I hear the voice before I find its source — low, clipped, coming from somewhere past the main hallway. I follow it in the jeans and cotton shirt I pulled from my suitcase after a shower that lasted longer than it should have.
Beckett's office is large, book-lined, and occupied. A man stands behind the desk with a phone pressed to his ear and his back to the door.
Dark suit, posture that says he was working before the sun came up.
He turns when the floorboard creaks under my foot, and his eyes find me before I've decided what to say. He hangs up without a goodbye and I recognize him from the leadership page on Beckett's company site.
This is Ridley Cavanagh. Chief of staff, or chief of something — the title was vague.
He doesn't introduce himself. Just looks at me like he is assessing how much of a problem I represent and how quickly I can be removed.
"What the hell are you doing here?" No warmth. No pretense of it.
"Beckett offered the guest wing while we work through our… arrangement."
"Oh, I know about the arrangement." He leans against the desk and crosses his arms, and I can feel the interrogation shift into something more specific. "And I think you're a trap."
I don't react. My hands stay at my sides.
"Garrison Pryce is a smart man. Smart enough to send his own wife into a competitor's house with a sob story and insider access. By the time Beckett figures out the play, the damage is done." His voice is flat and direct. "Beckett thinks with his gut when women are involved."
I let every word land and I don't flinch, because defending yourself against someone who has already decided makes you look guilty.
"Are you finished?" I ask.
His jaw tightens. He wasn't expecting calm.
"Because if you are," I say, "I have documents to reconstruct and a lawyer to brief. You can watch me do all of it from whatever distance makes you comfortable."
I walk out before he answers. My bare feet are cold against the hardwood, and I can feel his stare on my back all the way down the hallway.
I spend the rest of the day in the guest room with my laptop balanced on the bed and my back against the headboard.
The laptop works fine. The problem is that everything on it points to systems I can no longer reach. Shared drives that reject my password. Cloud folders that load to a blank screen. Email accounts that greet me with 'Access denied. Contact your administrator.'
Gary is my administrator.
He must have changed every credential within hours of the gala.
Every rejected login feels like a door slamming in my face and I'm rebuilding from memory. My fingers hover over the keyboard between entries, and I keep second-guessing myself — was the Meridian contract signed in March or April?
The hours pass. I eat crackers I find in the kitchen and drink water from a glass that isn't mine in a house that isn't mine, and the absurdity of it keeps circling.
I designed hotel rooms for a living. Created spaces where strangers could feel at home. And now I am the stranger.
That realization sits in my ribs like a splinter.
Beckett comes back to the estate after dark. He finds me on the patio with my laptop open and a blanket pulled across my knees that I found folded on the guest bed. He's carrying takeout and sets them on the table between us.
We eat. The bread is warm and the crust cracks under my fingers when I tear it.
The conversation starts with timelines for the acquisition. He takes notes on his phone between bites, his thumb moving across the screen.
I watch his face while he reads my notes, searching for the flicker of doubt I've been trained to expect. The tightened jaw, the skeptical pause that preceded every time Gary overruled one of my ideas.
It never comes.
Beckett asks a follow-up question that assumes I'm right, and moves on. The ease of it makes my throat ache. Then I set my fork down.
"Why are you doing this?" I ask.
He doesn't answer right away.
He finishes chewing, sets his own fork down, and leans back in his chair. The patio light falls across the bridge of his nose and leaves the rest of his face in half-shadow. I can see one steel-blue eye clearly. "Doing what?"
"This." I press my fingertip to the table between us and draw a slow line from his side to mine. "The house, the guest wing, the takeout." My finger stops. "What do you get out of the personal part?"
His gaze drops to the line I traced and he stares at it like I've drawn something visible between us, and for a second neither of us speaks.
"I'm protecting my investment." He says it smoothly, automatically, the way he'd answer a reporter.
"That's a lie and you know it."
He tries the half-smile. "My guest wing was going to waste."
I don't laugh and hold his gaze until the smile thins and fades. The space between us tightens into a charged awareness I can feel against my skin.
"I spent eight years with a man who never gave me a straight answer about anything." I hold his gaze across the table. "I'm not doing that shit again."
The charm pulls back like a curtain being drawn. For a few seconds I see Beckett Morrow with no wit, no deflection, no carefully arranged ease. His hands rest on either side of his plate — large, still, the fingers relaxed in a way that Gary's never were.
Gary's hands were always doing something. Adjusting a cuff, gripping a glass, checking a phone.
Beckett's hands look like they're comfortable being empty.
I notice it the way you notice a current shifting beneath a surface you thought was still. His shoulders, the way he sits back in the chair — open and unhurried, taking up space without apology.
Gary was attractive in a polished, controlled way. Everything maintained, everything managed, including the way he touched me. Our intimacy became routine early and then obligation.
I can't remember the last time I wanted to be touched. Or my last orgasm.
It’s sad to realize. Even more sad to realize it this late.
But looking at Beckett with his sleeves rolled and his guard down… I wonder. Involuntarily and recklessly so of what he would be like.
The thought arrives warm and low in my stomach, and I hate it, but I don't push it away.
His phone rings and the change is immediate. His shoulders tighten, his jaw sets, and his hand reaches for the phone. He glances at the screen and his entire face closes.
When he picks up, I can hear a man's voice on the other end — clipped and loud. Beckett's response is controlled, flat, and careful in a way I recognize in my own bones, because I used to sound exactly like that on the phone with Gary.
"I understand," he says. A pause. "I understand."
He doesn't need to explain.
I never had a father to manage. But I spent every weekend of my teenage years at Sloan's house, and I watched her father do this to her for a decade.
He raised his expectations constantly, and when Sloan failed to meet them — which was always, because the bar moved every time she got close — his voice would go quiet and clipped and Sloan's personality would leave her body.
She'd sit straighter, answer in single syllables, agree to whatever he wanted.
Beckett's face has the same look right now.