His gaze moves from me to Mike, lingering just long enough to make my insides twist. “Would you care to introduce me to your friend, Daisy?”
His voice is calm.
Too calm.
Lucia steps in, her hand landing on Edward’s bicep. “What’s going on?” she asks, voice filled with concern. “Is everything okay?”
Edward doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t even look at her. His stare remains fixed on me, unwavering. When he finally speaks, his tone is clipped, and utterly terrifying in its restraint.
“Lucia, this is Daisy. My girlfriend.”
I flinch. The first time he’s ever called me that in public, and it soundswrong. Ominous. Like he resents the word.
“And this,” he continues, “is the gentleman who just shoved his tongue down her throat.”
Mike—the godforsaken idiot—sticks out his hand like we’re at a bloody LinkedIn mixer. “Mike Stevens,” he says, chipper as ever. “Producer at BritShop.”
Edward just stares at the offered hand. Like Mike has just presented him with a dead rat.
With agonizing slowness, Edward lifts his gaze, pinning Mike in place with a stare that could set him on fire.
Mike isn’t small, but next to Edward, he shrinks.
Because Edward?
Edward is still. And that lethal stillness sucks the oxygen from the space between them.
Mike’s bravado wobbles. His hand hovers in midair for a beat before he lets it drop, rubbing the back of his neck like he can scrub the awkwardness off. He mutters something under his breath.
Edward doesn’t react. No clenched jaw, no sharp comeback, no explosion. Just that eerie, unshakable calm.
It’s so much worse than if he’d yelled.
I hate this—hate how his stillness shrinks me, how it twists my panic into something sharp.
“You don’t get to be the victim here,” I choke out, “You don’t get to leave me at home, go to your fancy events, live in your fancy world, and then suddenly act possessive when it suits you.”
Something raw flickers in his eyes—there and gone, swallowed up by that mask of etiquette. But his knuckles tighten. The only tell that he’s not as unaffected as he wants to be.
“Perhaps,” he says with a grimace, “we should discuss the finer points of our relationship when you’re sober and we don’t have an audience enjoying the spectacle.”
The cameras are still flashing.
I’d tuned it out, but there’s no escaping it now.
Edward’s nostrils flare as his gaze sweeps the area.
“You didn’t tell me you still had a boyfriend,” Mike pipes up, sounding all wounded.
“Oh, shut up, Mike,” I snap, but it comes out husky because the tears are right there, clawing at my throat.
Edward can stand there, all noble and untouchable, but he’s here withher, proving every suffocating fear I’ve been swallowing all night. And yeah, maybe I’m proving him right too—I’m the loud, sloppy disaster he’d never parade around, the girl who ends up half-soaked and yelling on a red carpet. My hands curl into fists, nails biting into my palms, and I’m so fucking exhausted from trying to be enough for him when I’m clearly just . . . this.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I bite out, my voice shaking as I glare at him. “I have afuck buddywho claims I’m everything he wants in a girlfriend—until we’re anywhere near his family or, god forbid, in public.”
The tears spill over now, hot and messy, mascara streaking into my eyes and stinging. I swipe at them viciously.
“Daisy,” Edward says, low. A warning laced with restraint.
