Page 45 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

I'm still there when the first gray light comes through the curtains. I lie still and I listen to him breathe as I look at the ceiling and I let myself think the thing I've been not thinking for two months.

I'm falling for him.

I know it the way you know things you've been trying not to know — all at once, with the clarity of something that was always true and was just waiting for you to stop arguing with it. It isn't a revelation so much as an admission. The feeling has been there since Dallas, maybe before. I've just been managing it instead of naming it.

I name it now. Quietly, in the gray morning light, with Logan Drake's arm around me and his heartbeat steady under my cheek.

I'm falling in love with him and I know it.

What I don't know — what I can't answer lying here in the dark — is whether Logan Drake is a man capable of falling back. Whether what happened last night, the way he held my face, the way he carried me through that door, the way he wouldn't let me go — whether any of it means what I want it to mean. Or whether I am building something in my mind that exists only because I want it to.

I don't know.

I lie there with that uncertainty sitting heavy and real in my chest — not despair, because I am not a woman who does despair — but a clear-eyed reckoning with what I am risking. What I may have already risked without realizing it.

Outside, Boston is waking up. I close my eyes and stay exactly where I am.

Chapter Thirteen

Logan

Idon't think about her.

That's what I tell myself on a Tuesday morning when I'm reviewing the overnight correspondence and I've read the same paragraph three times without retaining a single word of it. I set the document down. I look at the city outside my window. I pick the document back up.

I don't think about her the way a man with a problem thinks about something. It's more ambient than that — a frequency running underneath everything else, present enough to be felt, quiet enough to be ignored if I choose to ignore it. I've been choosing to ignore it for going on two months now. The choosing has gotten harder.

I've made adjustments to my schedule. Small ones. All professionally justifiable. A standing review that moved from 9:00 to 8:30 so I'm at my desk when she arrives with the morning brief. A working lunch restructuredto happen in the office rather than off-site. A Friday afternoon blocked for internal review that happens to keep both of us on the floor two hours past when the rest of the team has gone. These are operational decisions. Each one has a legitimate rationale.

I haven't examined the pattern they form together.

My evenings used to have a quality I'd call sufficient. The apartment, the work I bring home, the scotch I pour at eight and finish by nine, the silence that has been the backdrop of my personal life for a decade. It was enough. It was exactly what I built it to be — a life calibrated for one person, no complications, no expectations, nothing that could become something I hadn't planned for.

That silence has developed a texture lately. Not uncomfortable, not loud. Just — present. A low frequency thing I notice in the moments between tasks when there's nothing else to notice. I don't examine that either.

What I do instead is work. More of it, later into the evening, with the specific focus of a man who has found that the best way to not think about something is to give his mind nowhere to rest.

It works.Mostly.

The Hartwell Group sends their lead negotiator to the table on a Wednesday — a man named Marcus Vane, mid-forties, the kind of polished that comes from twenty years of getting what he wants in rooms like mine. He's good. I've dealt with him before and I know his tells, know the way he pivots when the leverage isn't where he needs it, know that the charm is a tool and thetool is well-maintained. He notices Sutton the moment she enters the conference room.

She's there in her operational capacity — managing the room, handling the documentation, the quiet efficient presence she maintains in any professional setting. She sets the briefing folders at each seat, exchanges two sentences with our legal counsel, and takes her position near the door.

Vane watches her cross the room. I clock it in the time it takes most people to blink. I say nothing. I open the negotiation the way I open everything — direct, controlled, already two steps ahead of wherever he thinks this conversation is going.

The first hour is clean. Vane is sharp and I match him point for point, the back and forth of two people who both understand the real conversation underneath the one being spoken. Sutton moves through the room as needed — refilling water, passing documents, fielding a request from our legal team with the ease of someone who has absorbed this world so thoroughly she operates inside it like she was built for it.

Vane addresses her twice. Both times with the specific quality of attention that has nothing to do with the document she's handing him. My jaw tightens on the second one. I redirect the conversation. Vane follows because I give him no choice. The negotiation closes at the outcome I came in for, the terms clean, the handshake firm. He leaves satisfied, which means he got less than he wanted and has been managed well enough not to know it.

The legal team files out. The room empties. Sutton is at the end of the table gathering the briefing folders when I walk toward her. She looks up. She reads my expression in the way she does now — quickly, accurately, the specific fluency of someone who has spent months learning a language most people never get access to.

"Vane," she says. Not a question.

"He was out of line."

"He was professional," she says.

"Attentive, but professional."