POV Caroline
Sleep is impossible.
The bed stretches between us like a battlefield, each inch of mattress charged with the weight of everything we refuse to say. I lie rigid on the right side, staring at the shadows dancing across the ceiling, acutely aware of James's breathing three feet away.
He hasn't moved in twenty minutes. Neither have I.
"Stop pretending you're asleep." His voice cuts through the darkness. "Your breathing changed ten minutes ago."
"Maybe I'm having a nightmare."
"Are you?"
"I'm trapped in a cottage with a man whose family destroyed mine. You tell me."
The sheets rustle as he shifts onto his side. I keep my eyes fixed on the ceiling, but I feel the heat of his gaze like a brand against my skin.
"We need to talk about this, Caroline. The avoidance isn't working for either of us."
"There's nothing to talk about." I sit up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. "We have an arrangement. We're executing a plan. Feelings don't factor into the equation."
"Feelings are the only thing that factors into it." He sits up too. "You kissed me first and then threw me out like I'd committed a crime. And now we're sharing a bed, and you're so tense I can feel it from here."
The anger comes sudden and hot, propelling me to my feet. "What do you want from me, James? Gratitude?"
"I want honesty. Something you seem incapable of providing."
"You want honesty?" I grab the decorative pillow from the armchair and hurl it at his head. He catches it easily, which only makes me angrier. "Your sister was behind the wheel when my brother died. Every time I look at you, I see her face. Every time you're decent to me, I feel like I'm betraying Will's memory. Is that honest enough for you?"
"Lucy didn't murder your brother." He rises from the bed, and even in the darkness, I can see the tension coiling through his shoulders. "It was an accident. Ice on the road. She loved William—genuinely loved him."
"She was driving too fast. Everyone said so." I snatch a leather-bound book from the nightstand and throw it at his chest. He deflects it with his forearm, and it thuds against the floor.
"Everyone who? The society gossips who needed someone to blame?" His voice rises. "Lucy drove like a grandmother. She was the most cautious person I've ever known."
"Then why is my twin dead?"
The question tears out of me, raw and ragged. I'm shaking now, and the tears I've been holding back burn at the edges of my vision.
My hand finds a ceramic vase on the dresser, and before I can think, I've thrown it against the wall behind him. It shatters into a hundred pieces, the sound violent and satisfying.
"Why is Will in the ground while I'm trapped in this nightmare, being sold to strangers, carrying—" I stop myself, but not quickly enough. The word hangs in the air, unfinished and damning.
"Care to finish?"
"I don't know what I'm saying. I can't hold anything together anymore. Everything makes me want to scream or cry or throw things, and I hate it." A porcelain figurine follows the vase, exploding against the doorframe in a spray of white fragments. "I hate feeling like this. I hate that I can't control myself."
A brass candlestick flies from my hand next, clattering against the hardwood. Then a crystal paperweight that shatters against his headboard when he ducks. I'm reaching for a small marble clock when James finally speaks.
"Caroline, you're going to run out of ammunition eventually."
I catch my reflection in the mirror above the dresser—hair wild from tossing in bed, eyes red-rimmed and furious, wearing nothing but an oversized silk sleep shirt that's slipped off one shoulder. I look unhinged, feral, and dangerous.
James's mouth twitches.
"Stop." I point at him, my voice deadly. "Stop. Smiling."
"I'm not smiling."
"Your mouth is doing that thing. That almost-laugh thing. Don't you dare laugh at me, James Calloway."
"You've just destroyed half of Oliver's guest room and nearly concussed me with a paperweight. I'm allowed a reaction." The twitch remains, spreading into something that looks dangerously close to actual amusement.
"This isn't funny."
"The situation isn't funny. You, however—" He gestures at me, at the destruction scattered across the floor, at the marble clock still clutched in my raised hand. "You're magnificent when you're furious."
The word detonates something in my chest. I drop the clock and cross the room in three strides, my palm swinging toward his face with every ounce of rage I possess.
He catches my wrist before the blow lands.
His fingers close around me like a shackle, firm but not painful, and the sudden stillness is more jarring than any impact could have been.
We stand frozen, my arm suspended between us, his grip the only thing keeping me from falling or flying apart entirely.
"Let go of me."
"No." His voice is low, controlled, but I can hear the strain beneath it. "Not until you stop trying to destroy everything in reach, including yourself."
"You don't get to tell me what to do. You don't get to stand there looking at me like I'm some kind of—"
"Like you're what? Human? Broken? Allowed to feel something other than ice-cold hatred for once in your life?"
"You—"
"I'm honest about my humanity," he continues, his grip on my wrist loosening but not releasing. "Something you seem determined to deny yourself." He steps closer, glass crunching beneath his feet. "You've built hatred into a fortress, Caroline. You hide behind it because feeling anything else would require vulnerability, and vulnerability terrifies you more than any enemy ever could."
"You don't know anything about me."
The words come out vicious, meant to wound. But James doesn't flinch.
"I know you're terrified of needing anyone because everyone you've ever needed has abandoned you or been taken away." Each word lands like a blow. "Your father ignored you. Your mother weaponized you. Your brother was the only person who made you feel seen, and now he's gone. I know you look at me like you're waiting for me to prove you right—to betray you, to disappoint you, to give you a reason to keep those walls intact."
The accuracy of it steals my breath. I stare at him, my heart hammering, and the hatred I've been clinging to wavers like a candle flame in a storm.
"And you," I say quietly, the words pulled from somewhere deep and dangerous, "are so afraid of becoming your father that you've become a man who wants and pretends he doesn't. You'd rather be empty than risk the kind of destruction that broke your dad into pieces."
Silence stretches between us. The fire crackles. And something in the air shifts—the anger transforming into something raw and electric and infinitely more dangerous.
James moves toward me, and my breath catches.
"You think I don't want?" His voice is rough, wrecked, stripped of every layer of control. "You think I haven't spent every moment since that hotel trying not to want you?"