14. Public Pressure #2
"I spent twenty minutes getting her regulated after you walked away," she said. "She asked if you were mad because she laughed too loud."
Something inside me folded in on itself.
I looked away first.
"Don't," Riley said. "Don't you dare disappear now."
"You want honesty?" I asked. "Fine. Investors are threatening to pull funding unless I announce a comeback exhibition in forty-eight hours."
Her face changed. Not with shock. With understanding, which was worse.
"Luca," she said softly.
I looked away.
"Are you considering it?"
"No."
But the answer came too fast, and we both heard it.
She rounded the desk then. I should have moved. I didn't.
"You don't have to decide this alone."
A laugh scraped out of me. "That's sweet."
She flinched, and I hated myself before the sound faded.
"I'm not trying to be sweet," she said. "I'm trying to be here."
"You can't fix this."
"I didn't say I could."
"You can't even understand it."
The room went quiet.
I saw the hurt in her eyes and still couldn't stop. Some part of me wanted the distance. Needed it. Because if she touched me with that mercy again, I might lean into it, and leaning was how men fell.
"You have no idea what it means to lose everything overnight," I said. "Your wife. Your identity. The only version of yourself the world ever respected. Then you wake up, and a child is looking at you like you're supposed to know how to keep breathing."
Her lips parted.
I turned toward the window before she could see what that cost me.
"Everyone wants something from me," I said. "Money. Stability. A headline. A father who doesn't break. So forgive me if I don't have room to talk about my feelings right now."
Behind me, Riley's voice came, small, wounded, and steady.
"That's not honesty, Luca. That's punishment."
Punishment.
The word stayed in the room after she said it, quiet and poisonous.
I turned back from the window. "You think I'm punishing you?"
"I think you're punishing everyone who gets close enough to care."
My laugh came out wrong. Hard. Empty. "That's a nice theory."
"It isn't a theory." Riley's eyes were bright now, but she didn't back down. She never did when it mattered. "You let me in until it scares you. Then you shove me out and call it protection."
"Because you do need protection."
"From what? You?"
The answer was too close to yes.
I moved around the desk, not toward her exactly, but close enough that her breath changed. The office felt smaller now, all glass and heat and the distant pulse of reporters shouting beyond the gates.
"You walked into my house, my life, my daughter's heart," I said. "You think that doesn't come with consequences?"
"I didn't sneak in, Luca. You opened the door."
My jaw locked.
"And now you're terrified because you can't manage me like a staff problem or a security threat.
" She gestured toward the legal notes and investor emails covering my desk.
"You can't bully grief into behaving. You can't schedule panic.
You can't control every outcome just because one terrible thing happened that you couldn't stop. "
The room went dead still.
There were places inside me no one touched and survived. She had found one with bare hands.
"Don't," I said.
Her voice softened, which made it worse. "I'm not saying Zoe's death was your fault."
"Do not say her name like you know what that cost."
Riley recoiled a fraction. I saw it. I hated it. I kept going anyway, because anger was cleaner than the thing breaking open beneath it.
"You think this is about control?" I snapped.
"It is. Because people depend on me. Ava depends on me.
Hundreds of employees depend on me. This resort goes under, they don't get poetic closure.
They lose paychecks. Homes. Insurance. The investors walk, the press feeds, Jax laughs, and my daughter gets to watch her father become a public disaster all over again. "
"I know people depend on you."
"No, you don't." My voice rose, rough enough to scrape. "You get to believe love fixes things because you haven't had to stand over a body and learn it doesn't."
Her face crumpled before she caught it. The damage was instant. The regret came slower, because pride blocked the door.
Riley stepped closer instead of away. "You don't get to hurt me because you're hurting."
I stared at her mouth. Her trembling chin. The pulse beating fast in her throat.
"I know," I said, but it came out like a warning.
She whispered, "Then stop."
I should have. God help me, I should have.
For one second, neither of us moved.
The office held its breath around us. Beyond the walls, the world kept circling, cameras waiting, investors sharpening knives, my phone vibrating itself half off the desk. None of it reached me the way Riley did.
She stood there with hurt in her eyes and fire in her spine, daring me to be better than the worst thing I knew how to become.
I failed.
I crossed the space between us and stopped close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin.
"Tell me to stop."
Her breath caught. "Would you?"
Every muscle in my body locked against the need to touch her. "Immediately."
Something shifted in her expression.
"That might be the first smart thing you've said all night."
"Low bar."
"Underground."
Then she fisted my shirt, rose onto her toes, and kissed me like she hated that she wanted to. Her palm hit my chest, not a push. Not permission either. Something trembling in between. "You're impossible."
"I know."
"You're cruel when you're scared."
"I know that too."
Her fingers curled into my shirt. The contact went through me like impact, brutal and clean. I should have stepped back. I should have apologized with my hands at my sides and my mouth shut.
Instead, I covered her hand with mine.
Riley looked up at me, eyes shining, anger and want tangled so tightly I couldn't tell where one ended.
"This doesn't fix anything," she whispered.
"No."
"It might make it worse."
"Probably."
Then she rose onto her toes and kissed me like she hated that she needed it.
I took the kiss like a starving man, all restraint snapping at once. Grief, fury, fear, want—everything I had locked down broke open against her mouth.
I'm not sure which of us initiated it; our bodies collided with a force that felt like both an explosion and a slow unraveling.
Her kiss deepened, raw and demanding, pulling me into her gravity.
I pressed my body against hers, feeling the soft curves of her form beneath the crisp fabric of her blouse.
I could taste the salt on my lips, remnants of the argument still lingering in the air, but it only fueled my need.
My hands found her waist and I backed her against the desk, papers scattering as I lifted her onto the edge.
The mahogany surface bit cold through her thin skirt, and she gasped against my mouth—not from temperature, but from the sudden vulnerability of being open to me, legs parting to make room for me between them.
"Wait," she breathed, but her fingers were already tearing at my belt, fierce and clumsy. "The door?—"
"I locked it." I had moved on instinct, some animal part of me knowing what this would become. "When I came in."
Her eyes flashed—anger at my presumption, or relief, I couldn't tell. She yanked my shirt free from my trousers, and her palms slid up my back, nails dragging hard enough to leave marks I would feel for days. I wanted them. I wanted everything she could punish me with.
I pushed her skirt higher, bunching fabric at her hips, and the sight of her thighs trembling against mine undid something in my chest. She was shaking. Not from cold—from me.
"Look at me," I demanded, though the words came out broken.
She did. Her eyes held mine—wet, furious, devastatingly open—and I felt the weight of what I was doing crash through me. This wasn't desire cleanly spent. This was desperation wearing desire's skin, two people trying to climb inside each other to escape themselves.
I touched her through her underwear and found her already wet, slick heat that made my vision narrow to a single point of focus. She moaned, sharp and involuntary, and her head fell back, throat exposed. I wanted to bite her there. I wanted to mark her, so the world would know she was mine.
"You're still angry," I said, working her with my fingers, watching her face for the truth.
"Yes." She ground the word out, hips rocking into my touch despite herself. "At you. At this. At how much I—" She cut herself off, but I heard the almost-confession echo in the silence.
I hooked my fingers in her underwear and dragged it down her legs, the fabric catching on her heels before she kicked free.
The sight of her bare on my desk, skirt rucked up and blouse still buttoned like we were only halfway to sin, unraveled something in my spine.
I should have been gentle. I should have taken my time and made this mean something better than what it was.
I wasn't capable of either.