CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Xavier’s POV

“Ivanna,” I said, straightening slightly in my chair, the warmth in my voice arriving a beat later than it should have.

“You sound surprised to hear from me,” she said, a teasing edge under the words that didn’t quite mask the sharper tone underneath.

“Long day,” I said. “What is it?”

“I heard you were back from Thailand.” She gave a deliberate pause and continued. “You didn’t bother to call or check on me.”

“It’s been a heavy landing week. Work backed up faster than I expected.” I defended myself.

“Of course it did.” She let the silence stretch just long enough to make her point without needing to state it directly. “My father would like to schedule dinner. Just the four of us; you, me, him, and Arthur. And to pick up where the Grandview evening left off.”

The Grandview evening. The same one I had been avoiding for years now. I was not following that thread right now, not with Ivanna’s voice in my ear.

“I’ll check my calendar,” I said.

“Xavier.” Her voice dropped, losing its practiced warmth for a more direct tone. “We need to move forward on this, we’ve been stagnant on our wedding preparations for months and people are beginning to notice.”

“People always notice something,” I said. “It’s what they do.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“I’m not joking,” I said evenly. “I told you I’ll check my calendar and I will.”

There was a longer pause, this time the kind that communicated more in its silence than her words ever managed to. “I’ll wait to hear from you then,” she said finally and ended the call.

I sat with the dead screen for a while before turning back to my desk.

The truth was, I had agreed to date Ivanna Sinclair the way I agreed to most decisions my grandfather had made in my life.

I met Ivanna through a slow accumulation of expectation rather than a single moment of decision. There had been no proposal in the conventional sense, no dramatic turning point I could point back to and say that was when I chose her.

It had simply assembled itself piece by piece over the course of a few years until one evening when my grandfather mentioned the engagement at dinner as though it had already been set to happen. Looking back at it now, I realized I should had never succumb to my grandfather’s deceit. I should have said no clearly and firmly enough to stop it.

I had told myself at the time that this was simply how my life was planned to worked. The Beaumont name came with a structure and the structure had never asked for my enthusiasm, only my compliance was needed and I had given that compliance to everything else without complaint. The relentless schedule that left no room for anything resembling a personal life outside the occasional curated appearance.

Ivanna fit into that structure, efficiently and logically, the way everything else did without requiring me to examine whether that was what I actually wanted. And the truth is, I never wanted her.

She was intelligent. I would never claim otherwise. She was also born into the elite circle. She navigated rooms the way I navigated boardrooms with a precision that came from years of careful preparation rather than instinct and there was a version of respect I held for that, even now. But respect and the specific ache of actually wanting someone were not the same currency. And somewhere over the past years, I had stopped pretending to myself that they were.

I thought of her now, elegant, polished, and already planning a dinner to formalize a future neither of us had built together so much toward, other than been told to merge.

Then, unbidden, I thought of the corridor.

Why was I still thinking about a woman I had barely met for two seconds. But I still feel a faint sense of recognition toward her, I just couldn’t place it. Like trying to remember someone you’ve seen years ago but your brain acts foggy.

And as if that wasn’t worse enough, I’m kind of sexually attracted toward her. That thought troubled me more than I wanted to admit.

I had never been sexually attracted toward Ivanna, even when she tries to touch me, her hands felt like thorns on my skin. Not because I was disloyal but Ivanna and I had never built anything resembling the kind of intimacy that made disloyalty a meaningful concept.

The only woman I had been sexually attracted to again was the woman from that night five years ago. The night I avoided dinner with Ivanna and my grandfather, exactly like the Grandview evening.

What exactly was I building toward?

A merger dressed as a marriage. Or a continuation of a legacy that had never once asked whether continuing it the way it always had been continued was actually the right path forward.

Kingsley Sinclair, Ivanna’s father, who has been the Beaumont’s family adviser for over three decades has a quiet and permanent presence in every Beaumont decision for the next several decades, secured through a wedding rather than simply a contract, because Kingsley had learned long ago that family ties were harder to dissolve than business ones.

I sat at my desk long after the office had quieted around me, the city lights coming up gradually beyond the window as the afternoon gave way to evening, and turned the question over without finding an answer I was ready to act on.

I picked up my phone once more, scrolled briefly to Ivanna’s name, and set it back down without calling.

There would be time for that conversation. There was always time in my life for the conversations that mattered least and demanded the most performance.

Tonight, I let myself sit with the one thought I hadn’t been able to shake since the corridor and reminisce on the young woman I couldn’t quit thinking about.

I badly wanted to see her again.