CHAPTER 1
NATE
Itoweled sweat from the back of my neck as I stepped into my hotel room. The early morning Manhattan skyline stretched outside the window like it was trying too hard to impress me but I barely noticed it.
My run through Central Park had been followed by the hotel gym, where I’d punished a treadmill for the crime of existing. Theonlyredeeming feature of my three-day stint in networking purgatory so far had been Colin Thayer.
As the Chief Financial Officer of Thayer Steelworks, he was as much a player in this game as I was, so I’d brought him with me to the financial conference.Misery really does love company, after all.
On the other hand, he was my brother-in-law now, and I was really starting to like him. We shared the same preferences for whiskey and quiet lounges, and we both possessed the rare skill of letting silence exist without trying to murder it with small talk. Now that Alex was married to Colin’s sister, Jane, we were practically family.
And our family wasn’t just wealthy. We were an empire. My older brother, Alex, ran Westwood and Sons, I handled acquisitions strategy, and our younger brothers rotated throughthe family machine like soldiers in training. Except for Jesse, who was who knows where these days. Probably on a beach with some models, knowing him.
After dropping the towel on my bed, I grabbed my work phone from the desk in my room and fired off a text to Colin. If I was going downstairs, I was damn sure doing it with him as a human shield.
Me: Back from the gym. Breakfast in an hour?
Colin: Already in the lounge. See you then.
The response was efficient, exactly the kind of communication that made me trust someone with both multimillion-dollar decisions and whiskey recommendations.
I set the phone down just as my personal phone buzzed across the room, still plugged into the charger on the nightstand. The sound was soft and harmless, but at the same time, completely capable of hijacking my central nervous system.
My pulse spiked before I even crossed the carpet. It was about the right time of day for?—
Emma.
Her name lit up the screen and something dangerously close to giddiness detonated in my chest. It was ridiculous how four little letters could dismantle years of cultivated emotional restraint just for being arranged in an order that spelled out her name.
I picked up the phone, already smiling like an idiot as I opened the message.
Emma: Morning! Are you alive or has your work thing made you sacrifice yourself to the gods of productivity yet?
I laughed before I could even think of biting it back. She’d been doing that for five years, making me react before I had time to regulate. A skill bespoke to her and her alone.
Me: Still alive, which I’m sure is a disappointment to several of my coworkers and competitors.
Emma: Tragic. I’ll alert the authorities to your survival.
My heart kicked harder than it had even once during my run this morning. All because tonight wasthenight.
Five years of messages, late-night confessions, and conversations that had crawled under my skin, and it was about to collide with reality. For five whole years, this woman had been my confidante, my friend, and the only person alive who really knew me inside out.
And I’d never even seen her face.
I’d tried to imagine it hundreds of times over the years, but I’d always failed miserably. Emma existed to me only in words and humor, and yet, she made me feel seen and understood in ways I’d never experienced before.
Tonight, I would be meeting her for the first time, and I was already in love with her. The realization wasn’t new, but admitting it even internally? It felt like stepping onto unstable ice.
I hadn’t told her yet, but I wanted to. Desperately.
God, do I want to.
The thought pressed against my ribs with every breath I took, but maybe soon, I would finally be able to do it. As I thought about her, I wondered briefly if this was what Alex felt whenever he talked about his wife, Jane. Did he have this constant hum under his skin and the unsettling combination of calm certainty and absolute terror?
Me: Are we still on for tonight?
The typing bubble appeared instantly and my stomach tightened like I was twenty-two, making catastrophic life choices again.
