Beckett's POV
Waverly is retreating toward the hallway with her hand still gripping the doorframe like she needs it to stay upright. Her face has lost two shades of color and her eyes are locked on my body even though the shirt is covering it now.
She asked a simple question with an answer that will unravel every careful thing I have built between us since the night I opened my car door in that parking garage.
I did not plan on telling her this soon. In fact, I did not plan on telling her at all.
Not while the arrangement is still fragile and her trust in me is held together with necessity. I had a timeline that did not include her walking into my bedroom while I was half-dressed.
My mouth opens and what comes out is the worst possible version of the truth.
"It's a birthmark, Waverly." I roll the sleeves to my forearms out of habit, and the normalcy of the gesture feels obscene given the look on her face. "I've had it since birth. That's generally how those work."
She doesn't smile. Her jaw is set and her blue-green eyes hold mine. The air between us feels thinner and I can see her pulse beating in her throat.
We stand there for three seconds that feel like thirty. "How long have you known?"
Her voice is steady but her hand on the doorframe is not. Her knuckles are white against the wood, and the tremor travels up her wrist into her forearm where she can't hide it.
"That it was me. How long, Beckett?"
I open my mouth, the truth is sitting right there and I can feel it pressing against my teeth, ready to spill across this hallway.
Eleven years. Every gala. Every time I said I wanted her company when I meant her.
But she reads my hesitation faster than I can fill it.
"You know what?" She drops her hand from the doorframe and straightens her spine. "Forget it. It doesn't matter."
She turns and walks toward the hallway, and I watch her shoulders pull inward — the same posture she wore in the parking garage. Something tells me every time Waverly feels exposed, she folds herself smaller, and I am watching it happen in real time.
"I looked for you." The words leave my mouth before I've approved them. "For five months after that party… I looked for you."
She stops. Her back is to me, and I can see the muscles along her shoulders lock beneath the cotton of her shirt.
She doesn't turn around.
"We didn't exchange phone numbers, I didn't know your last name, we had no mutual friends." I take a breath. The words feel like pulling nails from old wood — necessary, painful, leaving holes I can't fill back in. "By the time I saw you again, you were standing next to Gary, and looked at him like he was the answer to all your questions."
She turns. Her arms are crossed over her chest now, her chin lifted, and the vulnerability from thirty seconds ago has been replaced by the sharp, defensive composure.
"And you didn't think to walk over and introduce yourself? Say, 'Hi, I'm the man from the party, remember me'?"
"I was going to. I was literally halfway across the room." My hands find my pockets. "Then I saw your husband by your side, and I told myself that night didn't mean anything anyway, did it?"
"Right. It didn't." She says it fast, automatic, and the flinch in her own expression tells me she heard how it sounded.
"So I talked about wanting your hotel group instead. Said it to your face at every event for years because it was the only excuse I had to stand near you and look at you without it meaning what it meant."
The silence in the hallway is dense and warm and full of things neither of us is ready to hold. Waverly's arms tighten across her chest.
"That's a beautiful story, Beckett." Her mouth twists into a half-smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "The reformed playboy pining quietly for the one that got away while cycling through every socialite on the eastern seaboard… Very convincing. You should write greeting cards."
"I'm not denying my reputation." I lean my shoulder against the doorframe. "I have been exactly who the tabloids say I am. I'm not going to stand here and pretend those women didn't happen."
"Then what are you pretending?"
"That I brought you here because of the deal."
Her expression shifts — a fracture running through the composure so fast that if I blinked I would have missed it. She recovers, but I saw it.
"Why didn't you tell me the night you brought me here?" she asks. "You sat across from me in that kitchen and watched me eat your chef's food and offer you my company, and you knew the entire time. Why didn't you say a single word?"
The honest answer is ugly, so I give it to her.
"Because you would have left. And I was not willing to lose the first real chance to be near you." I hold her gaze and let the weight of it sit between us. "It was selfish. I know that."
"Selfish." She repeats the word like she's testing its weight. "You're a womanizer who has spent a decade replacing intimacy with turnover. And you expect me to believe you held onto one night with a stranger?"
"Funny. You're a woman who has spent years letting a man convince her she deserves to be hit, and you're standing in my hallway telling me what I'm capable of feeling."
The words land and I watch her face go white.
I went too far. I know it the second the sentence finishes, and the regret is immediate and useless because the words are already in the air and I cannot pull them back.
Her eyes hold mine and the hurt in them does not flare and fade. It settles in and I know it will still be there at midnight when she's lying in the guest room with the lights off.
"You don't know a single thing about what I let happen or why I let it," she says quietly.
"Waverly…"
Whatever she was about to say has lodged itself somewhere between her throat and her teeth. I can see her physically swallowing it back.
Something happened after that night. Something she won't tell me.
Her hand drops to her side.
"The personal part of this arrangement is over." Her voice is brittle while constructing a wall with whatever materials are closest. "I will stay for your lawyers and your resources. I will work alongside your team until the acquisition is done and my share is secured. Then I leave, and we never discuss this again."
I watch her build it, and I recognize the architecture.
Every wall Waverly puts up was taught to her by a man who punished her for leaving them down.
That fucking bastard…
"That night didn't really matter to either of us," she says, and the lie is so transparent that arguing with it would be an insult to both of us.
I want to fight her on it. I want to cross this hallway and take her by the shoulders and tell her she is wrong about me and wrong about herself and wrong about what that night meant.
But she is pregnant and bruised and standing in a stranger's house because the last man who pushed past her boundaries slapped her for announcing she was carrying his child.
So I swallow every word that wants out and give her the only answer that won't make me into another man she has to defend herself against.
"If that's what you need," I whisper as she walks away.