I looked at him. "How?"
"When they see you at your worst," he said, "and they stay, anyway."
I thought about the veranda. About the way Amelia had held me while I broke apart. About the way she'd looked at me thismorning and saidI love youlike it was the simplest, truest thing in the world.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "She stayed."
"Then you're a lucky bastard," Lucas said.
"I know," I said.
We packed up as the sun dipped below the horizon.
The servers had already cleared the table, the bar, the chairs. The volleyball net was still up, swaying gently in the breeze.
I took one last look at the beach—at the place where, for a few hours, I'd felt like a kid again.
Then we climbed back into the SUV and headed back to Dominion Hall.
Back to reality.
Back to whatever came next.
24
AMELIA
Adriver from Dominion Hall dropped me at the Embassy Suites like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“Have a good day, Ms. Emerson,” he said, perfectly polite, as if he hadn’t just driven me from a billionaire fortress full of ex–special forces brothers and their women.
“You, too,” I managed.
The automatic doors whooshed shut behind me. Cool, conditioned air hit my face—recycled, faintly citrus-scented, aggressively neutral. Lobby carpet instead of polished wood. Soft jazz instead of the murmur of power.
The normalcy of it made my knees weak.
Embassy Suites had never struck me as comforting before. It was just a chain. A place with decent breakfast and enough outlets near the bed. But walking across the lobby now, past the potted palms and the smiling front-desk clerk, it felt like a decompression chamber between two worlds.
By the time I swiped my keycard and stepped into my room, the quiet hit with full force.
I dropped my bag just inside the door, toed off my sandals, and stood there for a second, listening.
AC hum. Distant elevator ding. The faint thump of someone’s TV through the wall.
No Danes. No Byron. No Vanguard. No editor. No women who looked like they belonged on magazine covers telling me they were on my side.
Just me and the beige walls and the generic art of sailboats that had never seen real weather.
I exhaled and let my shoulders slump, the way I never did when anyone was watching.
The driver had offered to wait. To take me back whenever I was ready. I’d thanked him and said I’d call.
I wasn’t ready.
I needed time to let my brain catch up to the last forty-eight hours. To the fact that I’d watched a dead man come back to life, watched the man I loved fall apart, watched my editor twitch under pressure I didn’t fully understand, watched my own ethics shift under my feet.
And I’d eaten a lemon tart while five future Mrs. Danes took turns reassuring me that I wasn’t insane for loving one of them.
