I stare at the oatmeal. A skin has formed across the surface. I poke it with my spoon and it resists, rubbery and defiant.
“This oatmeal has a texture.”
“Eat it anyway.”
“It moved, Mason. I poked it and itmoved.”
He doesn’t respond. His phone is already out, one hand scrolling through emails while the other brings a spoon of yogurt to his mouth. The blue light from the screen catches the shadows under his eyes, the tension around his mouth that hasn’t eased since we landed in this town. His glasses sit slightly crooked from sleeping on that torture device of a loveseat, and he hasn’t bothered to fix them.
I abandon the oatmeal and pick up a strawberry. It crunches between my teeth—not in the good way. More in the way a tennis ball might crunch if you had the jaw strength to bite through one. I set it back on the plate and watch Mason instead.
His thumb moves in quick, practiced flicks across the screen. Every few seconds his jaw flexes, the muscle at his temple jumping, and I know that particular rhythm. Bad news has its own cadence on Mason’s face. Small bad news makes him sigh. Medium bad news gets the jaw clench. Big bad news—the kind that rewrites schedules and requires damage control—produces this: the dead-eyed scroll, the mechanical chewing, the total absence of commentary.
I’ve been reading Mason Aldrich for three years. This is big bad news.
“Mase.”
His thumb doesn’t stop. “Mm.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Delay with the replacement aircraft. Maintenance team from Boston can’t get here until tomorrow morning at the earliest.” He still doesn’t look up. “We’re here another day.”
Another day. Another twenty-four hours in this doily-encrusted time capsule of a town, sharing one room with an alpha who catches me ogling his morning situation and an assistant who looks like he’s being slowly murdered from the inside out.
I pick up my spoon and let it hover over the oatmeal.
I set it back down.
“Oh no,” I say, voice flat as the cantaloupe. “How terrible. Stuck in a quaint coastal village with no schedule, no press, no cameras, and no mother. Whatever will I do.”
Mason’s thumb pauses. His gaze lifts just enough to pin me over the rim of his glasses.
He peels back the foil on his yogurt, takes a single precise bite, then points the spoon at me.
“You will be on that plane when it gets here.”
I lean back in my chair, tilting my head. One eyebrow climbs slowly toward my hairline. “And if I don’t want to be?”
“Phoenix.”
“What exactly is your plan, Mason? Are you going to pick me up and carry me onto the tarmac? Fireman-style? Over one shoulder with my legs kicking?” I pluck a piece of cantaloupe from my plate and examine it like a jeweler appraising a suspect diamond. “Because I’m heavier than I look and I bite.”
“I’ll do what I have to do.”
“Please. I would wipe the floor with you.”
Mason sets down the yogurt. Sets down the spoon. Sets down his phone.
He looks at me.
Not the professional look. Not the patient, long-suffering assistant look he gives when I’m being difficult about schedules or dietary fabrications. This is something else. Something that starts in those gray-blue eyes and pushes outward like a wave finding shore, quiet and certain and completely, devastatingly direct.
My breath hitches. The cantaloupe stops halfway to my mouth.
“You really want to know which one of us would win in a fight,” he says, voice low and slow like drips of honey. “There is only one way to find out.”
The cantaloupe drops onto my plate.
