My fingers brushed the edge of his collar. Warm skin. Starched fabric. The rough scrape of stubble where his jaw met his neck. I fixed the fold with more care than the task required, then adjusted his tie, two small tugs to center the knot.
It took too long.
We both knew it.
His breath touched my wrist. His gaze stayed on my face, open in a way that made my chest feel too small. Want was there, yes, unmistakable and reckless. But beneath it was something harder to survive. Trust. Not easy trust. Not blind. The kind he kept handing me piece by piece, even when I had done nothing to deserve a clean version of it.
A server laughed somewhere down the hall.
Neither of us moved.
“Declan,” he said, so quietly the music almost swallowed it.
My name should not have sounded like that in his mouth. Not here. Not with my wife’s voice still in my ear and his girlfriend waiting under ballroom lights.
My thumb smoothed once along the edge of his lapel before I made myself drop my hand.
Jace searched my face. He looked exhausted, furious, steadier than he’d been five minutes ago, and more dangerous to me than anyone in that ballroom could have guessed.
“How long are we going to act like this isn’t happening?”
The hallway seemed to shrink around us.
There were responsible answers. There were cruel ones. There were versions of the truth that would hurt everyone less if I said them now and meant them.
None came easily.
Children laughed twenty yards away. Cameras flashed. Sponsors drank champagne. Vanessa was probably checking the photo they’d just taken. Olivia was at some dinner in another city, still caring about a marriage I was quietly betraying.
I stepped back because staying close would have been a decision.
“Not here.”
His face tightened, not with surprise. With the cost of hearing it.
I turned and walked back toward the ballroom.
I didn’t look over my shoulder.
I felt him there anyway, in the hallway behind me, breathing through what I had left unsaid.
Chapter 15
Chapter 15
JACE
Not here.
I carried those two words out of the fundraiser like a bruise under my shirt.
Declan went back into the ballroom. I followed three minutes later because I could count those, because counting gave me something to do with my hands besides grabbing him by the front of his suit and asking what the hell he wanted from me.
Not here.
Not no.
That was the part making me insane.
