The heart she trusted is still beating. It’s just broken now.
Not from a cardiac event. From her absence. From the look on her face when the cameras went off and the truth hit her broadside, and I watched every piece of trust I’d built disintegrate in her blue eyes. From the sound of suitcase wheels on hardwood. From three words I said too late to a woman who was already gone.
She fills the space. All of it. Every corner of the empty room my mind has produced since day one with this ridiculous meditation app. Peace was never a place for me. It was a person. It’s Ella. It’s been her from the beginning, and she’s in Sedona right now, thinking I let her go without a fight.
The backs of my eyes sting. I’m sitting in a hospital bed in a gown that doesn’t close in the back and a meditation app playing its idiot chimes through my earbuds. My throat is tight. My hand finds the scarf on the table beside me. The only piece of her I have left.
I wrap the silk around my fist and hold on.
The app is still playing. I pull the earbuds out and set the phone on my lap to give myself a moment to think amid the quiet.
Then the door opens and the quiet is over.
“Jesus Christ, Beckett. You look like shit.”
Finn Bardot fills the doorway like he was built for entrances. Sandy-blond hair, greenish-blue eyes already scanning the room with the look of a man who finds hospitals personally offensive. Behind him, Wyatt Reed steps in carrying a paper coffee cup, his dark hair still too perfectly styled for a hospital visit at eight-thirty in the morning.
“Martha called us last night,” Wyatt says. He sets his cup down on my bedside table. “She said you were being discharged this morning. We came to make sure you’re actually alive.”
“I’m alive.”
“Barely,” Finn says, dropping into the visitor’s chair like he owns it. His gaze lands on the scarf, the gown, the wristband, the stubble. “You’re the only person I know who can come back from a vacation still wound tight enough to land in a cardiac ward.”
“It wasn’t cardiac.” The words come out flat. I look at Wyatt, who is watching me with the careful attention of a man deciding how hard to push. “It was an anxiety episode. My heart’s fine.”
“Anxiety,” Wyatt repeats. He leans back, arms folded, his expression shifting from amusement to something sharper. “You? You actually had an anxiety attack.”
“Apparently.”
Finn is quiet for exactly one second. Then the grin arrives, slow and deliberate. “Something’s not adding up here. What exactly happened at that resort you went to? Let me guess. You were sent there to relax, but you spent the past ten days negotiating another multi-billion-dollar acquisition? One nine-billion deal about to close wasn’t enough?”
“Nothing like that,” I grumble. “I met someone.”
Wyatt’s dark brows shoot up. “A little holiday fling? Don’t tell me you overdid it with some lovely island beauty and landed in the ER.”
He makes air quotes on the words “overdid it” and I swear if I wasn’t wearing a hospital gown with my ass hanging out of it, I’d leap off the bed and punch the bastard.
“It wasn’t a fling, and Ella’s not from Barbados. She lives in Sedona.”
Wyatt frowns. “As in, Arizona?”
I nod, and he leans in, suddenly very interested.
“Are you saying you fell in love?” The miserable look I give him is answer enough. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Finn smirks. “Alec Beckett, the third man to fall. I sure as hell didn’t have that on my bingo card. For the record, I believe this means you’ve officially forfeited your stake in our little wager. The Last Billionaire Standing field is thinning.”
Wyatt shoots him a glower. “Read the room, Finn. Fuck.”
“I am reading the room. The room says he’s lovesick, not dying. Those are very different problems, and one of them is a lot funnier than the other.” Finn turns back to me, and for half a second the grin slips. “The fact that a woman put you flat on your back in a hospital bed is either the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard, or proof that she’s worth every cent of the million you’re about to lose.”
He says it like a joke. But his eyes hold mine a beat too long, and what’s in them isn’t humor. It’s the look of a man standing on the edge of something he doesn’t believe in, staring at the wreckage below and privately calculating the odds that it happens to him.
It won’t,his expression says.I’m smarter than that.
I’ve seen that face before. In my own mirror. About three weeks ago.
“You need anything before we head out?” Wyatt asks, picking up his coffee. “I can drive you home once they spring you.”
