“No,” she agreed. “You shouldn’t.”
“He probably wants to be alone.”
“He probably does.”
“Going after him is the opposite of every smart decision I could make right now.”
“It absolutely is.” She touched my arm — gentle, brief, a touch that says I know what you’re about to do and I’m choosing to love you anyway. “Go.”
I found my heels in the hallway. Not the metaphorical ones — I’d never lost those. My actual heels, clicking against marble at a pace that was definitely faster than dignified but not quite a run, because Sloane did not run after men on national television. She walked briskly. With purpose. In four-inch stilettos that were going to give her a stress fracture if she kept this up, and she was keeping this up, because apparently she’d left her survival instincts in the makeup chair along with her lip liner.
He’d gone left at the junction. I knew this because I’d spent four weeks memorizing his escape routes — the garden terrace, the east corridor, the bench where his hands had trembled and I’d looked at the stars to give him somewhere to hide. I’d built an entire mental map of Rhys’s retreat patterns, and if that wasn’t the most pathetic form of intimacy two people hadever developed on a reality show, I didn’t want to hear about whatever came in second.
I wasn’t going to give him somewhere to hide this time.
“Rhys.”
He stopped halfway down the corridor. Didn’t turn around. His shoulders were a rigid line, held together with what looked like sheer stubbornness and the last functioning thread of his dignity.
“I need a minute,” he said. His voice was rough — scraped raw, stripped of the sardonic drawl and the dry discipline and all the defenses I’d indexed over four weeks. This was new. This was underneath.
“You left before I could score you.”
“I failed. Score accordingly.”
“You didn’t fail.”
That made him turn. Slowly, like the motion cost him. His face was still open — still showing everything he usually kept buried under sarcasm and distance and that frown that I was going to dream about for reasons I refused to examine. In the late afternoon light through the arched windows, he looked exhausted and exposed and so honest it made my throat tighten. The collar of his shirt was slightly askew from where he’d apparently been gripping it, and I noticed that detail how I’d been noticing every detail about this man for weeks: with total recall and zero chill.
“What would you call that?” he asked. Quiet. A quiet that sits right before honest.
I took a step closer. Then another. Then another, until I was standing in front of him with no cameras and no audience and no pretense, and the distance between us was measured in inches and everything we weren’t saying.
“I’d call it real,” I said.
His throat moved. His eyes dropped to my mouth — then snapped back up — and the effort that correction cost him was visible, documentable, a tell that would hold up in any court. He’d done the same thing in the garden. Looked at my mouth and caught himself. Looked at my mouth and decided not to. Except each time, the not was getting shorter, and I was running out of reasons to want him to succeed at it.
“You should go back,” he said.
“Probably.”
“The cameras—”
“Aren’t here.”
“Sloane.” My name in his mouth — low, rough, careful, like the word itself was fragile. “If you stay, I’m going to—”
He stopped. Swallowed hard enough that I watched his throat move. A man who couldn’t finish a sentence because finishing it meant admitting something he’d spent thirty years training himself not to want.
I stepped closer. Close enough to see his pulse hammering in his throat, fast and visible and completely beyond his control.
“You’re going to what?”
He didn’t run. Didn’t deflect. Didn’t reach for sarcasm or any of the emergency exits he usually kept propped open. He just stood there, breathing hard, looking at me with those unguarded blue-grey eyes, and I understood — bone-deep, four-seasons-of-experience, every-cell-in-my-body understood — that whatever came next was going to change everything. And I had chased him down this hallway in four-inch heels because I wanted it to.
He opened his mouth.
My walkie-talkie crackled. Tessa’s voice, tinny and sorry: “Sloane, we need you back for Derek’s one-on-one. Five minutes.”
