18. No Return Flight #2
For a month, I had rehearsed this moment in conference rooms while lawyers pushed documents under my hand, in hotel rooms after midnight, and in elevators between meetings where somebody always needed another signature before I could leave Miami.
None of those rehearsals survived the sight of her.
The marina stretched between us, wide enough that I couldn’t pretend we were already close.
Piper’s attention dropped to the duffel, then moved behind me toward the empty driveway. There was no SUV waiting at the road, no assistant standing beside a vehicle, and no photographers hiding behind tinted windows. I had brought nothing with me except the bag at my feet.
“Skipper and I watched the broadcast a month ago. We didn’t know if you actually survived the corporate fallout, and then you just show up standing in the middle of a boatyard.”
She watched it.
All those nights wondering whether the feed had reached her, whether she understood why I had climbed into Reid’s SUV, whether the confession in that green room had changed anything at all—and she had been here watching.
I kept my feet planted because knowing she had seen it still didn’t tell me what she wanted from me now.
“I wanted to come back sooner.”
Her gaze returned to my face. “Then why didn’t you?”
The question carried no accusation I could hide behind. She wanted the answer, and I owed her one without polishing it into another version that made me look better.
“Reid and the team filed emergency injunctions to freeze my travel and my accounts. His lawyers started before I was even finished with my attorneys that night.”
Piper remained beside the scattered tackle. “They stopped you from leaving Miami?”
“For a while, they made leaving a bad idea.” My thumb caught against the side seam of my jeans before I let my hand drop again.
“Every time my attorneys cleared one problem, another one showed up. Contract claims. Brand penalties. Asset disputes. Reid contesting whatever he could get his hands on after I fired him.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And you stayed because you thought they’d follow you here.”
“Yes. I already brought cameras to this marina once. I wasn’t doing it again.”
Piper looked toward the highway, where the sedan had disappeared. I let the quiet sit between us rather than filling it with another defense.
“I couldn’t come near you until the ink was dry and I was legally clear,” I said. “If I had left before that, Reid could’ve turned my location into another fight. The team could’ve sent people after me. Reporters would’ve followed whichever lawyer leaked first.”
“So you stayed in Miami for four weeks.”
“I stayed until nobody had a contract they could use to drag me back.”
She looked down at the duffel again. The bag looked smaller from where she stood than it had at the airport.
“What happened to everything?”
“A lot of it got sold.”
“The houses?”
“Some assets went into settlements. Some I liquidated because keeping them made no sense.”
“And the endorsement money?”
“Penalties took plenty of that.”
Piper stared at me as if waiting for the punch line, but there wasn’t one. No hidden account waited behind the confession, no penthouse in Miami, and no black card existed to turn inconvenience into service. I had enough to live on, which was no longer the same thing as having an empire.
Her eyes moved behind me once more, searching the driveway as if a second vehicle might appear if she looked long enough.
“You came down here in a local car.”
“Yes.”
“With one bag.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody knows you’re here?”
“My attorneys know where I went. Nobody from the league does.”
A strand of hair blew across her cheek. She pushed it back and looked at the empty space behind me where Reid’s convoy had once stood, then settled her attention on me again.
“You’re actually completely broke, aren’t you? You don’t have a handler, or a return flight booked.”
I looked down at the duffel beside my feet, then back at Piper. There was no point dressing the answer up now. I had spent too many years doing that.
“I have enough to live on,” I said. “But no, I don’t have what I had before.”
Her gaze stayed on me. “And there really isn’t a car coming back for you?”
“No.”
The word carried across the yard without anything behind it. No reservation confirmation sat in my pocket. No driver waited around the corner. If Piper told me to leave, I would be walking back toward the highway with the same bag I had brought in.
She glanced down at the tackle scattered at her feet, then stepped around it.
I stayed beside the duffel.
Piper descended the wooden steps with care, one hand brushing the railing. She reached the dirt and started across the boatyard toward me, leaving the fallen tray behind on the deck.
For the first few steps, I couldn’t make myself believe she was coming all the way over.
Every instinct I had left from my old life told me to close the gap for her. Walk forward. Make the moment happen. Take control before uncertainty had time to ruin it.
I had already ruined enough by deciding what was best for her.
So I waited.
The breeze moved through the yard between us, carrying salt and diesel off the docks. Shells shifted beneath Piper’s shoes as she crossed onto the driveway, and the afternoon sounds of the marina went on around us as if nothing important was happening.
She kept coming.
Only when she had covered most of the yard did I take one step toward her. My boots scraped through the shells, and I stopped again before the movement could become an assumption.
“Do you want me to stay where I am?”
Piper slowed. “Just don’t rush me.”
“I won’t.”
She came a little closer before stopping.
A few feet remained between us. Close enough that I could make out the exhaustion beneath her eyes and the changes four weeks had brought to her pregnancy, but far enough that touching her would still require a choice neither of us had made.
My hands stayed at my sides.
Piper looked different from the woman Reid had forced me to leave behind, but the difference wasn’t something I could reduce to pregnancy or clothes or the marina sun.
She stood in front of me without the mansion, without my name protecting her, and without any reason to believe another promise from me.
That was what mattered.
“I didn’t do it for the cameras, Piper.”
Her expression shifted, but she said nothing.
“I know that’s probably impossible to believe after everything I turned into a performance.” I glanced toward the docks, then met her eyes again. “But the broadcast wasn’t another stunt. I did it because I needed you to know that there is nothing in that league worth losing you.”
Piper folded her arms. “You say that now because you don’t have the league anymore.”
“That’s fair.”
“You don’t know what this is going to look like six months from now.”
“No.”
Her expression tightened at the answer. “You’re not going to argue with me?”
“I’ve spent enough time arguing with you about things you were right about.”
That earned the smallest change around her mouth, gone before I could decide what it meant.
Piper looked past me toward the marina road. “It’s not going to be glamorous out here, Nolan. There are no assistants, no luxury suites, and no VIP access. It is just grease, salt water, and hard work, every single day.”
“I know.”
“No, you know what it looks like when you’re trying to prove something for a few weeks. That isn’t the same as living it.”
I let that sit between us. She was right again.
The weeks I had spent scraping hulls and sleeping at the Driftwood had been punishment, in part because I had treated them that way. Endure enough dirt. Take enough orders. Show enough commitment.
Living here couldn’t be another test I planned to pass.
“I don’t expect you to make this easy for me,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to pretend the last few months didn’t happen.”
Piper watched me without offering anything back.
The duffel remained behind me in the dirt, small enough to carry everything I thought worth bringing.