Chapter five

Caden

I’ve destroyed men for less.

Built empires from nothing, buried competitors without blinking, sat across boardroom tables from men twice my age and made them sweat through their suits just by staying quiet. I have never in forty-two years of living lost control of myself. Not once. Not over anything.

And then Aria came home.

Three weeks. That’s all it took. Twenty-one days of her padding around my house in oversized shirts and bare feet and that laugh she had the one that came out surprised, like she hadn’t meant to find things funny and everything I’d spent a lifetime building around myself developed a crack I couldn’t locate and couldn’t fix.

I noticed her the first day.

I hated myself for it the same night.

The morning after the bathroom I was up at five.

I ran six miles in the dark because I needed to do something with what was living inside my chest and the alternative options were all significantly worse. Cold shower after. Coffee. Suit. The whole armor of routine I’d built over decades that had never once failed me.

I sat at my desk at six thirty and stared at the quarterly projections on my screen and thought about the sound she made when I kissed her.

Completely useless.

My phone lit up. Marcus, confirming the gala tonight. I responded, closed the report, opened another one. Tried again.

Her voice kept coming back. I can’t. Barely a whisper, and yet it had gone through me like a current, like something I’d been waiting to hear without knowing I was waiting.

I was in serious trouble.

Not the kind I knew how to handle. Not the kind you could buy your way out of or stare down across a table. This was the kind that lived under your skin and got worse every time you tried to starve it.

I’d tried starving it.

For three weeks I’d been cold and distant and deliberately unbearable, hoping she’d keep her distance, hoping she’d make it easy. Instead she’d looked at me across the dinner table with those wide brown eyes and argued back and laughed at things and existed in every room I walked into like she’d been placed there specifically to ruin me.

Last night I’d stood outside a bathroom door like a man who had lost his entire mind.

Because I could hear the water. Knew she was in there. And something in me just stopped working. Every rational, controlled, sensible part of me that had kept this buried for three weeks just put its hands up and walked out.

I’d told myself I was going to knock. Tell her something mundane. Check that she had towels or some other idiotic domestic pretense that would let me hear her voice through the door and go back to my room and sleep.

I stood there for ten minutes instead.

Pathetic. Genuinely pathetic. A forty-two year old man standing outside a bathroom door like a teenager.

And then the lock clicked.

She unlocked it.

And everything I had left evaporated.

I shouldn’t have gone in.

I know that. I knew it the second I pushed that door open and saw her standing there in nothing but a towel with her hair wet and her eyes wide and her mouth already slightly open like she’d forgotten how to breathe properly. I knew it and I went in anyway because I am apparently no longer a man who makes good decisions where she is concerned.

The way she looked at me.

That was the thing. That was what did it. Not just that she was beautiful though God help me she was, she was devastating up close in a way I’d been careful not to acknowledge but the way she looked at me like she wanted me and was terrified of it and wasn’t going to back down anyway.

Like she was brave enough for both of us.

I told her to tell me to leave.

Gave her every opportunity. Held myself at the edge of it waiting for her to say the word that would let me walk back to my room and lock my own door and get some version of a grip on myself.

She said I can’t.

Two words. Barely audible.

I was done.

I kissed her and she made that sound that small, wrecked, involuntary sound against my mouth and something in my chest that had been wound tight for three weeks just snapped completely. I had her against the wall with my hands in her hair and her back arching into me and she felt she felt like something I had no language for, something that bypassed every defense I’d constructed and went straight for the part of me I’d kept locked for years.

I pulled back because I had to. Because her mother was sleeping thirty feet away and because if I didn’t stop then I wasn’t going to, and some part of me that still functioned knew that the first time I had her properly it was not going to be pressed against a bathroom wall with the risk of being discovered.

When I have her I want time.

The thought arrived fully formed and I didn’t bother fighting it.

I walked back to my room and sat at the edge of my bed in the dark for a long time.

Then I picked up my phone.

The gala tomorrow night. Wear something that covers you.

I sent it before I could talk myself out of it. Watched the dots appear.

And if I don’t?

I stared at her response for a moment.

Then I won’t be responsible for what I do to you in front of everyone.

I put the phone down and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and sat there in the quiet of my room thinking about Diane asleep down the hall. My wife. A woman I respected. A woman who had done nothing wrong.

The guilt came. Of course it came. It always came.

It just wasn’t enough anymore.

That was the part that should have scared me. That despite everything the ring on my finger, the woman in the room down the hall, every line this crossed and everything it could destroy the guilt sat in my chest and I looked at it clearly and thought, not enough.

She was worth burning everything down for.

I didn’t sleep.

By morning I had made exactly one decision.

Tonight at the gala I was going to stay away from her. Across the room, conversation minimal, hands to myself. Public setting. People everywhere. Even I could manage that.

My phone buzzed.

A photo.

Aria. In a mirror. Red dress, short enough to stop my heart, one shoulder bare, hair down. No message. Just the picture.

Just the picture.

I got up, straightened my tie, and accepted the fact that I was going to hell.