Chapter Ten #3
I looked at her. Really looked. The tiny fists. The alert eyes. The way she tracked movement in the room with a focus that belonged on someone three times her age.
“Whoever’s coming for her,” I said, very quietly, the same tone I’d use to note incoming weather, “is going to have a problem.”
When I looked up, Braham was still. Not the controlled stillness he carried as default.
Something else. Deeper. The specific, total stillness of a man who had just been hit somewhere he didn’t see coming.
His eyes were on my hands. On Grace. On the space between us where something had just happened that neither of us had planned for.
Ashe cleared his throat. The moment broke.
He picked up his tablet, adjusted his stance by two degrees, and continued with the briefing.
Numbers. Grid coordinates. Movement patterns.
The language of men who were used to tracking threats through a city they knew better than the people who lived in it.
I listened. I took notes in my head the way I’d been trained to do—cataloguing, cross-referencing, building the picture piece by piece. But part of me was still in that moment. The one where Braham had gone completely, utterly still, and the room had held its breath around us.
Grace blew a raspberry at the yellow triangle. Missed. Tried again.
The briefing moved on. The day kept going. But the moment didn’t leave the room. I could feel it there, patient, waiting for a name neither of us was ready to give it.
The afternoon reshaped itself around us like something alive. I wrote at the kitchen island, manuscript open, word count climbing in fits and starts that would have given Petra an aneurysm if she’d been watching the live document.
Every time I hit a rhythm, something would snag—a line of dialogue that sounded too much like someone in the room, a description that pulled details from the view outside the glass—and I’d have to stop, delete, start again.
Across the long dining table, Braham worked. Calls came in steady—English first, then French, then what sounded like Mandarin, his voice shifting registers with the ease of a man who treated language the way other people treated tools.
Documents appeared and disappeared via Ashe, who moved through the penthouse with the quiet regularity of a tide, each folder placed precisely where Braham’s hand would find it without looking.
The full operational weight of Wolfe Global ran through a man in a suit who kept his phone on mute and his attention divided.
He glanced at me. A lot. With the subtlety of someone who genuinely believed he was being discreet. He was not being discreet. He was being obvious in the specific way that made my chest do something complicated every time his eyes landed on the back of my neck and stayed there a beat too long.
I logged every look in a part of my brain I’d very much like to password-protect. Folder: Wolfe, B. Subfolder: glances, sustained. Sub-subfolder: things I will examine later, with alcohol.
I’m a romance novelist. I have spent years studying exactly this—the specific grammar of wanting something and not saying it, the way attention accumulates in a room before anyone admits it’s there.
The weight of a gaze. The pause before a sentence.
The silence that happens when two people are aware of each other’s bodies in a way that has nothing to do with conversation.
I knew what this was. I just hadn’t decided what to do about it.
That was a lie. I knew exactly what I wanted to do about it.
I was simply aware that wanting and doing occupied different categories when the man in question had used the word “mate” and meant it in a way that had the word “permanent” running underneath it like a current.
Permanent was not a word I had much practice with.
Permanent asked questions I wasn’t sure I had answers for.
Grace fell asleep in the bouncy seat around four in the afternoon. One minute she was batting at the blue square with the focused determination of a quantum physicist; the next, her eyes drooped, her fist went slack, and she was out, head lolling to one side, mouth slightly open.
The penthouse went quiet in the particular way it did when she was asleep—a held-breath quality, the city’s orange-and-grey light spreading long across the dark walnut floors, turning everything the color of old paper.
I saved the document. Rolled my neck until something popped loud enough to make Ashe glance up from his tablet.
Sixteen hundred words. Not my best day, but respectable given the circumstances.
Drew and Eli had finally stopped arguing about kitchen knives and moved on to the part where they admitted they’d been circling each other for three hundred pages.
Progress.
I made the mistake of drifting to the floor-to-ceiling east-facing windows in the living room. The glass ran from floor to ceiling, twelve feet of it, and Portland spread forty floors below like a model someone had built and then abandoned.
Gold and pewter in the late light, the river a dark cut through the grid, Mt. Hood a pale shape at the edge of the sky, snow-capped and distant. From up here, the city looked manageable. Contained. A problem you could solve if you had the right tools and enough time.
I didn’t hear him approach. I never did.
One moment I was alone with the view; the next, Braham was standing beside me, close enough that the cedar-and-scotch-and-something-underneath smell of him registered as a physical fact.
Not announced. Just there, the way the mountain was there, a presence so consistent you stopped noticing it until it moved.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. The glass held our reflections—me in a faded t-shirt and yesterday’s socks, him in a suit that probably cost more than my annual rent, both of us standing too close to the edge of something neither of us had named.
“I know you didn’t choose this,” Braham said. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the city, on the river, on the distant pale shape of the mountain. “The apartment. The situation. Any of it.” No apology in it. Just acknowledgment, plain and level, the way you’d note a fact about the weather.
“I chose to stay,” I said.
He nodded. Once. “Yes.”
“That’s not nothing.”
He turned to look at me then. Gold eyes steady and unhurried, the kind of gaze that made the room feel smaller. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
I kissed him first. I’d like the record to reflect that. It was quick and deliberate, a decision executed cleanly, the kind of move you make when you’ve run the probabilities and decided the outcome is worth the risk.
My mouth found his, and for one heartbeat, it was just contact—warm, dry, the faint taste of coffee and something darker underneath.