A full week has passed since the estate dinner, and the days between have been mercifully ordinary — morning briefings, quarterly projections, Theo's hand never once landing where it doesn't belong.
Office hours are easier. Office hours have rules that don't require me to perform devotion across a dining table while his twin dismantles me with his eyes.
Now it is Friday morning and Theo has cleared both our schedules for the day — a rare, deliberate emptiness in the calendar that means family business.
"Apparently my grandfather liked you," he says over breakfast at a café near his apartment. "He called yesterday. Invited us to play a round at the club this afternoon. He never invites anyone to the club, Wren. His accountant of thirty years hasn't seen the inside of that clubhouse."
"Victor Bracken liked me…" I set my fork down. "The man who spent dinner cataloging my posture and asked me which university my father attended like it was a security clearance question?"
"He said you had steady hands during the third course." Theo takes a slow sip, watching me over the rim. "From Victor, that's practically a declaration of devotion."
"Steady hands. I was gripping my fork so hard I nearly bent the silver."
"He didn't notice the grip. He noticed you didn't flinch." The corner of his mouth lifts — that small, private almost-smile that I hoard like currency. "So… golf. Can you play?"
"I took a PE elective in college that involved putting on artificial turf. Does that count?"
"It does not."
"Then no. I cannot play golf."
He laughs — a real one, unguarded, the kind that crinkles the skin around his eyes and makes him look twenty-two again and standing in a campus library at midnight. The sound reaches into my chest and wraps itself around the organ that already belongs to him.
"I'll teach you then," he says. "Just don't aim for any members of the Bracken family. Especially the dying ones."
***
The club is everything I expected and worse — manicured greens that stretch to the horizon like someone ironed the earth, a clubhouse with wood paneling older than most democracies, men in polo shirts discussing handicaps with the gravity of foreign policy.
I am handed a set of clubs that weigh more than my convictions.
"Loosen your grip," Theo says, stepping behind me on the first tee.
His hands settle over mine on the club, repositioning my fingers with the patience of a man who has never rushed a single decision in his life.
"You're strangling it. The club isn't going anywhere."
"Neither am I, apparently." I adjust my stance the way he showed me and try to focus on the ball instead of the warmth of his chest against my back, his breath near my ear, the impossible geometry of his forearms bracketing mine.
Concentrate, Wren. It's a golf club, not a marriage proposal.
I swing and the ball dribbles twelve feet and dies in the rough like it gave up on life.
"That was technically forward motion," Theo says, diplomatic as ever.
"That was a cry for help in spherical form."
He grins and tees up another ball for me. By the fourth hole, I've lost three balls to a water hazard that seems personally offended by my presence.
Victor is watching from his golf cart with an expression I can't decode — amusement, possibly, or the quiet satisfaction of a man confirming his grandson chose a woman who doesn't threaten anyone on the leaderboard.
Theo stays close the entire afternoon.
His hand finds the small of my back when we walk between holes. He fixes my grip twice more, his thumb sweeping across my knuckles with an absentmindedness that means nothing to him and rearranges my entire bloodstream.
He tells Victor our rehearsed story with such effortless ease that I almost believe it myself — the dinner at Luca's, the four months of secrecy, the slow fall into devotion that I wish were his truth instead of my fiction.
Victor nods, asks measured questions, watches us with those pale cataloging eyes.
When Theo hands me a lemonade at the ninth hole and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear without thinking, Victor's mouth softens into the nearest thing to approval I've seen on his face.
The gesture wasn't scripted. My heart doesn't care.
By evening, the club gives way to the estate, and the estate gives way to the pool terrace — heated stone, string lights draped through the pergola, a bottle of rosé that Theo opens with one hand while loosening his collar with the other.
Two glasses in, the world goes soft at the edges. The city is a distant glow beyond the tree line.
Theo sits beside me on the lounge, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off his skin through the thin cotton of his rolled sleeve.
"You did well today," he says, his voice low and unhurried, the version of him that only surfaces when the performance drops and there's no one left to manage. "You got further in one afternoon than most board members manage in a decade."
"Maybe I'm just very charming when I'm failing at sports."
I take another sip. The rosé tastes like peaches and poor decisions.
"Or maybe he felt sorry for me after the water hazard incident."
"He respects you, Wren. That's not pity."
The sincerity in his voice is so quiet and so complete that it settles over me like a hand pressed to my chest — steadying and devastating in equal measure.
I want to live inside the way he says my name. I want to build a house there and never leave.
"There's a family weekend starting tomorrow," he says, his gaze drifting to the pool where light ripples across the surface in slow, restless patterns. "Julian will be here. Some cousins, a few of Victor's oldest friends. It would help if you stayed. Having you here makes the relationship more convincing, and I need Julian to see consistency. He's still watching us like he's waiting for a crack."
"You want me to stay the whole weekend?"
"I'm asking. Not as your boss." He turns his head, and the string lights catch the gold flecks in his brown eyes that I've spent three years memorizing from across a desk. "As someone who needs you here."
Needs me. The word lands in the center of my ribs and blooms outward, warm and aching, feeding roots I should have pulled years ago.
The rosé hums in my veins. The night air carries jasmine from the garden beds, and Theo is close — closer than he was in the car, closer than he's been since the kiss at dinner — and his mouth is right there, slightly parted, the lower lip fuller than the upper.
I have spent six years memorizing the architecture of that mouth without ever knowing what it tasted like until that night.
I lean toward him and my hand finds his knee just as my chin tilts upward, closing the distance between us one slow, terrified inch at a time.
Theo pulls back.
The movement is small — a shift of his shoulders, an angling of his jaw — but it lands with the precision of a door clicking shut.
"Wren…" His voice is gentle, which makes it worse. "This isn't real, we have to remember that."
The warmth drains from my chest so fast I feel hollow, scooped clean, the rosé turning sour against my tongue.
"Right." I pull my hand from his knee and fold both hands in my lap where they can't betray me again. "I'm sorry. The wine, the evening… I got carried away. It won't happen again."
He watches me for a beat too long, his expression unreadable in the low light.
"Can you show me my room?" I ask, and my voice is steady because it has no other choice. "It's been a long day."