Victoria emerged, wiping her palms on a paper towel, eyes carefully avoiding mine as she moved beside me to look at the stage through the doorway. “Remember last time I was up there?”
I did. Cruz called her up to sing as he played guitar, her reluctance melting into something I’d never seen before—she’d looked joyful andfree, her arms flung out to her sides and head thrown back like she was ready for whatever the world threw at her.
“You got me up on stagethatnight too,” she said.
“I convinced you to go for drinks,” I said. “He’s the one who convinced you to sing.”
“I wouldn’t have been here without you, though.” Her throat worked. “I couldn’t do any of it without you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, I could.” She nudged my shoulder. “But it would be less organized. And a lot less fun.”
“That I’ll give you.”
Through the doorway, people were claiming tables, the energy building in that way crowds do when they sense something’s about to happen.
Victoria’s voice went quiet. “What if he doesn’t come?”
When she turned to face me, the fear in her eyes reminded me of the day her grandfather died and she’d realized her entire life was about to change.
“He’ll come,” I said, pulling out my phone to reread Kate’s messages for probably the tenth time. “Kate promised she’d get him here. He’s already at her house, he’s been there since…”
“Since he talked to my dad.” Her voice went tight and bitter.
“Yep.” I kept my tone carefully neutral.
She went still, her posture straightening. “I wasn’t bluffing earlier, you know. With my dad.”
“I know.”
I’d stood in her foyer as she stabbed her dad in the chest and told him that she didn't trust him. After 25 years as the Chief Operating Officer of The Sinclair Group, she told him to step down—and she wantedmeto replace him.
I’d watched her every movement, hoping and praying that she’d touch her neck. She always did that when she was bluffing to keep anybody from noticing the flush she got when she lied.
But there was no flush up her neck, no hand to cover it.
And that was the part that terrified me—not that she’d said that she wanted to promote me to COO, but that she’d meant every word.
“That wasn’t just some bullshit power grab." She looked at me directly, no hedging or corporate speak. "Even before Dad overstepped, I was already thinking that I wanted you to take over as my COO.”
This was classic Victoria—throwing life-changing job offers at me backstage in a bar as a diversion from spiraling about whether the man she loved would show up. “We don’t need to talk about this right now.”
“We do, because it keeps my mind off how it’s going to feel if he doesn’t show up, or worse—what if he comes and he sees me and he tells me it’s over, that I missed my chance, that he never—that I—” She pinched the bridge of her nose, her breath coming faster.
I grabbed a bottled water from the case stacked against the wall and pressed it into her hand. “So what title should I put on my new business cards?”
She smiled in relief as I pulled out my notebook. We spent the next hour and thirty-nine minutes building a five-year plan that we both knew we’d probably revise six times before implementing, but that wasn’t the point. The plan gave her something to focus on besides the fact that she was about to put her heart on display for a bar full of strangers.
By the time the lights shifted and the crowd quieted, I’d found a spot in the back where I could watch without being seen.
The curtain parted, the lights shifted. Victoria sat at the piano in a chic sheath dress, her Jimmy Choos beside the bench so she could play barefoot, as she began playing “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her voice cracked onlonely, and I felt it like a physical ache.
I’d spent six years making sure Victoria Blackstone never showed weakness in public… and here she was choosing to break in front of a room full of strangers, choosing to be raw and vulnerable and completely unprotected.
For him.
Movement caught my eye near the back: Cruz, standing up. Man-bun, rumpled clothes, looking completely unprepared. I tracked his movement toward the stage, holding my breath. When he reached her, when she kept playing but her voice wobbled, when he cupped her face and kissed her forehead—
