Chapter 7: What He Doesn't Say

They didn’t speak of Reginald Cole again until they were home, until the driver had gone and the house had settled into its late-night quiet and Sienna, still in her midnight-blue dress, found Nathaniel standing at the window of his study instead of behind his desk, staring out at nothing.

“You think it’s connected to your father’s death,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

He didn’t turn around right away. “My father had a heart attack. That’s what the doctors said. That’s what I believed, for six months, right up until an hour ago when a seventy-year-old man went pale at the mention of your father asking questions.” His voice was tight in a way she’d never heard from him, not the practiced control of the boardroom, but something rawer underneath it. “I don’t know what to do with the possibility that it wasn’t just his heart.”

Sienna crossed the room without deciding to, the way she seemed to keep doing around him lately, and stood close enough that she could see the tension in his shoulders, the effort it was costing him to hold himself together. “You don’t have to know what to do with it tonight,” she said quietly. “You just have to not carry it alone.”

He turned to look at her then, and whatever careful distance he’d been maintaining since the night in this same study seemed to have run out of road. “I’ve carried everything alone since I was twenty-three years old,” he said. “I don’t know how to do it any other way.”

“Then let me help you learn.”

It wasn’t a calculated thing to say. It came out of her before she’d fully thought it through, born out of the strange, unwilling tenderness that had been building in her for two weeks, and she watched it land on him like something he hadn’t braced for.

“Sienna.” Her name in his mouth had none of the coldness it carried in the lawyer’s office weeks ago. It sounded, now, like something closer to reverence. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this. Not while there’s a contract between us. Not while I still don’t know if you’re staying because you want to or because you have to.”

“Ask me,” she said. “Ask me why I’m still here, in this study, at midnight, when I could be asleep.”

He closed the distance between them slowly, giving her every chance to step back, every chance to change her mind. She didn’t take it.

“Why,” he asked, his voice barely more than a breath, “are you still here?”

“Because somewhere in the last two weeks,” she said, “I stopped being able to remember why I was supposed to hate you.”

He kissed her then, not the brief, efficient kiss from the altar, performed for cameras and forty guests, but something slower, something that felt less like a performance and more like a question he’d been holding back for days finally allowed to ask itself. Sienna’s hands found the front of his shirt, and for one long, unguarded moment, the contract between them, the feud between their families, the mystery sitting heavy in the study around them, all of it fell away, replaced by nothing but the two of them and the particular, terrifying relief of finally stopping the pretending.

When they broke apart, Nathaniel rested his forehead against hers, breathing unsteady in a way she’d never once seen from the composed, controlled man the business press wrote about.

“This complicates everything,” he murmured.

“I know,” Sienna said, and found she couldn’t bring herself to mind.

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