“Thanks, Denver,” Sullivan says.
My father’s head of security gives my brother a curt nod, then quickly shifts his gaze back to me.
“Are you okay?” he repeats, his hand still wrapped around my arm. He studies me, two thick dark brows pinching together and forming a valley at the center of his forehead.
My throat is too thick and sore from crying to answer.
Dad told me Denver was in the US Special Forces before he came to work for our family a few years ago. I’m guessing he’s around thirty, but I’ve never asked. He’s always working with my father and rarely speaks to me. He’s a silent wall of muscle, watching everything with a stern expression permanently on his face. I’ve never seen him come close to smiling.
He glances down, his mouth curling toward his chin at the sight of my heels. Disapproval tightens his jaw as he glares at them. Irritation bubbles inside me that he felt it necessary tointervene, breaking my fall and ruining my chance of feeling a different pain for a change. Because now my grief comes whooshing back, stealing my breath straight from my lungs. The same way it does each time I wake from another nightmare where all I see is the explosion, over and over.
And fire. So much fire.
“I’m fine,” I snap, shaking his hand off and dislodging my heel from the mud.
His eyes darken as they rise to meet mine again. But his voice is gentle, a direct contrast to the storm behind his eyes. “Sincla?—”
“I said I’m fine!”
I tug Sullivan, ripping my gaze from Denver’s. “Keep walking.”
I don’t need Denver’s help.
And I certainly don’t want his pity.
1
SINCLAIR
PRESENT DAY
“This hasto be the last dance. I can’t afford for this to turn into an all-nighter,” my friend, Zoey, says, as I pull her onto the dancefloor of the nightclub.
“As if I’d make you stay out all night. I know you and Ashton have that thing tomorrow at the gallery,” I shout over the music as I spin and tip my head back, soaking up the beat.
I look back at Zoey when she doesn’t say anything and smile at the pointed look she’s giving me.
“Nothing happened, and you know it. That guy was a complete gentleman,” I say about the brother of one of the models I went home with after a night out a few days ago. “I met his boyfriend and their cat and everything. He drove me to the hospital the next day.”
My mood sours immediately at the memory of the following morning. The call from Sullivan. The tone in his voice as he told me there had been a fire.
Another one.
Zoey doesn’t miss the way I’ve stopped dancing, my limbs weighed down as it all comes crashing back. She pulls me over to the bar, signaling the bartender for two glasses of water.
“You okay?” she asks the moment I’ve gulped mine down.
“Yeah.” I side-eye her and then sigh at her worried expression. “Yeah,” I repeat, wiping my brow. “Just, that night… Dad’s club burning down. It was all too much like…”
She curls her hand over my forearm reassuringly. “Too close to the way you lost your mom and brother. I get it.”
I look into her kind brown eyes. “Yeah, too close.”
It’s been two years since they died on my father’s yacht in a freak fire. And I was finally feeling that life had something to look forward to again. My career as a model has skyrocketed from all the extra hours I’m putting in, landing me some huge campaigns. Sullivan took over from my father as CEO of our family jewelry firm, Beaufort Diamonds, and is expanding it. And my father has grown his portfolio of member’s only piano bars that he enjoys so much.
We are all learning to survive without them. Or trying, at least.
I even hired my father a sought-after dating expert called Halliday Burton hoping he’d be happier if he let love into his life. He didn’t like any of the dates she set him up with, instead becoming smitten with her. I’ve never seen him like it, not even with Mom. Halliday’s twenty years younger than him, and now they’re engaged and having a baby together.
