Page 25 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

The doors open. We go right. Our suites are six feet apart in the same corridor, and the specific irony of having requested distance and arrived at proximity is not something I spend time on.

I find the adjoining door the moment I walk into my suite. It's just a door — paneled, standard, the bolt on my side thrown. I stand in front of it for exactly as long as it takes to acknowledge it and decide to move on. She's on the other side of it. Fifteen feet, maybe less.I go to the desk and make two calls.

She knocks twenty-eight minutes later. I open the door and step back. She's changedinto a cream silk blouse and dark trousers, her hair still loose from the flight. She smells like something light and floral — warm underneath, the kind of scent that stays in a room after the person has left it. I notice it and move past it.

"Sit down," I say, moving to the desk.

"We have about four hours before the car."

She sits across from me and gives me her full attention. No notepad — she stopped bringing one weeks ago, which I've come to respect.

I take her through the tier-one donor interactions for the evening — the conversations that need to happen, the ones that need to stay brief, the two situations that require careful handling. She asks the right questions and already knows half the answers from our San Francisco briefings. Where she doesn't, she absorbs the information cleanly and quickly.

This is the thing that has gotten under my skin more than anything else. Not the way she looks — though I'm not unaware of that. It's the way she keeps pace with me. I've operated at a tempo most people find unsustainable for long enough that I stopped noticing how much space I take up in a room. Sutton doesn't shrink from it. She matches it, every time.

I close the brief.

"Car is downstairs at 7:00. I'll meet you in the lobby."

"I'll be ready." She stands and moves toward the door. At the threshold she pauses — just enough to look back.

"Logan."

I look up.

"Tonight's going to go well," she says. No performance in it. Just a straight, quiet fact.

She leaves before I can respond.

***

I'm in the lobby at 6:55.

I've reviewed the room configuration, confirmed our table placement, and exchanged two messages with the foundation's event coordinator. I'm standing near the base of the staircase when the room shifts — a subtle change in the ambient noise that happens when something worth looking at enters a space.

I turn around and see her standing at the top of the stairs in front of the elevators.

The gown is deep emerald, fitted through the bodice and waist in a way that doesn't need commentary, the skirt moving as she descends with a quiet authority that belongs to women who know how to wear something. Her hair is down, swept to one side, catching the light of the lobby chandeliers. At her throat and ears, diamonds — small, precise, drawing the eye to the line of her collarbone.

I don't move for two full seconds. Then I cross the lobby and meet her at the base of the stairs.

"You look the part," I say.

Her eyes find mine and something in them shifts — something close to amusement.

"High praise."

Ioffer my arm. She takes it, and the moment her hand settles into the crook of my elbow I feel the warmth of it through my jacket. I keep us moving toward the door.

Dallas moves past the windows — wider than San Francisco, the sky bigger, the city lit and sprawling. She looks out at it with her hands in her lap and I glance over at her profile against the passing lights. Her perfume is richer tonight, warmer than what I've grown used to in the office. In the closed space of the car it's impossible to ignore so I don't try. She turns from the window and I look forward.

"Nervous?" she asks.

"No," I say.

She's quiet for a beat.

"Me neither. I just wanted to say it out loud."