Page 39 of Hostile

I walked back and took it from his hand.

“Thank you,” I said stiffly.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

“That’s not⁠—”

“It’s a yes or no question, Megan.”

I looked at him. At the complete absence of strategy on his face—no angle, no play, just the straightforward question of a man who had noticed I probably hadn’t eaten breakfast and was asking about it the same way he always had. As if it were the obvious next thing. As if ten years hadn’t happened.

Like ten years hadn’t happened.

“I have a full afternoon,” I said.

“So that’s a no.” He fell into step beside me before I’d agreed to the arrangement. “There’s a place two blocks over. We’ll be in and out in forty-five minutes.”

“Wyatt—”

“You have to eat sometime.” He glanced sideways at me, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “Some things don’t change.”

I wanted to argue. I had a very good argument, in fact—several of them, stacked and ready, each one more reasonable than the last.

I’m not interested in you. I’m not interested in being your friend. I’m not interested in working with you.

The words were right within reach. At that exact moment, my stomach growled so loudly that a passing businessman glanced over. Wyatt looked at me. I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead.

“You still don’t eat when you’re working,” he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact, observed and filed away, as he always did with things about me. “You used to do the same thing in the library. On the third Thursday of every month, like clockwork, I’d find you at eleven p.m., an empty coffee cup in hand, with no sign of dinner.”

I looked at him despite myself. “You tracked that?”

“I tracked everything about you,” he said plainly, without any show. “I still do, apparently.”

The admission hit me in a place where it shouldn’t have.

Stop it, I thought. But my mouth had already done what it did when I was tired, and my guard was down, and someone said something that was precisely, specifically true.

“The third Thursday was always the derivatives seminar,” I said. “It ran long, and I kept meaning to eat beforehand.”

His quiet smile altered the air between us.

That’s the most dangerous kind of familiarity, I thought. The kind that reassembles itself without permission.

“Fine,” I said. “Forty-five minutes.”

His quiet laugh settled somewhere in my chest, a place I’d spent ten years trying to empty out.

Damn him, I thought, falling into step beside him. Damn him for making it so hard.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

It was just lunch.

We were half a block from the restaurant when I realized I was looking forward to it. Not strategically. Not as reconnaissance or an opportunity or any of the clean, purposeful categories I’d used to justify every interaction with him since the gala.

Just looking forward to it. To sitting across from him. To the conversation, wherever it went. To hearing what he thought about things, even when I disagreed with him. To the way an hour with him always seemed to pass faster than it should. To making him laugh. To the easy rhythm we’d fallen into without either of us seeming to realize it had happened. To collecting another handful of small facts about him that I absolutely did not need and somehow never forgot.