The woman—pink lipgloss, high ponytail, dark eyes—smirks. “That depends. Are you the kind of poet who journals in lowercase or the kind who drinks bourbon alone in the rain?”
“Both,” Rishi replies, absolutely shameless. “I’m very layered.”
She snorts into her champagne.
I text Mr. Lover, Lover.
If you keep leaning that far into her seat, you’re going to end up in her lap.
That’s the dream, Rhodes. Some of us didn’t come on this trip to stress-eat our dignity.
I exhale hard. He’s not wrong. I am stressing. But eating nothing. Except the envy crawling up my throat every time Chloe tosses her head back and laughs at something Jackson says like she isn’t the absolute worst.
I glance down at the tablet on my tray table. Blank screen. Zero notes. The only thing I’ve written in the past hour is:
Don’t punch Jackson.
Underlined three times.
This is going to be a long flight.
I check my watch. Twenty minutes until takeoff. Rorie hasn’t boarded yet.
Every minute she doesn’t walk through that door, my brain spins another worst-case scenario. What if she bailed? Or maybe she decided not to tempt fate by spending a week on an island with me. She could be stuck in traffic. What if she misses the flight?
…No. Rorie Adams doesn’t miss flights.
My eyes flick toward the entrance again, trying to make it subtle, like I’m just observing. Not counting the seconds until the woman I haven’t stopped thinking about shows up and wreaks havoc onwhatever self-control I’ve managed to scrape together over the past few weeks.
Which is none.
I catch movement near the back of the cabin.
Laurel McKee.
She’s angled into a conversation with one of the execs from Halston Inc, laughing at something that probably wasn’t funny. Her eyes bounce to the main circle of power players clustered near Thatcher, the section unofficially reserved for those who think God designed the C-Suite as a personality.
Thatcher’s right in the middle, lounging like he owns the goddamn plane. He hasn’t glanced at Laurel once. Doesn’t need to. His silence is as deliberate as anything he could’ve said aloud.
You’re not one of us.
Laurel’s too classy to show it, but her tight grip on the armrest says it all. Along with the split-second recalibration of her smile. The imperceptible tilt of her chin. She’s holding herself upright by sheer will.
She’s good.
But Rorie’s the reason that firm has fangs.
Laurel might be the name on the door, but Rorie’s the one who gave it bite. The one who turned a shaky boutique brand into something worth fearing.
And now Rorie’s walking into the lion’s den with all eyes on her.
Ifshe walks in.
God, please let her walk in.
I look out the window, pretend I’m unbothered. But then there’s that shift in the air, a prickle of something electric against my skin.
I turn.
