She could have dismissed me. The smart play, the TV-friendly play, would have been to mark me as uncooperative and move on to contestants who’d actually chosen to be there.
Instead, she’d descended from her throne and walked straight toward me.
The moment her perfume had hit me came back unbidden — vanilla, yes, but with a sharper note underneath, one that made me think of citrus groves and expensive hotels and trouble. Her eyes searching my face like she was reading blueprints, tracing load-bearing walls, looking for the hidden flaw I would have sworn I’d buried too deep for anyone to find. Her voice when she’d told me I didn’t have to kneel, but I did have to play.
I’d thought: This woman is dangerous.
I hadn’t cared.
“We’ll see,” I’d said, and she’d smiled at me like I’d just handed her a gift I hadn’t meant to give, and I’d realized too late that I’d agreed to stay without meaning to.
Standing at the window now, three hours and one crisis of self-awareness later, I understood what had happened. She’d read me. In ninety seconds, she’d mapped my defenses and decided, for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand, that I was worth the effort of siege.
I should be insulted. I should be terrified. I should be packing my valise and calling a car and getting as far from this California nightmare as possible before she had a chance to find another crack in my defenses.
I turned away from the window.
The valise sat where I’d left it, zipper still gleaming, still promising escape. Three days of clothes. A toothbrush. A book I wouldn’t have time to read because I was supposed to be getting eliminated tomorrow, the next day, the day after that at the latest.
My hand reached for the zipper.
And stopped.
I’ve spent thirty years building walls. Walls around my heart, around my history, around every soft and breakable thing that my father taught me to hide and my brother keeps trying to excavate. I’ve built them so high and so carefully that no one has ever gotten through — girlfriends, colleagues, the string of women I’ve dated and disappointed and walked away from before they could see anything real.
She looked at me once and I felt them crack.
That’s not attraction. That’s reckless damage.
I should leave. Every instinct I have, every defense mechanism I’ve spent three decades perfecting, every lesson my father ever taught me about the danger of wanting things — all of it screams at me to go. To run. To get out before she has a chance to find another weakness, exploit another fault line, bring the whole carefully constructed edifice crumbling down.
Instead, I opened the valise.
Started unpacking.
I told myself I was staying because the show was absurd and I wanted to expose it. I told myself I was staying because Declanhad challenged me and I never backed down from a challenge. I told myself I was staying because leaving would let everyone assume they were right about me — the arrogant man who couldn’t handle a strong woman, the villain who ran away when things got hard.
The real reason didn’t exist. There was no real reason. Just strategic curiosity. Professional interest in understanding the enemy. She’d looked at me like she could see past the armor, and I needed to prove she was wrong. I needed to prove that there was nothing to see. That the defenses went all the way down.
That was the only reason.
I hung my shirts in the closet with more care than the task required, aligning the hangers at exact intervals, the same discipline I brought to the rest of my life. Order. Control. Structure. These were the principles that governed my existence, and they would continue to govern it regardless of how many reality TV producers tried to manufacture chaos around me.
Sloane Mitchell was an obstacle. A variable to be analyzed and understood. And if understanding her required paying close attention — memorizing how she moved, the sound of her laugh, the shade of green in her hazel eyes — that was simply good strategy. Nothing more.
That I could still smell her perfume, hours later, miles away from wherever she was sleeping in this ridiculous mansion? Irrelevant. Olfactory memory was a well-documented phenomenon. It meant nothing.
That I kept replaying the moment I’d said “We’ll see” — the way her eyes had sharpened, the almost-smile on her lips, how she’d held my gaze like I’d just handed her a challenge she’d been waiting for? Strategic analysis. Know your enemy. Standard procedure.
That a wire pulled tight inside me every time I thought about tomorrow, about seeing her again, about whatever test they’d designed to measure our attention?
That was probably just the altitude. California was at sea level, but the mansion was in the hills. Elevation changes affected cardiovascular function. Everyone knew that.
The production schedule was sitting on my nightstand where someone had placed it during the mansion tour, a printed itinerary in an elegant folder with the show’s logo embossed on the front. I hadn’t looked at it. Hadn’t planned to. Looking at the schedule meant acknowledging that I was staying, and I was supposed to be leaving.
But my clothes were unpacked now, hanging in the closet like they belonged there, and my toothbrush was in the bathroom, and my book was on the nightstand next to the folder I’d been ignoring, and at some point between refusing to kneel and standing here at 2 a.m. I’d decided to participate in this farce after all.
I opened the folder.
