Tomorrow was the Whitmore Gallery. Tomorrow I'd stand next to Callum in a room full of strangers andpretend that holding his hand was an act. That leaning into him was strategy. That the way I looked at him was a performance calibrated for Richard Ashford's benefit.
Except I'd stopped performing on a couch in this very room, less than twenty-four hours ago, and I didn't have the faintest idea how to start again.
The apartment was quiet. His quiet—the expensive, soundproofed kind that left nothing to hide behind. No neighbors fighting. No street noise. Just my own thoughts, ricocheting off the walls of a space that belonged to a man I'd kissed and craved and was terrified of wanting.
Forty years old. Seventeen years between us. A daughter closer to my age than I was to his. A marriage that ended in ruin. A man who'd chosen buildings over people for two decades and was only now learning that the blueprints wouldn't hold him at night.
None of it mattered. Or rather—all of it mattered, and I'd weighed it, and it still didn't add up to a reason to stop.
Mika was right. The age gap wasn't the wall. Fear was the wall. And I was so tired of being afraid of the things that could make me happy.
I closed the book. Set it on the coffee table. Pulled his pillow into my arms and stared at the citythrough his floor-to-ceiling windows until the skyline blurred and my eyelids kept falling shut.
I should've gone to the guest room. Should've maintained the boundary. Should've done the responsible, sensible, adult thing.
I fell asleep on his couch instead.
And when I heard the front door open hours later—quiet footsteps, keys set down with care, the rustle of a man trying not to wake the woman asleep in his living room—I didn't open my eyes.
But I smiled.
And I knew, with the certainty that doesn't need evidence or justification or a single rational thought to back it up, that tomorrow night at the gallery, I wouldn't be pretending.
Not anymore.
ten
CALLUM
She walked out of the guest room and my brain stopped working.
The dress was burgundy—deep and rich, the color of wine held up to candlelight. It draped across her shoulders, dipped at the back, and moved when she moved in a way that made me forget I was supposed to be a functioning adult with a vocabulary.
I'd seen Willow Monroe in a lot of contexts over the past year. Behind the coffee counter, hair escaping its bun, apron dusted with espresso grounds. In the emerald gown at Ashford's gala, looking polished but uncertain. In my borrowed sweats, curled on my couch with a nineteenth-century novel.
This was different.
She wasn't playing dress-up tonight. Wasn't trying to fit into a world that intimidated her. Shewore the dress the way she wore her opinions—with a confidence that dared you to comment.
"Your mouth is open," she said. "Might want to close that before you catch flies."
I shut my jaw. Tried to find language adequate to the situation and failed spectacularly. "That dress is—you look—" I stopped. Ran a hand over my face. "I had a vocabulary ten seconds ago. I'm sure it's around here somewhere."
"The color's called bordeaux." She smoothed a hand down the fabric, a small smile playing at her mouth. "The saleswoman at Nordstrom tried to put me in pink. I told her I'd rather eat glass."
"Dramatic."
"Accurate." She grabbed a clutch from the entry table—small, black, purchased with my credit card and worth every penny. "Ready?"
I wasn't. I wasn't remotely ready to spend an evening in public with this woman after what had happened on my couch thirty-six hours ago. After the kiss that had rewritten my neural pathways and left me incapable of thinking about anything else.
But here I was. Tuxedo pressed. Car waiting. Every rule we'd established in ashes.
"Ready," I said.
The drive to the Whitmore Gallery took twenty-two minutes.
Twenty-two minutes of sitting in close quarters with a woman who'd tasted of vanilla and stolen sleep and the want I'd forgotten I was capable of feeling. Twenty-two minutes of not talking about the kiss. Not mentioning how I'd stood in the hallway outside her door last night, hand raised to knock, before talking myself out of it. Not acknowledging that every atom in my body wanted to pull the car over and pick up where we'd left off.
