I take my wine to the window. The city glitters below. Thousands of lights, millions of lives, and I stand above all of itin a penthouse I bought with my own money and feel absolutely, devastatingly alone.
My phone sits on the counter. I haven't called Hayes. He hasn't called me. Three days of silence that I asked for and received and hate with every cell in my body.
I asked for space to figure out if what I felt was real.
It's real. I knew it was real before the SUV cleared the compound gate. I knew it when I reached for my reading glasses on the first night and they weren't on the nightstand because I left them in his cabin. I knew it in the board meeting today when I gave the most commanding performance of my career and the only person I wanted to see was a thirty-three-year-old man with dimples and steady hands who would've been sitting in the back of that room grinning at me.
I wanted him there. Not as a bodyguard. As mine.
The wine tastes expensive and empty. I set it down.
My phone rings. Warren.
"Kane's head of security was arrested an hour ago," he says. "He's cooperating. Full disclosure on the surveillance operations, the penthouse break-in, all of it. The FBI says the physical threat to you is effectively neutralized."
"Effectively."
"Kane's people are done, Lex. The ones who aren't in custody are scattering. It's over."
Over. The threat that sent me to a mountain compound in Nevada, that put me in a cedar cabin forty yards from a man who changed everything, is over.
"Good work, Warren."
"It wasn't just me. That tech specialist at Guardian Peak, Sully, is the reason we have a case. And the operative who ran your detail..." A pause. "Hayes Donovan. His threat assessment and tactical recommendations were critical to the FBI operation. Cross sent me his after-action report. It was the most thorough,strategically sound piece of security analysis I've seen in twenty years."
My throat constricts. "I'm not surprised."
"Lex." Warren's voice shifts. Personal. Careful. The voice of a man who's known me for six years and is about to step over a line. "Whatever happened up there, I've never heard you sound the way you've sounded in the last three days. Like something's missing."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're performing fine. You're excellent at that. But you're not fine."
I close my eyes. "Goodnight, Warren."
"He's a good man, Lex. Whatever's holding you back, it isn't his age."
I end the call. Stand at the window. The Bay glitters. The wine sits untouched.
Warren's right. It isn't his age. It was never his age.
It's mine.
Lines at my eyes. Softness at my jaw. A body that's healthy and strong but not twenty-five, not thirty, not the taut perfection that magazine covers tell women men want. I looked in the mirror this morning and saw a woman who is aging, and the small, cruel voice in my head whispered that Hayes will wake up one day and see it too. That the seven years between us will stretch into a canyon. That he'll realize he chose a woman already halfway through her life when he could have someone with all of it still ahead.
That's the fear. Not proximity. Not adrenaline. Not professional compromise.
The fear that I'm not enough time.
The intercom buzzes.
I frown. It's after ten. The doorman knows I don't accept visitors without prior arrangement. I press the button.
"Ms. Morrison, there's a gentleman in the lobby. He says his name is Hayes Donovan and that he has something that belongs to you."
My hand drops from the intercom.
I stand in my penthouse kitchen, barefoot, in the silk robe I changed into after the board meeting, and my heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
