Beckett's POV
Waverly is ignoring me.
She's sitting across the patio table eating the pad thai I brought from the place on Ninth that doesn't do deliveries for anyone except me. She's reading something on her phone with her brow furrowed and a noodle halfway to her mouth.
She hasn't looked at me in six minutes. I'm counting. That's how I know it's bad.
I made five jokes at dinner and she didn't laugh at any of them. She didn't even look up. Just eats like she's alone. A strand of hair has come loose from behind her ear and is brushing her jaw, and she hasn't fixed it.
I want to fix it. I want to touch it. I want to touch her.
The impulse arrives fully formed and completely unwelcome, and I grip my fork harder and stay where I am.
I am not used to being a background noise.
I am used to women who lean in and laugh before the punchline. Who fill silences with effort because the alternative is admitting the silence doesn't bother me.
My charm hits Waverly and slides off. It should annoy me. It does annoy me. The fact that it also interests me is a problem I'm choosing not to examine tonight.
"You're staring," she says without looking up from her phone.
"I'm thinking."
"You can think without pointing your face at me."
"I could." I take a bite of pad thai. "But the view's better in this direction."
She does look up then. Her blue-green eyes hold mine for a beat, and I see the assessment happening behind them. Measuring how much of what I say is real and how much is reflex.
I don't know the answer myself, which is… new.
"Does that line usually work?" she asks.
"Always."
"Then I'm sorry for your previous company." She returns to her phone, and the corner of her mouth moves a fraction.
Not a smile. But close enough that my chest tightens.
My father's call is still sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed and can't digest. Collier found out about the arrangement — which means Ridley went over my head, which is a conversation I'll be having with Ridley tomorrow.
Collier was direct. His voice came through the phone and my spine straightened before I'd processed a single word — a reflex trained into me at twelve.
"Bringing that woman into your company is a liability," he said. "If this acquisition goes sideways because you were thinking with something other than your head, I will pull every dollar of family backing and make sure the board knows why."
I said "I understand." Twice.
Because that is the only sentence I have ever been able to say to my father that doesn't start a war.
My mother could have told him that. She spent thirty years sitting at the other end of a dinner table, perfectly dressed, perfectly quiet. Tolerating a man who measured love in quarterly returns and called it providing.
I watched her cut her steak into smaller and smaller pieces while he talked about margins. I watched her leave those pieces on the plate untouched. And I watched her excuse herself before dessert with a headache that nobody believed and nobody questioned.
I was fourteen when I decided I would never be on either side of that equation.
Not the man who treats people like positions on a board.
I took a small inheritance at twenty-five — the only money I'd accept from him — and built my own brand. Competing brand. The rift with Collier became the defining fact of my adult life: he is proud of what I've built in the abstract.
He will never forgive me for rejecting his methods. I will never apologize for it.
We exist in the space between those two positions, and neither of us has moved in eight years.
Waverly shifts in her chair across the table. The blanket slips off one knee and she pulls it back without looking up from her phone. Her knee is bare for a second — just skin and the edge of the blanket.
But I look away fast enough that I feel the muscle in my neck protest.
I am a grown man. I have seen knees before. This is not a problem I should be having.
Her fingers are quick and precise on the screen, her jaw tight. She's waiting for something — a message, an alert, a detonation.
I've watched her check that phone every ninety seconds since I sat down, and each time her shoulders brace a fraction before she reads the screen.
I've never let a woman stay at this house, I have a penthouse in the city for that. Marble floors, a view that does the convincing for me, and a front door designed for people who don't stay past morning.
This house is where I live.
The books on the shelves are mine, the scuffs on the kitchen floor are mine, the quiet is mine. And I brought her here.
I am still not sure why. Except that when she stood in that parking garage with her hair dripping onto the concrete, something in me decided before the logic caught up. My gut moved.
Ridley said that's the problem. Ridley was half right.
The thing I haven't told her is that I remember the first time I saw her at an industry event several years ago. She was standing near the bar in a green dress, talking to someone from the Meridian Group.
She was laughing, and the sound rearranged the geometry of the room and in my chest. I was halfway across the floor before I noticed the ring.
Then Gary Pryce appeared beside her, put his arm around her waist, and she smiled at him like he hung up the Moon for her. She seemed happy. Or she was very good at seeming happy, and at the time I couldn't tell the difference.
So I talked about wanting their hotel group instead.
Said it to her face, not Gary's, and left it at that.
Every gala, every fundraiser, every industry dinner — I told Waverly Breck I wanted her company, and I meant something else entirely. She never noticed, and Gary never bothered to look.
But I watch her now. Again. The patio light catches the line of her throat when she swallows, and I follow it down to her collarbone. To the place where her shirt sits slightly open because the top button is missing or was never there.
My mouth goes dry. I take a drink of water and it doesn't help.
The way she holds her fork. The way she checks her phone. The bruise on her cheek has faded to yellow at the edges but the center still holds color… Every time I see it I feel a rage so specific and controlled it scares me more than the loud kind.
I hate him.
I hate him like you hate someone who broke a thing that wasn't theirs to touch.
He put his hands on this woman. He did it often enough that a door closing too hard makes her flinch and a raised voice makes her body go still.
And somewhere in the middle of hating Gary Pryce I have to be honest with myself. What I feel sitting across from his wife on my patio is not just strategic interest and not just the professional satisfaction of a deal falling into my hands.
Waverly looks up again.
"Is something wrong?" she asks, exhaling as if tired.
"No," I say simply. "Nothing's wrong."
She holds my gaze for another second and then returns to her phone.
I pick up my fork and push the food around my plate. I think the thought I've been circling all evening. The one I haven't said out loud. The one that has no place in a business arrangement and no business being in my head.
Now that she's here, I'm not letting her go. Ever.