“You can sleep here. I’ll watch over you.”
“Creepy.”
“Romantic.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
He kissed her, and she tasted champagne on his lips.
“I’m going to shower. I smell like a commercial kitchen.”
“You smell like victory.”
“Victory smells like grease and sweat.”
“My favorite combination.”
She laughed, kissed him once more, and headed for the bathroom.
She stood under the hot spray and felt the tension leave her shoulders. One muscle at a time.
Somewhere between rinsing out the conditioner and reaching for a towel, she remembered: Mrs. Porter’s daughter. The spring wedding. She needed to write that down before it slipped.
She wrapped herself in one of his towels and padded down the hall toward the kitchen. The study door was open. She ducked in to find a pen and paper.
The desk was immaculate. Of course it was. This was Gabriel. No stray papers, no scattered supplies. Everything in its place.
She opened the top drawer.
A frame sat inside. Glass and wood. Face up.
THE OATH.
There were three signatures at the bottom and three names she recognized. And a date. Three years after he’d walked away from her.
And the words. No serious relationships. No emotional complications. No exceptions. Until the age of forty.
She read it twice.
He’d told her there had been one woman after her. One. And when it ended, he’d felt relief. She’d held onto that word. Relief meant she was the exception. Relief meant no one after her had broken him.
But relief didn’t draft a legal document. Relief didn’t name a company.
Whoever that woman had been, she hadn’t done this.
That left only her.
She turned the frame over in her hands. Not a folded piece of paper. Not something in a box with a tassel and a graduation photo. Someone had put it under glass. Someone had decided it was worth preserving.
If the Oath was old news, nobody had told the frame.
It was years after he’d let her go. Years after his mother had cornered her in the Ashford hallway. Years after Camille Sterling had told her she’d never be good enough for her son.
It seems his mother was right. Long after the goodbye, he’d signed a document promising never to love a woman again. He hadn’t just walked away. He’d built an entire life around making sure he never made the mistake again.
“Tessa.”
His voice reached her from the hallway, closer than she’d expected. He said her name the careful way—not the way he said it in his kitchen or his bed—and she knew by the pitch of it that he already felt something was wrong.
