Chapter 2

Devin’s POV

The moment Eve's voice cracked on the other end of the line, I knew that walking misdemeanor had finally done what I had been silently hoping he would do since the day Eve told me she was engaged. He had removed himself from her life in the most catastrophic way possible, and while I was genuinely sorry she was hurting, I could not pretend I was sorry he was gone.

I had been in love with Eve Lovelace since we were sixteen years old. She had been crying in the school library over a history paper, looked up at me with those dark eyes, and asked if I thought anyone ever actually got what they wanted. I had no answer then. Seven years later I still had no answer, but I had built my entire life around staying close to her, and that meant swallowing every impulse that might send her running.

She thought I was her gay best friend. The one man in the world who wanted nothing from her. I let her believe it because it was the only way she let her guard down, and I would rather have her friendship on false pretenses than not have her at all. I am not proud of that, but it is the truth.

When she started dating Ambrose, I told myself it was temporary. When she got engaged to him, I told myself I had lost my chance. I even started trying to accept it, the way you accept a chronic pain that will never fully heal. Then she called me from her apartment, voice wobbling but still sharp enough to joke about prison orange, and told me that Ambrose and Delphine had been tangled up in her mother's cottage like two snakes in a basket. My first reaction was rage. My second reaction was terrible, traitorous hope.

I hung up and pressed the intercom. "Mark, come to my office now."

He appeared in twelve seconds flat, tablet already in hand, face already set in that expression of mild resignation he wore whenever I was about to upend his carefully organized schedule. "You have that expression," he said.

"What expression."

"The one that says I'm about to reschedule your entire week."

"I need you to reschedule my entire week."

Mark sighed and pulled up the calendar. "Where are we going?"

"New York. Eve's engagement ended."

"Ah." He said it the way someone might say ah upon discovering that a storm they had been tracking for years had finally made landfall. Mark was too professional to say I told you so, but his pause was eloquent. "The investor meeting tomorrow?"

"Move it. The board meeting Thursday, I will call in. As for the Cresswell charity gala, tell my grandfather there was a family emergency."

"Your family or her family?"

"At this point, Mark, I am not sure there is a difference."

He nodded and turned to leave, fingers already moving on his tablet. At the door he paused. "Sir. I hope it works out. Whatever it is you are hoping for."

I did not ask what he meant. Mark had been my assistant for four years and he was observant enough to have figured out a long time ago that my feelings for Eve went well past friendship. He also had the decency to never bring it up directly until this moment, when the pretense had become irrelevant.

I packed a bag with the muscle memory of someone who had spent years traveling for business. Three suits I would not wear, one sweater I probably would, and no plan beyond getting on the plane. Mark sent the flight details.

I called my grandfather's assistant and left a vague message about urgent personal matters that I would pay for later. My grandfather, Harrington Cresswell did not believe in excuses and he had been trying to marry me off to a suitable heiress for years. The fact that I was flying across the country for Eve Lovelace would not escape his notice, and it would not please him.

The flight was six hours and fourteen minutes. I spent most of it staring out the window, turning the situation over in my mind like a puzzle I had not yet solved.

Eve had thirty days to find a husband or she would lose her inheritance. That detail had settled in my brain and refused to leave. She needed to marry someone before her twenty fifth birthday. The condition was brutal and the timeline was absurd, but the fact remained that Ambrose was out and the position was vacant. I had been training for that position since I was sixteen years old without ever being allowed to apply.

The lie was the problem. She thought I was gay. If I told her the truth now, after seven years of silence, she would feel manipulated. She would look back at every movie night and every late night phone call and every time she fell asleep on my shoulder and wonder how much of it was real and how much was strategy. The answer was that all of it was real, but she would not believe me, not at first, and I could not afford to lose her trust right when she needed me most.

Which meant I could not simply walk through her door and declare myself. I had to be patient. I had to be present. I had to let her need me badly enough that the truth, when it came out, would feel less like a betrayal and more like a relief.

The plane touched down just after midnight. I texted her from the runway.

“I just landed. Are you still awake?”

Her reply came before I got to the gate: “Yes, the key code is still the same.”

The same key code, 1107, was her mother's birthday. I had memorized it years ago on a night when she had a fever and needed someone to let the doctor in. I was one of maybe three people in the world she trusted with that code, and that trust was the most valuable thing I owned.

I took a cab from the airport hurtling toward the only woman I had ever loved, carrying a secret so heavy it had worn grooves into my bones.

The elevator ride up to her floor felt longer than it should have. I stood there watching the numbers climb and tried to remember how to breathe like a normal person.

When I reached her door I typed in the code, opened the door and I stepped inside.

The apartment was dim, lit by a single lamp in the living room and the glow of the city coming through the windows. Eve was sitting on the couch with her legs pulled up under her and her phone loose in her hand. She looked up when I walked in, and her face was the face of someone who had been holding herself together for hours and was about to finally let go.

"Hey," she said. Her voice was quieter than it had been on the phone.

I dropped my bag by the door and crossed the room in four strides. I sat beside her and pulled her into my arms, and she buried her face in my shoulder and finally, finally cried. I held her and did not speak. There was nothing to say yet. The words would come later.

For now I just held her and let the hope in my chest unfurl a little further. Ambrose was gone. The position was vacant. And I was here, exactly where I had always been, waiting for Eve to realize that the man she needed had been standing in front of her all along.

I just had to show her without scaring her away. I just had to make her see me without making her feel lied to. The hardest thing I had ever done was love her in silence for seven years. The second hardest would be figuring out how to love her out loud.

But I was done waiting. The universe had cracked open a door, and I intended to walk through it.