He swiped the card, and the door opened with a soft, pneumatic hiss. He stepped aside and she walked in front of him. From the moment Jenna stepped through the threshold, she realized this was not simply a hotel suite but a secret wing of a presidential palace. To her left, an open archway led into a great room stretching out in a cathedral of glass, chrome, and moody midnight blue. There were three separate conversation pits, each with its own distinct arrangement of plush seating and abstract sculpture. Four fireplaces flickered in the periphery—two real, the others clever illusions, seamlessly programmed to cycle through flames of lavender and gold.
It was the kind of place where even the silence was expensive, where the air had that just-polished, barely-lived-in hush that made her want to tiptoe. But beneath the surface, the suite throbbed with something vibrant and alive. The far wall was glass from floor to ceiling, offering a view of the city so glittering it looked photoshopped. Past the living space, she glimpsed a terrace with a lap pool bordered by clusters of potted olive trees. Jenna followed the line of sight until she saw the shadowy profiles of hills beyond the city lights, unfamiliar and menacing, as if the world itself held its breath here.
D moved with unspoken confidence, leading her past an inset library with built-in shelves filled with actual books, not just decorative ones, and a media lounge with a screen so large it looked like a window to another dimension. He showed her to a dining area furnished with a live-edge wood table and sculptural chairs, then a kitchen so gleaming and high-tech it looked almost fake, as if set-dressed for a magazine shoot rather than a midnight snack.
“This iscomped?”
“Yep. There are three bedrooms,” he said, his voice low, reverberating off marble and glass. “Five baths. There’s an office, a gym, and the rooftop level is all yours if you want it. I’ll show you.”
She let out a forced laugh. “I can barely remember where the front door is. I think I need a map.”
D smiled, just the left corner of his mouth twitching up, as if mapping were something he’d already considered. “I can draw you one, if needed.” He motioned for her to follow, and she did, lagging a few steps behind as her eyes darted from suede upholstery to hand-blown glass vases to a wall-sized, kinetic piece of art that seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat.
He led her down a hallway, the floor covered in a muted Persian runner, past two guest rooms, each more luxurious than the penthouse suite she’d once splurged on for Bree’s Vegas bachelorette.
Holy shit.
She froze, and her heart, her stomach, her soul felt like they plummeted from her body.Tanner. How had she not thought about Tanner?
D must have noticed that she was no longer following him because he glanced over his shoulder. What he saw caused him to turn all the way around and take a large stride to close the distance between them. He stopped so close in front of her she was staring directly at his chest and had to tilt her head back to a 90-degree angle just to see his face.
“Are you okay?” His eyes searched her face as if trying to find clues. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Sorry, I just…” She shook her head. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t think about Bree or James. Shehatedgoing back on a rule she made for herself. She was a stickler for that sort of thing. Some even labeled it a compulsion, if she set a rule or boundary, that was it, no crossing it or breaking it. But she’d give herself a pass tonight, it had been a fairly extraordinary day. “I just remembered Bree’s husband in all of this. I can’t believe I didn’t even think about Tanner.I’llbe fine. James and I have only been together seven years, and I’m…wellme. But Tanner. Bree and Tanner have been together since senior year of high school, and he’sTanner. He adores Bree, she’s his whole world. I can’t believe all I thought about wasmyself.”
D’s dark brows furrowed as he stared down at her, and he breathed, “Wow.”
“I know.” She took a deep breath and exhaled.
His lips curled at the edges slightly, as if something amused him.
“What?!” she barked, somewhat aggressively.
“I wasn’t sayingwowbecause I agreed with you. I was saying,wow, are you always this hard on yourself?”
“I’m not.” She shook her head and took a step back as all of her emotional defense lasers activated, protecting her heart like it was the Fabergé egg in theOcean’sTwelvemovie. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’tknowme.”
He shrugged casually, clearly taking no offense. “Maybe, maybe not.”
She noted two things in his response to her reaction. One, he didn’t agree with her when she said he didn’t know her, which was odd since they didn’t even know each other’s full names. Or, at least she didn’t think D was his full name, and he hadn’t asked her name. James insisted on calling her Jen, so she knew he didn’t know her name. Two, he wasn’t reactive. She’d snapped at him and been cold to him, and both times his behavior towards her hadn’t changed at all. That was rare in men, at least the men she knew. It was a quality she’d taken for granted in her first husband, probably because they’d been off and on since they were fourteen.
She’d promised herself years ago, after being with James for a while, “Self, if we’re ever single again, we will never be with a reactive man.”
His eyes studied her. “So, if your daughter had been through what you went through today?—”
“She would never—” Jenna stopped herself mid-blurt. She really needed to get a head-to-mouth filter.
“She would never what?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He stared down at her, waiting.
He could wait all night, she was never going to say out loud the words that had nearly escaped her mouth, which were, “She would never marry a man like James, I would never let her.”
That’s not great. The fact that her first reaction was that she would never let her daughter marry a man like her husband. And the thing was, it had nothing to do with his behavior today. It was based on his behavior throughout their marriage. She would burn everything down before she’d allow Blake to be in a marriage like she’d been in with James.
How had that never dawned on her before?
