He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t even answer. He just nods, staring over her shoulder straight at me while his hand lingers a beat too long at her back.
Kate bounds down the steps, tossing her hair in the sunlight, waving like nothing’s wrong. The driver loads her suitcase, the car door slams, and she’s gone—swallowed by the world beyond the gates.
The silence that follows is a different kind of suffocating. The house is too big, too empty, and Dean’s shadow is suddenly everywhere.
He closes the door with a soft click. He doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t need to.
Because now it’s just us.
Just The Two Of Us
The door shuts with a click that feels louder than it should, echoing through the empty hall like a gunshot.
Finally.
Three weeks. That’s what Kate called it—just three weeks. To her, it’s nothing. To me, it’s everything.
The house has always been too big, too quiet, but with her gone it’s different. Not empty—no, never empty. Not with Brooklyn still standing in my foyer, pretending she’s not trembling under the weight of me watching her.
She doesn’t move. Not right away. Like some part of her knows that walking away would be the smart thing to do, and some darker part wants to find out what happens if she stays frozen here with me.
Her eyes flicker up—emerald jewels, wary and stubborn. She has no idea how close she is to the edge.
I drag a hand down my jaw slowly, deliberately, because I need to do something other than grab her by the throat and pin her to the wall.
“Three weeks,” I murmur, mostly to myself.
Her brows pull together. “What?”
I look at her fully now, letting her see just a fraction of what I’ve been holding back. “That’s how long it’ll be before she’s back. Which means…” I step forward, closing the space between us by half, savouring the way her breath catches, “…you and I are alone.”
Colour rises in her cheeks, quick and guilty. “You make it sound like…”
“Like what?” I cut in, voice low, amused. “Like it’s dangerous? Like it’s wrong?”
Her lips part, but no words come out.
Exactly.
I smirk, sharp and humourless, and turn away before I do something irreversible. My pulse is a live wire under my skin, every instinct screaming at me to circle back, to stalk, to claim. But I can’t—not yet.
Not until she learns what being mine really means.
I walk toward the kitchen, forcing myself to move slowly, deliberately, a predator in no rush. “You should eat,” I throw over my shoulder. “Kate left enough food behind to feed an army.”
She doesn’t follow right away. I hear her shift, uncertain, torn between running and staying.
And it thrills me.
Because no matter what she chooses, I already know how this game ends.
She follows. Of course she does.
I don’t look back, but I can hear her—bare feet padding across the hardwood, hesitant, like she thinks the sound of her footsteps might give her away. As if I couldn’t sense her no matter what.
The kitchen feels different with her in it. Warmer. Charged. Like every surface, every piece of polished marble and steel is complicit in the fact that she shouldn’t be here with me—mydaughter’s best friend, my assistant, the one woman I swore I wouldn’t touch again.
I open the fridge, taking my time. Let her stand in the doorway and watch me. She thinks she’s hidden, leaning against the frame, arms crossed tight like that’s armour.
