Breathless

Raven

In a few minutes, I’ll see Roman again after three years apart, and God help me, I might lose my mind just thinking about it.

James drives smoothly and unhurriedly, as if there is no such thing as urgency in the world. I’d forgotten that about him. I’d forgotten a lot of things about Boston until they started appearing outside the window one by one, demanding to be remembered.

The city looks the same. Of course it does. Three years feels enormous from the inside and means nothing to a skyline.

I press my temple against the cool glass and watch it pass and then my breath catches because there he is, Roman, forty feet tall on a billboard above the intersection, in a dark suit with his arms folded and that controlled expression he wears in every professional photograph. Like a man who has never once been caught off guard by anything.

But I know him better.

The Roman on that billboard is the one the world gets. Ruthless and composed and completely inaccessible. I know the other one. The one who slept in the same bed with me, shared a home with me, and took care of me while we both grieved when Mum died.

The one who has seen me naked and touched me in every forbidden way possible.

I look away before I do something embarrassing.

Two intersections later, there’s Vivienne. Her face on a perfume advertisement, luminous and enormous, lips slightly parted, eyes that look like they were designed specifically to make people feel ordinary.

I’d watched her on screen as a little girl and genuinely believed she wasn’t quite real, that she was something assembled from the best parts of every beautiful person who had ever existed and poured into one woman. I used to ask my mother if people like that actually walked around in the world or if they only existed inside televisions.

Now she was going to be my stepmother.

I almost laugh. It comes out as something else.

Roman Bellerie and Vivienne Cole. His face on one billboard, hers on the next, and the whole city already in love with the idea of them. Two important, untouchable people building a life together. And me, the girl he quietly packaged and shipped overseas three years ago, riding in his car to his office, nobody’s anything.

My phone rings and I’m almost grateful.

“RAVEN BELLERIE YOU ARE IN BOSTON RIGHT NOW!”

“Anaya.” I almost laughed at her voice.

“I am screaming. I am literally screaming. Are you at the house? Tell me you’re at the house, I’m getting in my car right now.”

Despite everything, I feel myself smile. “I’m not at the house. I’m on my way to Roman’s office.”

“His office? On your first day back? That man works too hard, honestly. Okay listen, I have been storing three years' worth of gist and I am at absolute capacity, I need to see you today.”

“I’ll call you the second I’m home, I promise.”

“You'd better. I’ve missed you so much. Hurry up and finish with your dad so I can have you back!”

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you more!”

I hang up and hold the phone in my lap and the smile fades slowly.

The Bellerie building comes into view before I’m ready for it. Of course it does. It always did. Roman’s buildings had a way of announcing themselves. Glass and steel and forty floors of quiet, certain power. I’d visited twice as a child and both times stood in the lobby with my neck craned back thinking that my stepfather had built something that touched the sky.

James pulls up to the entrance and opens my door. I step out with my bag, stand on the pavement, and look up.

Three years. Three years and somehow I am standing in front of his building with my heart doing something completely irrational.

I go in.

The lobby is exactly as I remember, cool and vast and hushed in the way of places where serious money is made. The receptionist gives me a visitor’s pass and points me toward the elevators. I ride up to the thirty-eighth floor watching my own reflection in the polished doors and barely recognizing the person looking back.

I have changed. I know I have. Those many years in London do something to a person. I am not the nineteen-year-old girl who sobbed quietly on a transatlantic flight and pressed her face into a pillow so the other passengers wouldn’t see.

The elevator opens.

The thirty-eighth floor is all clean lines and low voices and the particular atmosphere of people who are paid very well to be efficient. A reception desk, a waiting area, and a corridor leading somewhere important.

And at the end of that corridor, a security post.

Two guards. Both large. Both are looking at me the way people look at things they intend to remove.

“Can I help you.” It isn’t a question.

“I’m here to see Mr. Bellerie.”

“Mr. Bellerie isn’t available for unscheduled visits.”

“I’m his daughter.”

The taller one looks at the other. Something passes between them that I don’t like.

“Miss,” he says, with the specific patience of someone who has dealt with this before, “the only daughter of Mr. Bellerie we’re aware of is Miss Aria Cole. So I’m going to ask you nicely, just this once, to turn around and go back the way you came before this becomes a different kind of conversation.”

I stare at him.

Aria Cole. Vivienne’s daughter. Eighteen years old and already installed in my place so completely that his own security doesn’t know I exist.

“I’m going to call him,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. I reach into my bag for my phone.

“Ma’am—”

“I said I’m going to call…”

“I’m going to need you to step back!”

“And who the hell are you,” said a voice behind me, “to turn anyone away from seeing me?”

Everything in my body stopped.

I know that voice. I have heard it most of my life. Low and even, carrying that specific weight of a man who has never once had to raise it to be heard.

I turn around slowly.

He’s standing at the elevator, suit jacket open, tie loosened just slightly — just enough, just that one small concession to being human that the billboard version never shows, and his eyes are already on me. They find mine and stay.

My legs go somewhere unreliable.

“Mr. Bellerie—” the guard starts.

“She’s my daughter.” He says it quietly. His eyes don’t move from my face. “Speak to her in that tone again and you won’t have a job by the end of the day.”

“I’m so sorry, ma’am.” The guard apologizes. “Sorry, Mr. Bellerie. This won’t happen again.”

“Of course it won’t.” It came out more like a threat than a warning.

Roman is walking toward me now and I am standing completely still because if I move I’m not sure what will happen. Three years of phone calls and carefully maintained distance and I had told myself I was ready for this moment.

I was not ready for this moment.

He stops in front of me. Close enough that I can smell him, that specific, familiar thing that no amount of ocean between us had ever managed to fully erase from my memory.

He looks even more gorgeous now, silver dotting his temples, time sitting on him the way it only sits on certain men, like a gift rather than a cost.

He looks nothing like I remembered.

“Raven,” he says.

Just my name. Just that.

And I have absolutely nothing.