Chapter 29 #2
Ella beneath me. Our last night. Her eyes open, her hand on my face, her thumb tracing my cheek while I was inside her.
No laughter. No deflection. Just her, unguarded, looking up at me like I was worth trusting with everything she had.
And I looked back and knew. I knew then.
I loved her and I hadn’t earned the right to say it because I was still lying to her, and the knowing was so heavy and so complete that I almost said it anyway.
One more image forms on the inside of my closed eyelids.
Her hand on my chest. The image I carried to the hallway floor after I called 911.
Her palm flat over my heart, fingers spread, the way she fell asleep against me every night in that suite.
Trusting the thing underneath her hand to keep beating.
Trusting me to be the man she thought I was while the truth sat in my chest like poison I gave myself.
The heart she trusted is still beating. It’s just broken now.
Not from a cardiac event. From her absence.
From the look on her face when the cameras went off and the truth hit her broadside, and I watched every piece of trust I’d built disintegrate in her blue eyes.
From the sound of suitcase wheels on hardwood.
From three words I said too late to a woman who was already gone.
She fills the space. All of it. Every corner of the empty room my mind has produced since day one with this ridiculous meditation app. Peace was never a place for me. It was a person. It’s Ella. It’s been her from the beginning, and she’s in Sedona right now, thinking I let her go without a fight.
The backs of my eyes sting. I’m sitting in a hospital bed in a gown that doesn’t close in the back and a meditation app playing its idiot chimes through my earbuds. My throat is tight. My hand finds the scarf on the table beside me. The only piece of her I have left.
I wrap the silk around my fist and hold on.
The app is still playing. I pull the earbuds out and set the phone on my lap to give myself a moment to think amid the quiet.
Then the door opens and the quiet is over.
“Jesus Christ, Beckett. You look like shit.”
Finn Bardot fills the doorway like he was built for entrances.
Sandy-blond hair, greenish-blue eyes already scanning the room with the look of a man who finds hospitals personally offensive.
Behind him, Wyatt Reed steps in carrying a paper coffee cup, his dark hair still too perfectly styled for a hospital visit at eight-thirty in the morning.
“Martha called us last night,” Wyatt says. He sets his cup down on my bedside table. “She said you were being discharged this morning. We came to make sure you’re actually alive.”
“I’m alive.”
“Barely,” Finn says, dropping into the visitor’s chair like he owns it. His gaze lands on the scarf, the gown, the wristband, the stubble. “You’re the only person I know who can come back from a vacation still wound tight enough to land in a cardiac ward.”
“It wasn’t cardiac.” The words come out flat. I look at Wyatt, who is watching me with the careful attention of a man deciding how hard to push. “It was an anxiety episode. My heart’s fine.”
“Anxiety,” Wyatt repeats. He leans back, arms folded, his expression shifting from amusement to something sharper. “You? You actually had an anxiety attack.”
“Apparently.”
Finn is quiet for exactly one second. Then the grin arrives, slow and deliberate.
“Something’s not adding up here. What exactly happened at that resort you went to?
Let me guess. You were sent there to relax, but you spent the past ten days negotiating another multi-billion-dollar acquisition?
One nine-billion deal about to close wasn’t enough? ”
“Nothing like that,” I grumble. “I met someone.”
Wyatt’s dark brows shoot up. “A little holiday fling? Don’t tell me you overdid it with some lovely island beauty and landed in the ER.”
He makes air quotes on the words “overdid it” and I swear if I wasn’t wearing a hospital gown with my ass hanging out of it, I’d leap off the bed and punch the bastard.
“It wasn’t a fling, and Ella’s not from Barbados. She lives in Sedona.”
Wyatt frowns. “As in, Arizona?”
I nod, and he leans in, suddenly very interested.
“Are you saying you fell in love?” The miserable look I give him is answer enough. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Finn smirks. “Alec Beckett, the third man to fall. I sure as hell didn’t have that on my bingo card. For the record, I believe this means you’ve officially forfeited your stake in our little wager. The Last Billionaire Standing field is thinning.”
Wyatt shoots him a glower. “Read the room, Finn. Fuck.”
“I am reading the room. The room says he’s lovesick, not dying.
Those are very different problems, and one of them is a lot funnier than the other.
” Finn turns back to me, and for half a second the grin slips.
“The fact that a woman put you flat on your back in a hospital bed is either the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard, or proof that she’s worth every cent of the million you’re about to lose. ”
He says it like a joke. But his eyes hold mine a beat too long, and what’s in them isn’t humor. It’s the look of a man standing on the edge of something he doesn’t believe in, staring at the wreckage below and privately calculating the odds that it happens to him.
It won’t, his expression says. I’m smarter than that.
I’ve seen that face before. In my own mirror. About three weeks ago.
“You need anything before we head out?” Wyatt asks, picking up his coffee. “I can drive you home once they spring you.”
“Thanks,” I murmur. “I don’t need a ride home.” I glance down at the scarf that’s still wrapped around my hand. “I need to get to Sedona.”
They both look at me. Wyatt with understanding. Finn with a note of disbelief, maybe even sympathy. He steps closer to my bed. Then he does something I don’t expect. He reaches over and grips my shoulder. Brief. Firm. The contact of a man who doesn’t do sentiment but is doing it anyway.
“Go get her, Beckett,” he says. And walks out.
Wyatt lingers a moment. Puts his hand on the doorframe. “Call if you need anything.”
Then he’s gone too.
I spent three weeks engineering the perfect context for a confession. The restaurant, the brownstone, the neighborhood walk. Every variable accounted for except the one that mattered: Ella.
I tried to control the delivery of every important truth in this relationship, and every attempt to control it made the explosion worse.
No more. No plan. No strategy. No engineered context. Just me and the words I need her to hear and whatever comes after.
I pick up my phone. Scroll to my private pilot’s contact record and tap his number.
“Ray. It’s Alec.” My voice is rough. I clear it. “What’s the status on the jet’s refurb?”
“Wrapped up five days ago, sir.”
“Good. How fast can you get me to Sedona, Arizona?”
A pause. The sound of a man recalculating his morning. “I can have the jet prepped and ready for you in ninety minutes, Mr. Beckett. Flight time is about four and a half hours.”
“Do it. I’ll be there.”