Sneak Peak
Sneak Peek – When Quiet Waters Ignite - Hunter & Jessica’s Story
PROLOGUE
Jessica
The champagne was the good kind. It didn't try too hard — no aggressive bubbles, no cloying sweetness, just a clean, expensive nothing that left zero impression.
Just like everything else tonight.
I pressed two fingers to my earpiece and redirected the catering manager to the south terrace before he turned a minor garnish crisis into a full-scale meltdown.
Crossed the rooftop in four strides — four strides in four-inch Manolo Blahniks on polished concrete, because I'd learned years ago that if you couldn’t run an event in heels, you had no business running an event.
I chose the black D'Orsay pair tonight. The ones that cost more than my first month's rent in this city and were worth every cent because they made my five-foot-three frame look like it belonged at the front of any room.
I caught the lighting tech's eye and pointed at the spot on the east railing where the amber wash had gone cold — he fixed it before I finished the gesture. I smiled at the client's wife and complimented her dress before she could realize anything was amiss.
The wind off the Hudson caught my hair, and I smoothed the dark strands back before the blowout that had taken forty-five minutes could get ruined. I had painstakingly made sure it fell past my shoulders in that way that looked effortless despite being anything but.
Like everything else about me.
Three hundred guests on a Manhattan rooftop in October.
The skyline did what the skyline always did — standing there looking like a goddamn postcard, all lit up and self-important, daring you to be impressed.
The string quartet was nailing the setlist I'd agonized over for two weeks.
The floral installations were architectural.
The passed hors d'oeuvres were plated on black slate because I'd decided six months ago that white porcelain was dead, and I'd been right, apparently, because the food editor from Eater was photographing every single one.
The whole thing was flawless. Top to bottom, stem to stern, not a hair out of place. Including mine.
My client found me near the bar and gripped my arm with both hands.
Her eyes were wet when she said, "Jessica, this is the most incredible night of my life!” I squeezed her hands back, and my face did the thing — the curve of my mouth, the warmth, the crinkle at my eyes.
Red lips holding their shape the way they'd been holding their shape since six o'clock this evening, because I didn't wear red lipstick that moved.
It was my armor. My signature. The thing people remembered when they forgot everything else about my face.
"This is what we do," I said. My voice hit every note it was supposed to, and my face held every shape it was supposed to, but behind it all, there was nothing. A clean white room with the lights off.
I stood in the middle of something I'd built from a blank brief and a rooftop with bad drainage.
Three hundred people in cocktail attire and me in a black silk slip dress that moved when I moved and cost a small fortune, and I knew I looked exactly like the woman I'd spent ten years becoming.
Polished. Powerful. Put together in a way that left no seams showing.
Which was why there was a guy who had been circling me since nine.
Good suit. Square jaw. The kind of confidence that came from a trust fund and a personal trainer.
He'd done the orbit — the casual pass-by, the eye contact held a beat too long, the repositioning at the bar so he'd be in my sightline when I came back for a drink.
The playbook. I'd seen it a thousand times.
He made his move at ten fifteen. Smooth. Practiced. Leaned in close enough that I caught something expensive and woodsy and completely interchangeable with every other cologne in every other bar in this city.
"Hell of an event," he said. His eyes dropped to my mouth before coming back up. "You run all this?"
I let him talk. He was good at it — the right questions, the right laugh, the lean that said I'm interested without tipping into desperate.
Two years ago, this would have worked. Two years ago, I'd have let the flirtation carry me through the last hour of the night and maybe traded numbers and maybe let it turn into something that felt like enough for a while.
His hand found my elbow. Warm. Confident.
Proprietary in that way men do when they think the conversation is going well and they want to anchor it to something physical.
I waited for something to register. A flutter.
A hum. Anything at all to tell me the machinery was still working, that the part of me that responded to a good-looking man with warm hands and an easy smile was still in there somewhere. I gave it a full five seconds.
The five seconds came back empty.
I pulled my arm back. "Excuse me," I said, already moving. "I have to check on the terrace." My heels clicked on the rooftop tile, and I was already thinking about the lighting cue on the east railing and whether the valet line was backed up.
The guy was gone from my mind before I reached the door.
The October air hit my bare arms, and I leaned against the railing and tipped my head back. The sky above Manhattan was the color of a bruised peach. No stars. Just that thick amber glow of ten million lights drowning out everything above me.
I used to love this sky. I used to stand on rooftops just like this one and feel like I was standing on top of the world, like the city was mine, like I'd grabbed it by the throat the way I'd promised myself I would when I was eighteen and furious and leaving.
Now it just looked loud.
I closed my eyes. Took a breath. Tried to find the quiet underneath the hum of ventilation units and distant horns and the muffled bass from the quartet leaking through the door behind me.
The quiet didn't come. Something else did.
Unprompted. Uninvited. Rising up from somewhere so deep in the back of my brain that I hadn't even known there was a room there, let alone that someone had left the light on in it.
The creek.
Late summer. The air thick and sweet with whatever grows along Texas creek beds in August. Water so warm it felt like I was melting the second it hit my skin. The rocks under my feet, slippery and real. The way the current pulled at my ankles like it wanted to play.
And him.
Sitting on the bank with his arms crossed over his chest, jeans rolled to the knee, boots in a neat line behind him because Hunter Blackwood took his boots off carefully, even when he was pretending he wasn't going to get in the water.
Shaking his head at me with that look — the one that said, You're insane, and I'm not getting in, but I would follow you into traffic if you asked me to .
All of it contained in a jaw that barely moved and eyes that said everything his mouth wouldn't.
I told him to get in the water. He told me he didn’t have a swimsuit. I told him to stop being a coward. He told me there was a difference between cowardice and common sense. I splashed him. He got in. Because I knew exactly what to say. I always knew exactly what to say with him.
And his laugh — God, his laugh. That rare, startled, full-body thing he did where his whole face opened up, and he looked like a different person, like the boy underneath the quiet.
The sound of it bounced off the water and the trees and settled deep in the marrow of my bones to remain there forever.
I opened my eyes. Manhattan. The bruised peach. Ten million lights competing with everything. Not a single star.
My chest ached. A real, physical ache, sharp enough that my hand went to it before I could stop myself — fingers pressing into the silk of the dress, into the space between my ribs, like I could push the feeling back where it came from.
I drained my glass. Set it on the railing. Pulled my phone out, told my assistant I had a migraine, and Irish-exited my own event. The woman who'd built the night vanishing before anyone noticed she'd left it.
The firm's weekly debrief on Monday morning ran like it always ran — fluorescent lights, bad coffee, twelve people in a glass conference room trying to outdo each other while pretending they weren't. My director, Craig, stood at the head of the table with his shirtsleeves rolled and his reading glasses on and the particular energy of a man about to deliver news he thought would make the room excited.
"We won the Copper Creek bid," he said.
The air left my lungs.
Copper Creek. Two words that belonged to creek beds and Friday night bonfires and the smell of my mother's kitchen, not to a Monday morning conference room on the thirty-second floor of a building in Midtown.
And here they were, forty-eight hours after I'd stood on a rooftop and the memory had come for me uninvited.
I didn't believe in signs. I didn't believe in the universe tapping you on the shoulder and whispering, “Pay attention.” But my hands had gone still on my notebook, and my heart was doing something it had no business doing in a conference room.
The timing felt less like a coincidence and more like a dare.
Craig was still talking. "Twelve-month county events contract. Rural Texas. Full calendar management — galas, festivals, the works. It's a smaller market, but the exposure is —"
"I'll take it."
The words left my mouth before my brain finished processing the sentence. Before I'd calculated the logistics or the optics or what it meant for my Q1 pipeline. Before the room had time to register what I'd said.
Craig looked at me over his reading glasses. "You'll take it," he repeated. Tasting the words. Finding them strange, coming from a woman who color-coded her own calendar and didn't take a meeting without three talking points pre-loaded.