A creak from inside. A chair shifting. Denise’s voice dropped to a murmur I couldn’t catch.
Then: “I’ll call you tomorrow. Same time.”
I moved to the dark hallway just as the office light went off.
I remained there until I heard the office door close fully, then quietly slipped out the side door and across the property to my cabin on legs that didn’t feel reliable.
Locked the door. Sat on the edge of the bed. Stared at my phone.
She doesn’t suspect anything. She’s too distracted.
It’s actually working in our favor.
Every part of me wanted to call Rose. Right now. Tell her what I’d heard. But tell her what, exactly? A fragment of a phone call through a cracked door?
Ten minutes ago, Rose had kissed me. Ten minutes ago, the wall had finally cracked. I’d spent a week earning back a fraction of her trust, and she’d handed me something tonight that I knew,knew, she didn’t hand out easily.
If I went to her now with an accusation against her closest friend and I was wrong, I’d lose her. Permanently. She’d see it as jealousy, manipulation, another lie on top of all the others.
I needed proof. Concrete proof. The kind she couldn’t argue with.
I set the phone facedown on the nightstand and lay back and stared at the ceiling.
Sleep didn’t come.
Every time I closed my eyes, I heard two things on a loop: Rose breathing my name between kisses. And Denise’s voice in the dark, nothing like the warm, helpful woman who kept telling Rose not to worry, she’d handle everything.
CHAPTER NINE
ROSE
I didn’t sleep.
Not because of the kiss, though the kiss was part of it. The kiss was a grenade thrown into the middle of everything, and now I was lying in the dark, staring at my ceiling, watching shrapnel fall.
I’d kissed Graham Fraser Kincaid in the lounge of my ranch.
We'd been circling each other like two magnets flipped the wrong way, pushing back against something that was always going to connect.
I could still feel his hand in my hair. His mouth, warm and deliberate and tasting like something I wanted more of. The sound he’d made when my teeth caught his bottom lip. Low and unguarded.
I pressed my face into the pillow and said a word that would’ve made Theresa wash my mouth out.
This was a disaster.
He was a liar. He was famous. He was leaving soon. He was every bad decision I’d ever sidestepped, wrapped in a Scottish accent and forearms that should come with a warning label.
And I’d told him the Iceland series was good.
God.
By five a.m. I gave up on sleep, pulled on boots, and went to feed the horses. Cassiopeia bumped my shoulder when I reached her stall, her breath warm on my neck.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told her. “I’m handling it.”
She snorted.
“Iam.”
