Chapter Twelve
~ Jai ~
The coffee had moved. Again. Three days in the penthouse and Braham had already rearranged the kitchen cabinet—my kitchen cabinet, the one I’d been using for exactly seventy-two hours—because apparently the logical location for coffee wasn’t where I’d put it, but where he’d decided it should go.
I reached for the bag on the higher shelf, the one he’d relocated without asking, and the small, infuriating correctness of it made my jaw tighten.
Grace was on the island in her bouncy seat, working her entire fist toward her mouth with the focused ambition of a tiny scientist who had identified a problem and was determined to solve it through oral exploration.
Her eyes tracked the movement of her own hand with the grave concentration of someone mapping a complex chemical reaction. The toy bar above her swung gently, red circle, blue square, yellow triangle, all of them currently beneath her notice. The fist was the priority. Everything else was scenery.
The eastern light had leveled out. The famous twenty-minute golden hour—the one that turned Mt.
Hood into a threat and the penthouse floors into something that looked bottled—was over.
Now the light was cleaner, harder, a flat white-gold that caught the dark walnut and turned it the color of good scotch.
The air smelled like cedar and aged liquor infused with cherry blossoms worked into every surface. Below the glass, forty floors down, Portland hummed. A low, constant murmur, the sound of a city too busy to look up.
My laptop was open on the island. The manuscript glared at me. Chapter nine. The cursor had stopped blinking, which meant I’d been staring at the same paragraph long enough that the software had given up on me.
The problem was transparent and embarrassing.
Drew and Eli—my two leads, who were supposed to be circling each other with professional wariness and carefully maintained boundaries—had instead fallen into something that read like a love letter written by someone with no capacity for subtlety. They were in love.
Transparently, mortifyingly in love.
The dialogue had teeth marks. The descriptions had fingerprints. Petra, my editor, who had once reduced a marketing director to tears over a semicolon, was going to read this and know exactly what had happened to me. I’d typed the same word four times in a row. Certain. Certain. Certain. Certain.
I deleted it.
Again.
The problem underneath the problem was the sound.
The specific, low, rough sound Braham had made three nights ago when I’d pulled him closer—a noise that lived somewhere between a groan and a growl, something giving way—which kept surfacing mid-sentence like a pop-up ad for a product I was already addicted to.
My brain would hit a rhythm, the words would flow, and then—that sound—and suddenly I was typing “certain” four times and staring at the screen like it had personally betrayed me.
Grace got her fist approximately halfway to her mouth.
Not all the way. The logistics were still beyond her.
But she made contact, knuckles against lips, and the expression that crossed her face was one of profound, scholarly satisfaction.
Hypothesis confirmed. Fist: edible. Further research required.
Braham was at the far end of the dining table with the sleeves of his crisp white shirt pushed up, forearms bare, on a call in what sounded like Portuguese.
His voice was low and measured, the same cadence he used for everything—deliberate, unhurried, the kind of voice that made rooms go quiet without him raising it.
He hadn’t looked at me in seventeen minutes.
I was absolutely not watching him. I was editing. The stylus was in my hand. That was editing. The fact that I’d been holding the same page for the last ten minutes without reading a single word of it was irrelevant. The pen was in my hand.
Case closed.
He ended the call. Set the phone down. Stood. Crossed the kitchen in three long strides, detoured past the island, and set a fresh coffee beside my elbow without being asked, without a word, without even breaking stride back to the table.
The mug was bone china, thin enough to see light through, and the coffee inside was black and steaming and smelled like the good beans, not the ones I’d brought from my apartment.
I stared at it for a beat too long.
Three days. That’s how long we’d been doing this. Three days of a rhythm that had settled over the penthouse like weather—the kind you don’t notice until it’s already changed the air.
Last night, Braham had read at the other end of the couch for two straight hours. Not a book. Financial reports, dense with numbers and footnotes, the kind of reading that would have put me to sleep in six minutes flat.
He’d held Grace the entire time, one large hand supporting her back, thumb tracing slow circles between her shoulder blades while he turned pages with the other. She’d been fussy. Colicky, maybe, or just the particular brand of existential dissatisfaction that infants specialize in.
I’d been stuck on chapter eight, the scene where Drew admits he’s been lying to himself, and every time I looked up from the laptop, there was Braham—this enormous man in a custom suit, holding a seven-pound infant like she was made of something irreplaceable, reading quarterly projections with the same focus he brought to everything.
I’d looked up at one point and felt something shift in my ribcage. Not a flutter. Not a pang. It was something heavier, more tectonic, like a shelf of ice giving way after holding too long.
I didn’t have a clean word for it.
What I’d said to him instead was, “Your scotch collection is aggressively expensive and you breathe too loud and the next time you read over my shoulder you become a plot point and I kill you in chapter twelve.”
He’d absorbed it all with the patience of a man running a very long game. The corners of his mouth had done that thing—the almost-smile, the one that lived in the space between amusement and something warmer—and he’d said, “Noted,” and gone back to his reports.
Now the coffee sat beside my elbow, perfectly placed, exactly the right temperature, and the manuscript glared at me from the screen with the smug certainty of a document that knew exactly how compromised I was.
I picked up the mug. Drank. It tasted exactly right—rich, slightly bitter, the kind of coffee that existed as a delivery mechanism for caffeine and also, apparently, as evidence that Braham Wolfe paid attention to things I hadn’t said out loud.
Grace blew a raspberry at the yellow triangle. Missed. Tried again. Connected. Squealed with the triumph of someone who had just split the atom.
I set the coffee down. The manuscript stayed exactly where it was. Chapter nine wasn’t going anywhere. Drew and Eli could figure out their own problems for another hour.
Braham’s phone rang again. French this time. He answered with the same low, even cadence, and I went back to staring at the screen like it owed me money.
Three days. That’s all it had been.
It felt longer.
By mid-afternoon, the penthouse had gone quiet in that specific way expensive buildings get quiet when the only people in them are either asleep or pretending to work.
Grace was out cold in the guest suite, which meant the air carried nothing but the low city hum forty floors below and the occasional murmur of Braham wrapping up what sounded like his final call of the day.
I was at the kitchen island with my editing page on the a screen I had not read in an indeterminate amount of time. The paragraph in front of me might as well have been written in a language I’d never studied.
The reason for this was sitting at the far end of the dining table.
Braham had his sleeves pushed up to the elbows again, forearms bare on the dark wood, phone in one hand, eyes on the screen with the focused stillness he brought to everything.
His thumb scrolled. Once. Twice. The light from the eastern windows caught the corded muscle along his forearms and turned it gold. His jaw was set at that angle—not tight, just present, the way a mountain is present—and the five-o’clock shadow along it had deepened from suggestion to fact.
I had been watching him for longer than I could account for. The clock on the microwave said 3:17. I was fairly certain it had said 2:43 the last time I’d checked.
He ended the call. Set the phone down. Looked directly across the room at me.
Honey-brown eyes. Steady. Certain. The specific look I had been cataloguing for three days and categorically refusing to name, because naming it meant admitting I’d been counting, and counting meant caring, and caring meant I was in considerably deeper than I’d planned to be when I walked into his office with a baby from a cardboard box.
The page was still unread.
“Don’t,” I said.
He didn’t blink. “Don’t what?”
I pointed at him. “Whatever face that is.”
“I’m not making a face.”
“You’re making a very specific face.” I set the stylus down. “It’s the face that says you’ve reached a conclusion and you’re waiting for me to catch up, and it’s extremely irritating.”
He stood. Not fast. Unhurried. The kind of movement that came from a man who had already decided how this ended and saw no reason to rush the middle.
He crossed the room with the same measured pace he brought to territory negotiations and boardroom takeovers and, apparently, walking across his own kitchen to confront a man who had been staring at him for twenty minutes without editing a single word.
I stayed exactly where I was. Not because I was brave. Because I had also already decided, even if I was only admitting it to myself now, standing at a granite counter with a stylus in my hand and three days of pretending to work weighing on me like a bad conscience.