Chapter 6-Close Quarters
Richard was already up.
I lay still, listening. The coffee maker had finished. Footsteps moved across my kitchen. Water ran in the sink.
I pulled on sleep shorts and a tank top and told myself I was getting coffee.
That was all.
I froze in the doorway.
Richard stood at my counter in running shorts and nothing else, pouring coffee into two mugs.
His back to me. Morning light cut across his shoulders—broader than I'd let myself notice when he was wearing a shirt—and I could see every line of muscle beneath his skin.
The way they shifted as he moved. Lean and defined.
The kind of build that came from early morning gym sessions, from discipline, from the same methodical approach he brought to everything else.
A thin scar curved along his left shoulder blade. I wanted to trace it with my fingers.
The thought hit me before I could stop it.
He turned.
We locked eyes.
Neither of us moved.
I watched him glance down. Slowly. My almost see-through white tank top. The outline of everything underneath. Lower, to sleep shorts that barely covered anything. Then back up to my face.
His jaw tightened.
My breath caught.
Three heartbeats. Four. The morning light hit the line of his collarbone, the hollow at the base of his throat. He'd clearly just showered because his hair was still damp, and I could smell his soap from there—something clean and masculine that made my stomach tighten and heat pool low in my belly.
The rise and fall of his chest. Steady. Controlled. But faster than it had been a moment ago.
The way he was looking at me—like he was taking it in, like he didn't want to miss any of it. Like he was memorizing the sight of me standing in his doorway wearing almost nothing.
"Morning," he said, his voice rough. Lower than usual.
I made myself move. Crossed the kitchen on legs that didn't feel as steady as they should. The space between him and the counter was tight, and I had to turn sideways to reach the mug.
My shoulder brushed his chest. Bare skin against bare skin, just for a second.
It shouldn't have mattered. It was nothing.
Except it wasn't.
I felt it everywhere—the solid line of muscle, the heat of him, the sharp breath he pulled in like it hit him too.
My hand wasn't steady when I took the mug. I told myself to get it together. It was just coffee. Just a few inches of space—close enough that I had to think about it. About not putting my hands on his chest and pulling him to me.
Before I found out what his mouth tasted like. What his hands would feel like on my skin. What sound he'd make if I pressed my body against his and stopped pretending either of us could think about anything else.
I took the coffee and retreated to my bedroom.
When I came back out twenty minutes later—dressed, composed, every wall rebuilt exactly where it belonged—he was fully clothed and reading something on his phone.
He didn't mention it.
Neither did I.
I made toast the same way I always did, and somehow that morning, I ruined it.
Not dramatically. No smoke alarm. No blackened bread. Just toast left in the toaster, thirty seconds too long because my mind wasn't on the toast.
I stared at it like it had betrayed me personally.
Richard moved quietly behind me in my kitchen.
Which still didn't feel real. Which I was not going to examine too closely.
"You don't have to make it again," he said.
"I know."
"Blaire."
"I burned the toast." I slid it onto a plate anyway. "It's still edible."
His mouth twitched.
And this was the part nobody warned you about when someone moved into your space.
Not the logistics. I could handle logistics. Closet space. Bathroom counters. An extra coffee mug beside mine in the sink.
Easy.
It was the awareness of him that kept undoing me. The sound of his footsteps behind me. The quiet weight of another person existing in rooms I'd spent years teaching myself to survive alone in.
I left the toast on the plate and slipped back to my bedroom to grab my bag.
By 7:40, Richard had settled on the couch, laptop open, completely still. He'd been like that since day one. I'd noticed. I was trying not to keep noticing.
He didn't look up when I came back out. He was wearing a grey Henley I'd never seen before and reading something that had made a small vertical line appear between his eyebrows.
"You have the Bennett deposition at ten," he said.
"I'm aware."
"And the Caldwell call at twelve-thirty." He still hadn't looked up. "Which you scheduled over your lunch."
"I'm aware of my calendar, Richard."
"You haven't eaten anything."
I looked at the toast, still sitting on the plate where I'd left it. Looked at the empty coffee mug. Looked back at him, which was a mistake, because he'd finally glanced up and the morning light through the windows was doing something indecent to the line of his jaw.
I wasn't going to think about the first night.
I had placed the first night in the bottom drawer, beneath the photograph, beneath the expired protein bars, and it was going to stay there.
"I'll get something at the office," I said.
He held my gaze for one beat. Two. Then he looked back at his screen. "There are protein bars in the cabinet above the microwave."
"Those are for emergencies."
"Blaire."
He made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. I grabbed my keys and my bag and told myself the warmth moving up the back of my neck was the apartment running hot.
He was already at the door when I got there. Jacket on. Not blocking it, exactly—standing close enough that I'd have to go around him to reach the handle.
"I drive myself to work," I said.
"I know."
"I have done so for years without a problem."
"I know." He gestured toward the door and waited patiently for me to stop arguing. "I'll follow you to the garage. We take separate cars."
I looked at his hand. Looked at the door. Thought about the flowers on my desk, the open drawer, the weeks of feeling watched that I'd convinced myself was nothing.
"Fine," I said.
He didn't say anything. Opened the door.
The office was mine in a way the apartment, suddenly, wasn't.
I had built every square foot of my professional life with the same deliberate framework. The nameplate on the door. The precisely arranged desk. The way I walked into the building—spine straight, heels measured, an expression that said I had everything handled before I opened my mouth.
Whitmore & Locke had been the one place I could pretend to be Sunshine Blaire without it causing a problem, because the pretense was the point. The people around me expected it.
The people around me required it.
Richard had worked three floors up six months earlier. We'd kept it professional. Kept our distance.
We were both careful.
I had approximately four minutes at my desk before he appeared in the doorway.
He sat in the chair across from me like he'd done it a thousand times, which he had not. Opened his laptop. Didn't say anything.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, the Bennett deposition prep I'd been running through for the few minutes before he came through the door fell apart completely.
"You don't have to be here," I said.
"I know."
"I'm perfectly safe in my own?—"
"I know." He didn't look up. "I'm not here because I think something will happen at the office. I'm here because if something does, I'd like to be in the same building."
This was, technically, a reasonable position.
I hated it.
I pulled up the Bennett file and attempted to regain my concentration.
He came with me to the deposition.
He sat in the back of the conference room where Dr. Bennett couldn't see him from her position on the stand.
I stood in front of him wearing my best dark navy suit and walked Dr. Bennett through three years of testimony with the same focused precision I always brought to depositions.
I didn't think about Richard once.
I thought about him twice.
He crossed one ankle over his knee, and I caught it both times, out of the corner of my eye. Both times, I made myself look back at Dr. Bennett immediately.
Afterward, in the hallway, he fell into step beside me.
"That was?—"
"Don't."
"I was going to say thorough."
"I know what you were going to say." I turned toward my office. "Don't."
We walked in silence. His stride matched mine. It always had.
I stopped at my office door. He stopped half a step behind me, close enough that the space between us felt… deliberate.
I stayed where I was.
"You should eat something," he said. Quietly. Not like a directive—like a fact, offered without pressure, take it or leave it.
I went inside and pulled a protein bar from the bottom drawer. The same expired protein bars I'd put away weeks ago, on top of the surveillance photos. I ate one anyway.
He didn't comment.
By four PM, my focus was shot. The Caldwell call had run forty minutes over, which meant Richard had migrated from the chair to the small couch along the wall, working through something that had his full attention, a legal pad filling up beside him. Shirt collar loosened, completely absorbed.
"Caldwell?" he said, without looking up.
"They blinked. We'll have paperwork by Friday."
"Good."
Silence. The kind that should have felt easy, but didn't. I didn't know what to do with it.
He wasn't waiting for anything from me. He just worked three feet away, the soft click of the keyboard, that slow, even breathing that kept drawing me back to him.
I pulled up the next file. Morrison contracts—a different case entirely.
Read the same paragraph four times.
"There's a silver sedan," Richard said. "It's been following you for weeks. Declan ran the plates."
I looked up.
Silver sedan.
The words hit hard.
Rowan drove a silver Mercedes. Not the same model—not even close—but for half a second, I was back in the Whitmore Foundation parking garage eight months ago, staring at my phone.
Another message. Another threat about what he'd do if I didn't come back—to me, to my father, to Charlotte. And the sick realization that he knew. My schedule. Where I parked. That I always checked my rearview mirror twice before pulling out.