Chapter Six - Manageable

Julian didn't go home after the gallery.

He walked instead, the way he did when something was sitting too heavily in his chest to be taken home and set down somewhere and expected to stay put. London at evening was good for that — large enough to lose yourself in, indifferent enough not to ask questions. He walked for forty minutes without any particular destination, hands in his pockets, and replayed the afternoon in the particular involuntary way of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and couldn't seem to stop.

She'd blushed.

It shouldn't have registered the way it did. He'd touched her cheek for two seconds, practically nothing, a gesture any person might make toward any other person, and she'd gone still in that way she had — like something catching its breath — and when she'd finally looked back at the painting she'd been so deliberately not looking at him that it had taken everything Julian had not to smile.

He turned up his collar against the wind and kept walking.

He had spent eight months engaged to Charlotte Ashford. He had attended four family dinners, two charity events, a weekend in the country hosted by Margaret, and one deeply uncomfortable hour reviewing prenuptial terms with both sets of lawyers. He had been, throughout all of it, entirely composed. He had liked Charlotte well enough — she was beautiful and clever and moved through a room with the particular ease of someone raised to be watched — but he had never once walked home replaying the sound of her laugh. He had never, if he was being honest with himself, thought about Charlotte at all once the evening was over and he was back in his own space. She had existed, in his mind, primarily as a future commitment — one he'd agreed to without resistance because agreeing was easier than explaining to Edmund why the answer should be no.

He hadn't even noticed Charlotte's laugh. Not the way he'd noticed its absence, once Sophie arrived.

That was the thing that kept stopping him. They were identical. Objectively, scientifically, visually — the same face, the same dark hair, the same voice at rest. He had looked at Charlotte for eight months and understood her as a person without ever quite seeing her, and he had looked at Sophie for four days and felt like he couldn't stop. It made no logical sense. He had turned it over from every angle looking for the logic and kept coming up empty.

It wasn't simply that Sophie was different. It was the texture of the differences — the way she laughed only when something was actually funny, and then fully, unguardedly, like she'd forgotten to perform. The way she pushed back instead of deflecting. The way she'd stood in that storage unit surrounded by evidence of her sister's extraordinary selfishness and cried not for herself but for the relationship she'd lost — for the version of Charlotte she'd believed in and apparently misplaced somewhere in the last few years.

He'd pulled her into his chest before he'd consciously decided to, which was not something Julian did. Julian decided things. Julian considered and calculated and moved with intention, because that was how you ran a company worth the better part of a billion pounds and kept everything functioning the way it was supposed to function. He did not pull women into his chest on instinct, in storage units, on a Wednesday evening.

He had apparently started.

He crossed the bridge and stopped in the middle, elbows on the railing, watching the river move beneath him with the particular patience of something that had no interest in anyone's feelings whatsoever.

The pact she'd proposed made sense. He could see the architecture of it clearly — maintain the arrangement, protect the merger, keep Edmund satisfied until Charlotte could be located and decisions could be made with the full picture in view. It was logical. It was, in its own peculiar way, the same calculation he'd made eight months ago when he'd agreed to the engagement in the first place.

The problem was that it hadn't felt like a calculation when she'd said it.

She'd said business, nothing more with her face still damp, her voice still uneven, one hand pressed flat against her own leg to stop it shaking, and he had agreed to it while standing close enough to feel her breath — and he had known, with a clarity that annoyed him considerably, that neither of them meant it. He had stood there and agreed and watched her lift her chin and reassemble her composure piece by piece like someone who had done it so many times it had become automatic, and something in his chest had done a thing he was not prepared to describe.

He had wanted to tell her she didn't have to. That she didn't have to hold herself together quite so ferociously, not in front of him. That he wasn't going anywhere and she could fall apart as many times as she needed to.

He had said none of this. He had said all right and stepped back and let her go, which was the correct thing to do, and the right choice, and it had felt terrible

.

He straightened up from the railing and told himself firmly that this was irrelevant.

Sophie Ashford was in an impossible situation, one largely not of her making, and she needed the next week to go smoothly so she could find her sister and put everything back where it belonged. She did not need him complicating it. She was, in all likelihood, not lying awake thinking about him. She was practical, and clear-eyed, and had enough actual problems to occupy her without adding an inconvenient attraction to a man she barely knew.

He needed to focus on work.

There were three contracts waiting on his desk that he hadn't touched in two days because he'd been too busy following women to storage facilities and standing in galleries noticing how differently they laughed than their sisters. There was a board meeting on Friday that required his full attention. There was an entire functioning company that employed several hundred people and required its CEO to be present in something more than body.

He had built Calloway Shipping from a respectable inheritance into something genuinely formidable over the last six years, and he had done it by being the kind of man who didn't let personal complications bleed into professional ones. He had ended a three-year relationship once because she'd complained he worked too much, and he hadn't lost a night's sleep over it. He was not a man who got distracted.

And yet here he was, standing on a bridge in the dark, thinking about the way a woman's cheek had felt beneath his thumb.

He was almost off the bridge when his phone buzzed. A text from Theo, characteristically brief.

How's our situation.

Julian looked at it for a moment, then typed back: Manageable.

Three dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again. Then: That's not what your face looked like when I called you earlier.

Then, after a pause: She's not Charlotte, Jules. I don't just mean literally. I mean she's genuinely not like her at all. You know that, right? That this isn't just Charlotte with different mannerisms.

Julian stared at the message for a long moment, standing in the middle of the pavement while the city moved around him, before putting his phone away without answering.

He walked the last fifteen minutes home at a pace that was slightly too fast to be casual, let himself into his flat, poured two fingers of whisky he didn't particularly want, and stood at the window looking out at the city with the glass in his hand and the gallery afternoon playing on a loop he couldn't seem to locate the switch for.

Sophie's face when she'd stopped looking at the painting. The particular stillness of her before she'd collected herself. The way she'd said business, nothing more like she was trying to convince herself rather than him.

He took a sip of the whisky.

It was manageable. He had managed harder things than this. He would focus on work, keep his word, and get through the next seven days with his composure and his company's merger both intact.

He stared at the city for another long moment.

It would be significantly easier, he reflected, if he could stop thinking about the way she blushed.