Something soft passed across his gaze. Want. And then?—
His eyes turned to stone again.
“Don’t say something you’ll regret.”
I held his gaze. I didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away.
“You said you’ve got me.” My throat burned. “Did you mean it? Or was that just something you say in the dark when someone’s falling apart?”
CHAPTER 14
Pauline
The penthouse smelledlike cedar and something faintly citrus that I couldn’t place.
I’d been staring at the guest room ceiling for forty-seven minutes. I knew because I’d checked my phone six times, which was pathetic, and each time I checked I told myself I’d stop and then three minutes later I checked again. The sheets were obscenely soft—the kind of thread count that made you wonder what you’d been sleeping on your whole life—and the bed was enormous, wide enough to fit three of me and still leave room for my emotional baggage.
Jack had brought me here. Walked me through the front door without a word, guided me down a hallway that smelled like him, opened the guest room door, and stepped back.
“There are towels in the bathroom,” he’d said. “Extra blankets in the closet. If you need anything—” He’d gestured vaguely toward the rest of the apartment. Toward himself. Then that cool indifferent mask slid over his face, smooth as glass, and he’d said goodnight and pulled the door shut between us.
And that was it.
Clean towels. A phone charger when mine turned out dead. A glass of water on the nightstand, the ice still crackling as it settled. Everything I could possibly need, delivered with the warmth of a man tending a guest he intended to keep at arm’s length.
The man who’d held me on a dark floor and murmured I’ve got you against my hair had vanished somewhere between the parking garage and this hallway. In his place was a concierge. A ghost wearing Jack’s face.
I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my face into the pillow. It smelled like laundry detergent. Nothing else. Not him. Not anything that might anchor me to the reason I was here instead of in my own apartment, alone with my pigeon and the dark I’d asked him to save me from.
Take me to your place. I don’t want to be alone tonight.
I’d said that. Out loud. With my whole chest. And he’d brought me here and given me a guest room and closed the door like I was a package he’d signed for.
Sleep wasn’t coming. My blood was still fizzing, that low electric hum that hadn’t stopped since the building went black—since his hands found my face in the dark. My body wouldn’t settle. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in that stairwell, or back in his arms, or back in the parking garage watching his expression when I asked him to take me home with him. That flash of something raw and stunned before he locked it away.
I kicked the covers off.
The robe he’d left folded beside the towels was heavy silk, dove grey, pooling past my wrists when I shrugged it on. I tied the sash and padded to the door before I could think about what I was doing—because thinking was the enemy. Thinking was seven years of running dressed up as common sense.
The hallway stretched ahead, all clean lines and low light, and the living room opened at the end of it like a breath someone had been holding.
Glass. That was the first thing—an entire wall of it, floor to ceiling, and beyond it the city lay spread open, glittering and restless, a million small fires burning against the dark. I stopped walking. My hand found the doorframe. The view was so vast it felt like standing at the edge of something, like one more step and I’d fall into all that light.
I lived in an apartment where the window overlooked a brick wall and a pigeon with a grudge. Jack lived above the world.
The room itself was enormous—dark hardwood underfoot, warm where I expected cold. A deep charcoal sectional curved around a glass table. Bookshelves lined one wall, packed tight, spines cracked, not arranged for show. The kitchen gleamed to the left, marble and steel, a wine rack set into the island holding rows of dark bottles. Art on the walls—not the corporate kind, but pieces chosen by someone who actually looked at them. A painting near the window, abstract, all deep blues and fractured gold, caught the city light and seemed to move.
But my eyes snagged on the small things. A blanket thrown over the arm of the sofa, bunched like someone had kicked it off mid-sleep. A mug on the coffee table with a pale ring beneath it. A pair of reading glasses—Jack Specter wore reading glasses—folded on top of a book whose title I couldn’t make out from here. These tiny cracks were evidence that a man actually lived inside this monument to solitude, even if that man was currently doing his best impression of someone who felt nothing at all.
He was at the far end of the sectional, laptop casting blue-white light across his face. He’d changed out of his suit—grey sweats, a black t-shirt stretched across his shoulders. His hair was wrecked, shoved back like he’d been dragging his hands through it for hours.
He didn’t look up when I appeared.
My pulse was doing a deep thud I could feel in my fingertips.
“Are you busy?”
His gaze lifted. Found me in the hallway entrance—bare feet, his robe, my hair doing whatever it pleased. He looked at me. One second. Two. His eyes dropped—fast—to my bare calves below the silk hem, the exposed line of my collarbone, then he dragged his attention back to the screen, his jaw tightening, his eyes flickering with something. Want. I could see it, but it was gone in the next second.
