Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
éTIENNE
Iam not a man who lies.
This is the first thing anyone learns about me in business.
I am precise. Honest to the point of cruelty.
My word is my contract, and my contract is iron.
The fashion world calls me cold because I will tell a designer to his face that his collection is derivative garbage, and the banking world calls me reliable because I have never once failed to honor a commitment.
I do not lie.
Except tonight.
Tonight, I sent a woman a text about a nightmare that never happened, and I am standing in my study with a glass of whiskey I poured twenty minutes ago and haven't brought to my lips once. It sits on the desk beside my phone, amber and still, while I watch the street below for headlights.
What the fuck am I doing?
Sophie is asleep. Has been since ten. No nightmares, no restless turning, just a nine-year-old tired out from her own birthday, sleeping the way children do when the day has been good.
And I am pacing my study like a caged animal because in a few hours I'll be on a plane to Milan.
The timing is a disaster.
Milan has been scheduled for months. Fashion Week meetings, the spring collection preview, obligations I cannot move. Sophie will stay with my mother. The rotation has Madeline moving to the next household tomorrow.
Except the next household was supposed to be mine.
By the original schedule, Raphael's week ended with the party. Madeline should be packing her bag tomorrow to come here. To my apartment. My kitchen. My hallway.
Instead, I'll be in Italy. And she'll be at Bastien's.
Bordel.
We discussed it at the party, the three of us, while the children were occupied with cake. Brief, practical, the way we handle things now. Clipped sentences and no eye contact. Milan can't be moved. Madeline needs a household. Bastien takes the week early.
"Fine by me," Bastien had said. Then, with that slow twist of his mouth that makes me want to break things: "I'll make sure she's comfortable."
Raphael just nodded, watching me with that calm patience that's worse than any argument.
Madeline doesn't know yet. She'll find out tomorrow when she wakes up at Raphael's and the schedule has changed.
And now it's 2 AM and she'll walk into his apartment tomorrow and I'll be thirty thousand feet over the Alps trying not to think about what happens when his artist's eye lands on her for a full week without me there.
I have no claim on her. No right to her. I know that.
But I cannot let her walk into his apartment tomorrow with nothing from me. She needs to know, before Bastien gets his week, before Milan takes me away from this city and this woman and whatever is building between us in the spaces where we pretend nothing is happening.
I hit send.
Sophie had a nightmare. She's asking for you.
I wait for a few moments, imagining Madeline asleep or hesitating, before sending another message:
She won't settle. Please come.
She replies almost instantly after the second text. She was awake, and somehow that makes it worse.
I'm coming.
Two words. That's all. I told her my daughter needed her and she didn't think twice, didn't ask questions, didn't hesitate.
I pour the whiskey down the sink and grip the counter until my fingers ache.
A short time later, headlights sweep across the window.
A taxi pulls up below, and the door opens and she steps out. Dark hair loose around her shoulders. Jeans and an oversized sweater that swallows her frame.
I watch her cross the street, watch her disappear into the entrance, and I have to brace one hand against the window frame.
I could still stop this. Meet her in the foyer, apologize, send her home.
I hear the elevator begin its ancient groaning ascent. Then it stops. Footsteps in the hallway, soft and quick.
And then she's standing in the doorway of my study, cheeks flushed from the cold, hair windswept, eyes already scanning past me toward Sophie's room.
"Where is she?"
"Asleep."
Madeline freezes. "She's... asleep?"
"Yes."
"You said she had a nightmare."
"I know what I said."
The confusion crosses her face first. Then the realization. Then the anger.
Real anger. Not the polite, contained kind I've seen her manage at coordination meetings. This is the kind that straightens her spine and hardens her jaw and makes her look, for the first time since I've known her, like she might actually hit someone.
"Sophie's been asleep for hours," I say. My voice sounds strange. Raw. "She didn't have a nightmare. She didn't ask for you."
"So you lied."
"Yes."
"You used your daughter." She steps back from me. The distance is deliberate. "You used a child, your child, to manipulate me into coming here at two in the morning."
"Yes."
"Do you understand how fucked up that is?"
I don't flinch. She's right. She's completely right. And I have nothing.
"I trusted you," she says. Worse than the anger is the crack in her voice underneath it. "When that text came in, I didn't think. I didn't question it. I got dressed and I came because I thought Sophie needed me."
"I know."
"You knew I would. That's why you did it."
I don't answer. There's no answer that isn't damning.
She turns toward the door. Her hand finds the frame. She's leaving, and she should leave, and I should let her.
"I'm flying to Milan in four hours," I hear myself say. "You're going to Bastien's tomorrow. I arranged that. I arranged all of it."
She stops. Doesn't turn around.
"And before you went to him, I needed—" I stop. Swallow. "I've watched you for weeks. Watched you with my daughter. Watched you make her laugh, make her trust, when she hasn't trusted anyone since her mother left."
Her hand tightens on the frame, but she doesn't move.
"I've watched you fill my home with something I didn't know it was missing. And then I've watched you pack your bag and walk out my door and go to them."
She turns around. Her eyes are bright. Furious. But she's still here.
"Tomorrow you go to Bastien," I continue. "You will eat at his table and he'll look at you with those damn eyes that see everything. And I'll be in Milan. Going slowly insane."
"So your solution was to lie to me?"
"My solution was to tell you the truth. The lie was just how I got you in the room."
"That's not better."
"I know."
"It's manipulative and—"
"—I know."
She stares at me. I hold her gaze.
"I want you," I say. "And wanting you has driven me past every boundary I thought I had."
"That's not my problem to solve."
"No. It isn't."
She's breathing hard. So am I. The study feels like it's shrinking.
"If you'd asked me to come," she says, quieter now, "just asked—without the lie—I would have."
"I don't know how to ask. I only know how to… arrange."
"Then learn. Because if you ever use Sophie to get to me again, I'm done. Not just angry. Done."
Her voice is steady. Her hands aren't. I can see them trembling at her sides, and her eyes keep dropping to my mouth even though the rest of her is trying very hard to stay furious.
I step closer. She doesn't step back.
"This is a terrible idea," she says.
"Yes."
"I don't forgive you."
"I'm not asking you to."
Her hand comes up between us. Palm flat against my chest. I can feel her fingers shaking through my shirt. She's holding me away and holding herself back and it's the same gesture and we both know it.
I cover her hand with mine. Press it harder against my chest so she can feel what she's doing to me, how fast my heart is going, how far past control I already am. Her breath catches and her fingers curl against the fabric and I watch her eyes go dark.
"Madeline," I say.
And then I'm done talking.
I take her face in both hands and I kiss her.
Not carefully. Not like a man who's thought it through.
She gasps against my mouth and for one second she's rigid, braced against what's happening, and then her hands fist in my shirt and she's kissing me back and there's nothing careful about either of us anymore.
I push her against the bookshelves. Her back hits leather spines, and she doesn't flinch, just drags me closer. I bite her lower lip, and she makes a sound that I am going to hear every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
"I hate you for this," she breathes.
I lift her. Her legs wrap around my waist and I carry her to the sofa because my bedroom is past Sophie's door and I won't—won't—walk past my sleeping daughter to do what I'm about to do.
I lay her down against the leather and I have to stop.
Just for a second. Her hair fanning across the dark cushions.
The strip of bare stomach where her sweater has ridden up.
The way the lamplight turns her skin gold.
I've spent eighteen years studying the way fabric falls on a body.
I know the architecture of a woman's form the way an engineer knows load-bearing walls.
And nothing I've ever seen in a fitting room or on a runway compares to Madeline Blake on my sofa with fury in her eyes and her chest heaving.
"Look at me," I say, settling my weight over her. "Don't close your eyes. I need to know you're here with me."
"I'm here."
"Say my name."
"étienne." It comes out rough. Like the word itself costs her something.
My hand slides beneath her sweater. Her skin is warm silk under my palms and I take my time.
I trace the curve of her waist, the dip of her stomach, the edge of her ribs.
I'm mapping her the way I map a collection.
Learning which lines matter and which are decoration.
She tenses under my fingers, body arching toward me even as her jaw clenches.
I push the sweater up and press my mouth to her collarbone. She smells like vanilla and cold air and the combination is doing something to my brain that I can't undo. Her fingers twist into my hair and she pulls, hard, and the sting of it sends heat down my spine.
"Quiet," I murmur against her skin. "Sophie's a light sleeper."