My other hand moved to her right foot without consulting my brain. I worked my fingers along the tendon from her heel to the ball of her foot, and she exhaled slowly, her head tippingback, throat exposed to the moonlight in a way that made me acutely aware I was a man with a heartbeat and functioning eyes and a rapidly deteriorating cover story about therapeutic intentions.
“This is the part where you say something cutting,” she murmured, eyes closed. “About how my shoe choices are a public safety hazard.”
“Your shoe choices are a medical emergency and your metatarsals deserve better.”
“There he is.” She smiled with her eyes closed, and I felt it in places that had no business being affected by someone else’s facial expression. My palm followed the curve of her ankle — slower now, following the bone — and her knee drifted half an inch closer to my thigh. Close enough that the gap had become a measurement I was tracking with more precision than I’d ever applied to a building tolerance.
“Cameras are off,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
These little words carried more weight than anything I’d said in three weeks.
She opened her eyes and looked at me, and in the moonlight her irises were the color of aged whiskey — warm, amber, a shade I’d seen in the wood grain of restored Victorian timber, an unhinged comparison that was further evidence of contamination beyond repair. Her gaze moved to my mouth. Then back to my eyes. The intentionality of that movement activated every nerve I had left.
She touched my jaw. Her fingers were light, barely there, tracing the line from my ear to my chin. My eyes closed before I could stop them — involuntary, the most honest thing my body had ever done — and I felt myself lean into her touch. Towardher. The way a thing leans toward its center of gravity when it’s done pretending it can stand alone.
“Rhys.” Her voice was close. Warm. If I opened my eyes, she’d be right there — close enough that the slightest movement would eliminate the distance. Her breath landed on my skin, and my body was running one calculation, only one, over and over: the force required to close the gap between her mouth and mine.
“When we kiss,” she said — when, not if, deployed with quiet certainty, as if inevitability were a given — “I want it to mean something.”
“It will.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded stripped, bare, like the protective layers had failed in sequence and this was what lived underneath. “It already does.”
The space between us was three inches. Maybe less. Her warmth reached me without contact, and the gap was somehow more charged than the touch.
She pulled back. Slowly. Her fingers trailed away from my jaw and she smiled — tender, knowing, slightly wrecked — a smile that said she understood how close that had been and had stopped not because she wanted to but because the waiting was its own kind of want.
“Goodnight, Rhys.”
“Goodnight, Sloane.”
Neither of us moved for a beat. Two. Three. The jasmine was obscene, perfuming the air between us like the universe had decided to be heavy-handed about its metaphors.
She stood, slipped her feet back into her shoes with a grimace, and walked toward the mansion. At the garden gate she paused.
“For the record,” she said, “you have good hands.”
She disappeared inside. Which was strategic, because the only response I had was the truth: my hands were still unsteady and I could still feel her ankle under my fingertips and I was in considerably more trouble than twenty minutes ago. I sat on the bench for another ten minutes, staring at my hands, and then I texted Declan a single word: help. He responded with a laughing emoji and a GIF of a building collapsing. Brothers.
I didn’t sleep.
I lay in bed from 1:17 AM until 6:30 AM and tried to think about load calculations for the Tribeca project, about the seismic retrofit proposal I’d left on my desk, about literally anything besides the sound she’d made when I found the knot in her arch. I failed. I opened the Notes app on my phone and started drafting an email to my project manager about the foundation assessment, and somehow — somehow — it turned into a list of things I’d noticed about Sloane that I had no professional reason to know. I deleted it at 4 AM. Rewrote it at 4:07. Deleted it again at 4:12. At 4:15, I wrote “STOP” in all caps at the top of a blank note, which lasted until 4:16, when I added “she smells like jasmine and bad decisions” underneath it. The Notes app had never been weaponized against a grown man’s dignity this effectively.
I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror at 6:45 AM and understood, with clinical objectivity, why Mason would later tell me I looked like shit. The circles under my eyes had circles. My teeth were clenched so tight they could have cracked walnuts. I looked as if I’d been in a fight, accurate — I’d been fighting myself for five hours, and I’d lost badly.
The confessional interview that morning was an exercise in deception. The producer — sharp eyes, predatory instinct, bonus dependent on manufactured drama — positioned me in the chair.
“So, Rhys. Anything happen last night? Garden cameras are off, but you were seen heading that direction. And you weren’t alone.”
“Nothing happened.” My face gave nothing. “I went for a walk. The east terrace railing has an issue. I ran into Sloane. We discussed anchor bolts.”
“Anchor bolts.”
“Limestone erosion can destabilize a—”
“Sure.” Her smile held steady. Her eyes were already composing the footage reel. “Anchor bolts. Got it.”
Declan called at 9 AM. I knew it was coming how you know a storm is moving in — the pressure shift, the inevitability. I stepped onto the balcony.
