I pressed a kiss to her hair. “Show up. Tell the truth. Let the chips fall.”
She pulled back to look at me, something like wonder in her expression. “Who are you and what have you done with Sebastian Laurent?”
“He’s still here.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear — the gesture that had become as natural as breathing. “Just learning. Slowly.”
My phone buzzed. The board meeting confirmation. Both of us required, per the notice.
Emilia saw the message over my shoulder. “They want me there too?”
“You’re part of this now.” I met her eyes. “Partner, not accessory. Equal standing, equal voice. If they want to discuss the implications of our relationship on Laurent Enterprises, then you should be in the room when they do.”
Something settled in her expression — not surprise, but recognition. The specific look of someone who had been promised something and was watching it actually happen.
“Then I guess we’d better get some sleep,” she said. “Big day tomorrow.”
“Stay with me tonight.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“No.” I pulled her back against my chest, feeling the warm weight of her settle there like something returning to where it belonged. “It wasn’t.”
She kissed me once more — soft, unhurried, a promise that had nothing to do with tonight and everything to do with what came after it.
Then we gathered ourselves and made our way back inside, leaving the city lights to their indifferent business.
Tomorrow would bring the board and the consequences and a future neither of us could map completely.
But for the first time in three weeks, I wasn’t walking into it alone.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, that felt exactly like it was supposed to feel.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Emilia “Em” Rivera
Three months had passed since Sebastian’s press conference changed everything.
The board meeting had lasted four hours. Sebastian had walked in with documentation, his resignation not on the table, and the specific cold authority of a man who had decided he was done being managed by people who’d benefited from his company’s corruption. He’d walked out still CEO, with three board members having tendered their own resignations by end of day — including Charles Preston, whose involvement in the gala sabotage was now a matter of legal record.
Laurent Enterprises was still standing. Changed, leaner, and beginning the slow work of becoming something worth the name. But standing.
I stood in the library of our townhouse — the one we’d moved into six weeks ago, after a conversation that had started as a practical discussion about security and ended with Sebastian saying I want to wake up knowing where you are and me saying that’s either very sweet or very controlling and him sayingprobably both, but I’m asking not assuming and me saying yes — watching late afternoon light spill across the hardwood floors.
His minimalist aesthetic still dominated most of the space: clean lines, neutral tones, everything precisely arranged. But my chaos had infiltrated every corner like a slow-moving invasion.
Research files stacked on the antique coffee table he’d inherited from his grandmother. Coffee mugs I’d forgotten on windowsills, leaving rings he pretended not to notice. A corkboard I’d hung on the wall above the built-in shelves, covered in notes and photographs and half-formed story ideas connected by colored string.
Sebastian had stared at that corkboard for a full minute the first time he saw it.
“It looks like a crime scene investigation,” he’d said finally.
“That’s because it is. Sort of.” I’d kissed his jaw, feeling the scratch of his beard against my lips. “You married a journalist. This is what you get.”
We weren’t married. Not yet. But the word had slipped out, and neither of us had corrected it, and it had been sitting between us in the warm comfortable way of things that were inevitable and neither of us was in a hurry to rush.
Now I heard his footsteps on the stairs — the familiar rhythm of him moving through the space we’d carved out together, unhurried and certain.
He appeared in the doorway wearing dark slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, his signet ring catching the afternoon light as he paused to take me in. This was something he still did — paused in doorways to look at me, like he was making sure I was real, like some part of him was still surprised to find me here.
