“Good. Productive.” I lean one shoulder to the frame. “Walk me to my room?”
“Of course.”
Gallantly, he takes my hand, bringing it up to his lips and kissing the back. I roll my eyes.
“Where on earth is Conrad Masterson, and what have you done with him?”
“Chivalry is not dead, Princess.” Contrary to the charm of his words, his eyes are heated.
“Hmm. That’s good to know, because Tamsin gave me homework. I’m writing rules tonight,” I tell him, stopping in the door to my bedroom and leaning against the jamb. “Protocols.”
He blinks. “If you’re telling me you have suddenly become a dominatrix?—”
The idea provokes a laugh. “Not hardly. But I do demand your presence in my bed tonight.” I run my finger down the center of his chest and to the top button of his fly. “Think you can handle that?”
The muscle in his jaw jumps. He steps closer. “Phoenix?—”
“Slow first,” I tell him, and I don’t whisper. “Then not so slow. You can’t tell me no, Conrad.”
He exhales like I put oxygen back in the room. A grin slides over his lips. “Yes, ma’am.”
I’m smiling when I close the door to my bedroom and turn the lock. My cage. My key. My rules.
The rest of it—the man with the clean shoes, the tracker under my skin, the Boardroom knives I’m going to line up like silverware—can wait an hour. I have homework. I have a pen. I have four men in chairs who will read what I hand them and answer to it.
I print the title across the top of the page:PHOENIX’S PROTOCOLS.
Rule One writes itself.The key is mine.
I set the pen down, listen to the house breathe, and make my first use of it. I open the door, find the shadow keeping watch in the hall, and choose where the key turns first.
16
Storm
I don’t thinkthere’s anything more comforting or less forgiving than the ocean.
I sit with my father on the back deck while the tide slides under the pilings and the boards remember storms from years past. The island air tastes like salt and old wood. A heron ghosts the marsh like it owns the word quiet.
We don’t talk for a while. That’s our language. I listen for the breath under his breath, the way he rolls tension out of his knuckles, the small crack in the porch railing he never fixed. He takes his time with me, measuring his words before he says them. I appreciate that, because it’s always been my way, as well.
“I missed you,” I say finally, claiming the smallest hill first.
His mouth tilts, not quite a smile.
“I missed you, too.” He sits forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “There are things you don’t know about why I left. The choices I made.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I correct. “I heard enough the night you left to fill a book.”
He studies my face like there’s a tell I don’t know I have. “What did you hear?”
“I heard her telling you to go or die,” I say, eyes on the water. “Her saying the next man wouldn’t miss. And if I happened to be with you, that I was an acceptable loss.”
Someone—Maverick, I think—drops something somewhere in the house and curses colorfully. My father doesn’t flinch.
“She meant every word,” he says.
“I know,” I say, and the words land like a weight I’ve been carrying since seventeen. “You left so I wouldn’t end up at the bottom of the wrong staircase or be the victim of a tragic hunting accident…or…something. I hated you for that for a long time. But I understood the why of it.”
