Epilogue
ALEC
Aweek later.
The hallway outside the poker room smells of leather and aged wood and whatever obscenely expensive candle The Retreat burns in its wall sconces. I’ve walked this hallway hundreds of times over the years, usually alone, usually with my phone in one hand and glass of whiskey in the other.
Tonight the only thing I’m holding is Ella’s hand, warm and soft in mine. Her steps slow beside me and she pauses to smooth her skirt and adjust the scarf around her neck.
“You look amazing,” I tell her. Because she does.
Black dress, strappy heels that make her legs look fantastic and bring her petite height up at least three inches.
And that scarf. The turquoise silk is bright against her creamy skin, the painted sea turtle adding a touch of whimsy that’s pure Ella.
My Ella.
“I feel like I’m about to audition for acceptance into a secret society.”
“You’re not far off.” I chuckle, leaning close to press a kiss below her ear. “Don’t worry. They’re going to love you.”
She grins and slips her hand back into my grasp. Her fingers are warm. My chest is quiet. My pulse is steady and unremarkable, and I’m aware of that fact the way I’d notice the absence of a sound I’d stopped hearing. Something that used to hurt and doesn’t anymore.
I open the door.
The room is exactly as I left it a month ago.
Mahogany paneling, crystal chandelier throwing amber light across the green felt, leather chairs occupied by men I’ve known for over a decade.
The hand is mid-deal. Wyatt is shuffling.
Brad is leaning back with his arms crossed.
Gabriel sits with his usual stillness, reading the table.
Damien is smiling, which still hasn’t stopped being strange.
And Finn is drumming his fingers because the man is incapable of sitting still. His sandy-blond hair catches the low light, his greenish-blue eyes already locked on the doorway before I’ve fully stepped through it.
“Look who decided to rejoin the living,” he says, giving me a crooked smirk.
“Beckett.” Brad spots us next. His ice-blue gaze moves from me to Ella and back, and a slow smile of acknowledgment lessens his usual glower. “Good to have you back.”
“Gentlemen.” I pull out Ella’s chair before taking my own. “This is Ella.”
Everyone greets her, and she responds with her usual warmth and authenticity. More than one of my friends give me subtle nods of approval.
“The woman who put Alec flat on his ass in the hospital,” Finn adds, winking as he welcomes her. “He can’t stop talking about you.”
“Technically, his own stubbornness put him in the hospital,” Ella replies, settling into the chair like she’s known this crew for years. Comfortable. Ready to work the room. “I just gave him a reason to finally notice.”
Wyatt laughs first. A short, surprised sound, like he wasn’t expecting her to come out swinging. Brad’s grin widens. Damien nods once. Quiet approval. He’s been where I am. He knows the terrain.
My hand finds Ella’s knee under the table.
My palm lands there, on the warm skin above the hem of her dress and stays because that’s where it belongs.
She turns a private smile on me, and it’s all I can do to tamp down the desire that’s always there whenever I look at her.
She presses her leg a fraction closer to mine, and the contact settles into my body like the first sip of something good.
“Last time you were at this table, you face-planted into the chips,” Brad says, dealing Ella in without being asked. “You look marginally less terrible tonight.”
“High praise from a man whose poker face is worse than his haircut.”
“Beckett’s feeling better,” Wyatt confirms to the table. “The insults are back.”
The cards come around. Ella picks up her hand and studies it with a focus I recognize from watching her read a crowded diner floor. She’s assessing. Not the cards. The men. The tempo of the room. The way they speak to each other. The things they don’t say.
It took me years to learn the language of this table, the shorthand of men who show affection through well-aimed sarcasm and good-natured ball-busting. Ella’s mastering it in seconds.
“So,” Gabriel says, his dark eyes settling on me. “Are we going to address the elephant in the room, or are we pretending Alec Beckett isn’t about to relocate to the desert for love?”
Finn chuckles. “Isn’t Sedona one of those hippy towns full of woo-woo vibes and mystics on every corner?”
I glance at Ella, recalling a time not too long ago when I sounded like the same kind of jackass as my friend. “Don’t knock it if you haven’t been there, Finn. Sedona’s beautiful. It’s good for my soul.”
Ella reaches for my hand, giving it a tender squeeze. “Told you so.”
“Yeah, you did.” I lean over and kiss her, just a brief brush of our lips.
Wyatt chortles into his whiskey. “Never thought I’d hear the day this guy starts waxing on about looking after his soul. Now we know he’s lost it.”
“Speaking of losers,” Finn says, clearing his throat. “Didn’t you come here to square up, Alec?”
I nod. “Glad to.”
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the check I wrote earlier tonight. I slide it to the center of the table, next to the pot. One million dollars, made out to the Last Billionaire Standing fund.
“I’m officially out, gentlemen.”
My friends stare at the check for a moment before Brad breaks the silence.
“Three down,” he says, pointing around the table. “Mason, Damien, and Alec are out. That leaves four of us still standing.”
Finn gestures to me with his whiskey glass. “Congrats to Alec and Ella. As for the rest of you, best of luck. I’m one step closer to winning the whole pot now.”
The boast earns him a round of guffaws and insults, all of which he takes in stride, sipping his drink like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“A week off to save your life,” Wyatt says, shaking his head at me. “And it cost you a million dollars.”
I look at the check on the felt. A million dollars.
I’ve made more than a hundred times that building HoloTech.
I would pay a thousand times that to be with the woman sitting next to me, whose hand has now migrated to my thigh under the table, her fingertips tracing a lazy line along the inner seam of my trousers that is making it very difficult to maintain any kind of dignified composure.
“Smartest million I ever spent,” I say.
Ella squeezes my leg. I catch her eye and she’s looking at me with that expression I first saw in our suite in Barbados. The one where her blue eyes go soft and the corner of her mouth tilts and the rest of the room ceases to exist.
I have to look away before I do something these men will never let me live down.
The game continues. Ella folds her first hand and then wins her second with a bluff so clean that Brad demands to see her cards and then stares at them in silence for a full five seconds.
She shrugs. “Waitressing is just poker with food. You read the table, you know who’s bluffing about the steak being overcooked, and you never show your hand until the tip’s on the ticket.”
“I like her,” Brad announces to me. “She’s a hell of a lot quicker than you.”
“I’m aware.”
The banter rolls on. The cards come and go. Ella holds her own, not by pretending to be something she’s not, but by being exactly what she is: warm, sharp, funny, and entirely unimpressed by the net worth in this room.
She asks Damien about Willow. She tells Wyatt his shuffle is sloppy and offers to show him a trick she learned from a line cook named Hector.
She laughs at Brad’s bad jokes and makes a worse one in return.
She belongs at this table the way she belongs everywhere she goes.
Not because the room changes for her, but because she walks in and any room gets instantly better.
The same way my life has gotten better simply for having her in it.
Finn has been quiet for the last several minutes.
Not his usual quiet, the kind where he’s loading a joke.
This is different. He’s watching Ella and me with an expression I can’t fully decode.
Curiosity, maybe? Calculation, definitely.
Something more than either of those that he probably doesn’t recognize yet.
He catches me watching him and his mouth quirks.
“Don’t look at me like that, Beckett. I’m not going to catch whatever you people have.”
“Nah, of course you won’t.”
Good luck with that one, Finn. When the right woman steps in front of you, all bets are off. I’m the living proof of that.
He picks up his whiskey. Takes a slow sip. Says nothing else.
The evening winds down. The poker pot gets divided. The check stays in the center of the table as a monument to what it bought me, which is everything.
Wyatt starts to cash out. Brad is telling a story about a yacht and a misunderstanding in Monaco. Gabriel is already standing, buttoning his jacket.
“So,” Damien says, leaning back. He’s the only one at this table who would ask this question sincerely, because he’s the only one besides me who’s been where I am. “How did you know? That Ella was the one.”
The room doesn’t go quiet. The guys are still talking over each other, chips clicking, laughter filling the dark corners.
But the question lands in the space between Damien and me with enough weight that I feel it in my chest. Not the vise.
Not the ache. Just the warm, full-body recognition of a truth I’ve been living inside for weeks now.
I think about the meditation app. The hushed voice telling me to find a place of comfort and calm. The blank screen behind my eyelids every single time until the morning I sat in a hospital bed with her scarf in my fist and she filled the space. All of it. Every corner.
I don’t say any of that. These men would never let me hear the end of it, and besides, the explanation is simpler than the story.
“Because Ella taught me what home feels like.”
Damien nods. Once. He knows exactly what that sentence costs and what it’s worth.
Under the table, Ella’s hand finds mine. Her fingers lace through mine and she squeezes, not hard, just enough to say I heard that, and I love you, and this is real. I squeeze back.
I walked into this room one month ago alone, my hands shaking, my chest seizing, convinced that control was the only thing keeping me alive.
I was wrong about all of it. Every single thing. And sitting here with her hand in mine, a million-dollar check on the table, and the sound of my closest friends giving me shit I absolutely deserve, I can say with certainty that being wrong is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Ella leans over. Her lips brush my ear. “Take me home now, Alec.”
I look at her. At those soft blue eyes. At the scarf tied loosely around her throat and the smile that should still come with a warning label.
“Yeah,” I say, caressing her cheek. “Let’s go home.”