“Don’t even try.” She held up a hand. “I have eyes and a master’s degree in reading your emotional state from across a crowded room. And I’m telling you, as your producer and your best friend, that you are in so much trouble with that man.”
I tried to deny it. Tried to laugh it off, point out how absurd it was that I, a woman with a hit show and forty million viewers, could be thrown off balance by an architect with a bad attitude and cheekbones that should be classified as a controlled substance. If my attraction to Rhys were a Taylor Swift song, it would be on the vault tracks — the ones she knew were too embarrassing to release the first time. But Tessa knew me too well, and I was too tired for the performance.
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
“That’s above my pay grade.” She smiled, but a shadow flickered behind it. “I just produce the drama. I don’t know how to handle it.”
“You should, though.” The words escaped before I could stop them. “Handle some of your own. Find someone. You spend so much time making sure everyone else gets their happy ending — when’s the last time you went on a date?”
Tessa’s smile held, but her eyes shuttered like a door locking from the inside. “Some of us stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago. Some of us are better at running the show than starring in it.”
She said it like a joke. It didn’t land like one. I watched her walk back toward the production monitors, her posture perfect, her clipboard held like a shield, and I thought: Someone hurt you. Someone hurt you badly enough that you decided to spend your life writing other people’s love stories instead of living your own. I filed that thought alongside the growing list of things Tessa refused to talk about.
I found Mason sitting alone on the terrace overlooking the mansion’s absurdly manicured gardens, strange because Mason was never alone. Mason was perpetual motion, constant chatter, infectious energy that drew people into his orbit whether they wanted to be there or not. Seeing him still and quiet, staring at the sunset with an expression that looked melancholy, was like seeing a golden retriever who’d forgotten how to wag its tail. The internet would have called it a “sad boy autumn” moment, but the internet would have been wrong — there was nothing aesthetic about how his shoulders curled inward like he was trying to occupy less space.
“Hey,” I said, settling into the chair next to him. “You okay?”
“Yeah! Totally. Great.” Too fast, too bright, and his smile had all the heat of a fluorescent bulb. “Just, you know, taking a moment. Enjoying the view. Living my best life.”
“Mason.”
He deflated, the performance collapsing. “I’m fine. Really. Just…” A vague gesture at the gardens, the mansion, everything. “Thinking too much. Bad habit.”
“What were you thinking about?”
For a long moment, nothing. He was searching for words that wouldn’t come, and the golden retriever mask slipped just enough to show what was underneath — a loneliness I recognized from my own mirror. He was peeling the label off his water bottle, shredding it into tiny strips, unconscious destruction people do when their hands need somewhere to put everything their mouth won’t say.
“Everyone likes me,” he said finally, his voice stripped of its usual voltage. “I’m fun. Easy to be around. The guy who makes everyone laugh, who never takes anything too seriously, who you invite to parties because he’ll bring the energy.” He laughed, but it came out wrong, hollow. “Nobody ever looks at me like I could be… enough. Like there might be a person worth paying attention to underneath the jokes.” He was staring at his hands now, at the shredded label, and I realized he’d torn it into a perfect little pile of confetti. A celebration nobody had thrown. A party for one.
The admission hung between us, raw and completely at odds with the Mason I’d seen on camera — the one who tripped over furniture and seemed incapable of a serious thought.
“Mason—”
“Ignore me.” He was already pulling the mask back on. “Being weird. Probably hungry. Did someone mention food?”
But I didn’t ignore it. I couldn’t. I’d spent too many years being the person everyone laughed at and underestimated to miss the pain underneath someone else’s act. I filed it alongside the other things I was learning about these men — the ones who showed you who they were, and the ones who hid.
“Gentlemen, welcome to the Care Test.”
Tessa stood in the mansion’s industrial kitchen — stainless steel, commercial appliances that looked vaguely terrifying — with the confident smile of a woman about to ruin ten men’s afternoons.
“The rules are simple. You have two hours to prepare Sloane’s comfort food. The catch?” She paused. “You can’t ask her what it is. You have to already know.”
Julian’s composure cracked for a quarter-second — genuine panic, quickly smoothed. Mason made a noise like a dying whale. Derek’s smile sharpened, predatory. And Rhys didn’t react at all, just stood with his arms crossed, face unreadable, like he’d already solved a puzzle the rest of them hadn’t noticed. I tried not to read into the fact that my gaze had found him first. Failed.
“You have access to anything in this kitchen,” Tessa continued. “Cookbooks, recipes, ingredients. The only thing you can’t access is Sloane herself. Good luck.”
The chaos was everything the producers hoped for. Julian immediately began assembling a lobster thermidor with precise, methodical movements completely disconnected from anything I’d ever said about food — the culinary equivalent of buying someone a Peloton for their birthday: impressive, vaguely insulting, and proof he hadn’t been paying attention. Mason set fire to a pan of butter within ten minutes, spent fifteen more fighting the extinguisher while the smoke alarm auditioned for a horror movie, and eventually resorted to ordering pizza on hisphone when he thought no one was looking. (I was looking. I appreciated the honesty.) Derek prepared a picture-perfect beef bourguignon that screamed “I googled ’impressive date night dinners’ and selected the first result with good SEO.”
And then there was Rhys.
He moved through the kitchen like he belonged there. Didn’t rush, didn’t panic, didn’t glance at the others. Just worked. Competence porn — the internet had a word for everything. The specific attractiveness of watching someone be exceptionally good at a task. I’d thought it was a myth, a thing that only existed in Nora Ephron movies and TikTok thirst traps of men building shelves. I was wrong.
I watched from behind the one-way glass as he gathered flour, butter, sugar. Baking — but that narrowed it down to ten thousand options. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and I’m going to state this once and never revisit it: forearms. The kind that belonged on a man who built things, all lean muscle and visible tendons, now dusted with flour that I had the sudden, unhinged urge to brush off. I filed that thought under never examining more closely and focused on his technique — confident, measured movements that suggested either training or obsessive research he’d bring to any problem. He measured the way an architect would — no approximation, no eyeballing. When he cut the butter into the flour, he did it with the focused intensity of a man performing surgery on a building that mattered.
“You’re staring,” Tessa observed.
“I’m observing. There’s a difference.”
