. A stapler hit the floor. A pen rolled off. Neither of us gave a single shit.
His hands were everywhere at once, fisting in my hair, framing my face, shoving under my blouse to find bare skin. I yanked at his shirt, buttons popping, desperate to feel him. He helped, both of us clumsy and frantic, mouths never fully separating.
“Blythe-” His voice was wrecked already. “I love you. I love you so goddamn much it made me stupid.”
“Show me,” I demanded again, biting his lower lip. “Prove it.”
We didn’t even get our clothes properly off.
My blouse open, his shirt half-unbuttoned, my leggings and underwear gone somewhere behind the desk, his trousers shoved down just far enough, and then he was sliding into me in one long, trembling stroke, and both of us stopped breathing at the same time.
And then he didn’t move.
He stayed buried to the hilt, shaking with the effort of it, his forehead pressed to mine, his hands cradling my face, kissing me like my mouth was the only thing keeping him alive.
As physically close to me as he was allowed to be, and not one inch more.
I could feel his heart slamming against my chest. I could feel every muscle in him straining toward motion and refusing it.
“Reid.” I was the one trembling now. “Move.”
“In a second.” He kissed me again, deep and desperate. “Just - let me have this. Two weeks I thought I’d never get to be here again.”
“Move,” I ordered, and rolled my hips against him, and that was the end of his restraint.
He fucked me then. Really fucked me, deep and rolling and devastating, one arm banded around my waist to haul me into every stroke, papers sliding off the desk in sheets. And every crude thing he’d never say in a boardroom came pouring out of that flat, wrecked voice.
“Fuck, look at you. Taking me so deep after two weeks of making me suffer. This tight little cunt missed me. Squeezing like it wants to keep me. I thought about you every single night in that hotel room. Filling you up. Reminding you who you belong to now.”
His assistant knocked.
“Mr. Navarro? Your next appointment is here.”
He didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. Just kept moving inside me and called out in a perfectly level office voice, “Cancel my afternoon. All of it. All my meetings,” while the whole heavy desk walked an inch across the floor with a scrape.
“Yes, sir.”
“Reid,” I gasped, utterly destroyed, “someone will hear-”
“Let them.” He lifted me clean off the desk without pulling out, my legs locked around his waist, and held me up with those enormous hands while he drove into me standing, filthy and unhurried, like I weighed nothing at all. “Let the whole fucking floor know.”
Then he laid me back across the desk again, folded my thigh up against my chest and pinned it there, and slipped his hand between us to rub vicious circles over my swollen clit. “Come with me, menace. Right now. Together.”
I shattered, biting down on his shoulder hard enough to leave marks, pulsing around him hard enough to drag the curse out of him half-formed, and he came with me, in the same breath, slamming deep and spilling with a broken groan while thick heat flooded me and his whole massive body shook apart on top of mine.
We stayed like that for a long minute, sweaty, panting, him still buried inside me, desk thoroughly desecrated.
Eventually he pulled out carefully, scooped me up boneless, and carried me to the office couch. We collapsed tangled together, half-dressed, both of us breathing hard, both of us smiling like complete idiots.
“You’ve made me the happiest man on earth,” he said quietly against my hair. “And in heaven.”
“That’s very dramatic.”
“I’m a dramatic person.” He pressed a kiss to my temple. “When it comes to you.”
I traced lazy patterns on his bare chest. “We still have things to talk about. The pregnancy. The trial. What happens next.”
“I know.”
“This doesn’t fix everything.”
“I know that too.” He pulled me closer, one big hand spanning my lower back. “But we’ll figure it out together. That’s all I’m asking for. The chance to figure it out together.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. At his dark eyes, his ruined hair, the pure uncomplicated happiness softening every hard line of his face.
“Okay,” I said. “Together.”
He smiled, that rare real smile that changed his whole face, and just like that, I knew we were going to be okay.