Chapter 2: Denial

Josie’s Point of View

A freezing winter morning. Frost clouded the window, turning the glass white.

The room was silent. Two people lay tangled together, breathing in rhythm, sleeping soundly in each other’s arms.

When the sun rose and light spilled across the bed, birdsong slowly pulled me awake.

I opened my eyes slowly, still heavy with sleep, and my gaze landed on a flawless profile. His nose was as high as a mountain ridge, its line clean and sharp against the soft morning light. Below it, pale pink lips rested in a faint, relaxed curve. His jaw was firm, defined, as though it had been shaped by a patient hand. Beneath long lashes lay deep-set eyes, closed in peaceful sleep, and his fair, smooth skin seemed almost to glow in the dim room. He looked like a sculpture, every line carved with perfect precision, something that belonged in a museum rather than inches from my face. He was devastatingly handsome.

I blinked. Once. Twice.

Must be a dream.

I closed my eyes, counted to three in my head, and opened them again. He was still there. The same sharp nose. The same perfect lips. The same impossible face.

Refusing to believe it, I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter, as if I could erase him by sheer will power. I held my breath, silently praying, then cracked them open once more.

Still there.

So that meant...

My mind scrambled, desperately searching for any other explanation, any reasonable excuse for why a stranger, a breathtakingly beautiful stranger, was lying right next to me. But there was none.

My eyes flew wide. My breath stopped in my throat. My mind went completely, utterly blank, as if someone had wiped it clean.

Then, finally, my lungs remembered how to work.

"Aaaah!"

It was the loudest scream the morning had ever heard, a piercing, shrieking sound that tore through the quiet and was enough to shake the heavens.

I tumbled out of the bed, half falling and half crawling, and fled the room with the sheet wrapped around me.

Who was that man? Why was he in my room? Why had I slept with him?

My hungover brain couldn’t recall a single moment of last night’s madness.

Across the hall, a door opened.

Wyatt stepped out in his pajamas, with a sleepy Scarlett beside him.

When they saw me standing in the hallway, hair a mess and shoulders bare, clutching a bedsheet around me, both of them froze.

Wyatt's handsome face turned to ice in an instant. "Josie, why did you come out of that room?"

"Um, I..." I clutched at my hair and had no answer.

A few minutes seemed to pass before another person stepped out of the room.

I turned my stiff neck toward the door.

The man was already fully dressed, and he carried himself with a noble, refined air. His gaze was the deepest I had ever seen, his bearing cold, striking, and proud, and his face was so beautiful it was startling. His features had a mixed-blood, European cast, and his green eyes were mesmerizing. He stood tall and straight as young bamboo, and just standing there, he exerted an invisible pressure on the whole hallway.

Who was he?

"Brother!" Scarlett cried out in sudden surprise.

Brother…?

He was Scarlett's brother?!

I wanted to go buy a block of tofu and smash my head into it.

The man let his lazy gaze drift across our faces. His voice was cool and unhurried. "Mornings at the Callahan house really are something special. How lively."

When his eyes passed over me, they lingered for two extra seconds.

"Brother, don't tell me the two of you last night..." Scarlett swung her finger back and forth between us, and the answer was practically written in the air.

"No! Absolutely not! Nothing happened!" I denied it frantically.

The man, whose name I still had no idea, said nothing. He only gave me another look as I stood there in a panic, and one corner of his mouth lifted, ever so slightly.

"Then why did you come out of my Colt's room?" Scarlett squinted at me, suspicious.

So his name is Colt? Colt Hawthorne? Why did his name sound familiar?

"I... I think I drank too much last night, and I went into the wrong room..." I covered half my face with my hand and stammered out the excuse.

"Ha. So you threw yourself at him," Scarlett said, contempt flashing across her face.

Wyatt's fists, hanging at his sides, clenched until the knuckles went white. His face was cold and handsome as he tilted his head toward me. "Go back to your own room."

I looked up and met his eyes, full of resentment and hurt.

What right did he have to be angry? He had deliberately sent me away on a business trip, and when I came back, he calmly told me he had registered a marriage with another woman. He had slipped an atomic bomb into my hands without a word, and when it blew me apart, he should have known that was the end of us!

"Go in," Wyatt said, holding his breath and his composure.

I turned my head away and walked toward my own room.

Colt took in every expression in that exchange, and the pupils of his green eyes narrowed faintly.

As I reached my door, I faintly heard Scarlett's angry voice behind me: "Keep your little sister in line. Don't let her embarrass us like this again!"

Ha. Little sister?

Wyatt had actually told her I was his little sister!

The moment he brought another woman through the door, I was demoted to "sister." I wanted to turn around, expose everything, and see how he would react.

A sour ache rose in my chest. My eyes burned red. I pulled open my door, slammed it shut, strode into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and crouched on the floor without a word until the tears spilled over.

After nearly an hour, at the breakfast table.

I ate in silence with my head down.

I wore a white business suit, my hair pinned up neatly, my makeup clean and simple. I looked nothing like the seductive creature of last night.

Colt sat at the center of the table, slowly cutting a cod roll.

I didn't dare look at him because before I went down here, I searched about this man.

And guess what?

I had only just learned who he was. He was Scarlett's brother, a very famous figure and the current head of Hawthorne International. He was the youngest and richest tycoon on Asia's Forbes list, worth over a hundred billion at twenty-nine. His mother was a French princess, and his forefathers had held noble titles.

He was an aristocrat in every sense!