The world narrowed.
Brown eyes, darker than I remembered. A new line at the corner of his mouth. Same mouth, though—soft and obscene and burned into my nervous system. For a beat, everything in his expression went still.
“Emerson,” he said, low.
It was ridiculous how much just my name in that voice hurt. Like he’d reached into my chest and squeezed.
My jaw locked.
Every instinct I had screamed at me to turn around, to pretend I hadn’t seen him, to go back to the elevator and ride it to some other city, some other country, some other life. But the part of me that had walked into war zones on purpose?
She moved my feet.
I stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby, each stride deliberate, my cotton shorts swishing against my thighs, my oversized T-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Bare face, bare legs, hair scraped up in a knot I’d twisted without looking. He’d last seen me in dust and Kevlar and sweat.
Now, he got me half asleep and barefoot in a hotel lobby.
Good.
Let him see the woman he’d walked away from, stripped of every protective layer.
“Of course, you’re here,” I said when I stopped in front of him. The words came out sharp, edged in disbelief and venom. “Of course.”
He took me in—T-shirt, shorts, bare feet—and something flickered in his eyes. Not amusement. Not exactly surprise either.
“Good morning to you, too,” he said.
That calm, that steadiness—it made me want to slap him. Or kiss him. Or both, in rapid succession.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
The front desk clerk’s gaze ping-ponged between us, sensing a storm. She sputtered something about breakfast hours and loyalty points and then wisely found an excuse to duck into the back.
We were alone. Not actually alone—there were still people moving through the lobby—but the bubble around us felt thick and private. Like the air had decided we were the only two who mattered.
Levi didn’t look away.
“Checking in,” he said simply.
I inhaled through my nose. “Cute. Try again.”
One corner of his mouth edged up. “I’m serious. I flew in this morning. I need a room. This is a hotel. That’s generally how it works.”
“You’re in Charleston.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I noticed.”
“You’re in my hotel.”
“Didn’t realize you had territorial rights to the Embassy Suites, Emerson. Should I have asked permission first?”
Rage flared, hot and immediate. God, he was good at this—playing it cool, pretending like the fact that he’d dropped intothis zip code felt less like coincidence and more like fate taking a bat to my kneecaps.
“You followed me,” I said.
His brows twitched. “No.”
“Levi—”
