Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Rory

I didn’t sleep that night either, and I was starting to think sleep just wasn’t going to be a thing that happened to me anymore for as long as this contract lasted. I sat at my kitchen table with my phone face down in front of me like it was something that might bite, the photo still sitting there in my messages, unread by nobody but me, and I kept picking it back up every twenty minutes just to stare at it again like staring harder would somehow make it less real.

Talia showed up at seven with two coffees and a look on her face that told me she already knew something was wrong before I said a single word. “You didn’t answer my texts,” she said, setting one cup down in front of me. “Which means either you were asleep, which I don’t believe for a second, or something happened.”

“Something happened.”

I turned the phone around and slid it across the table. I watched her face change as she looked at it, watched the exact moment she understood what she was looking at and who it was, and watched her set the phone down very carefully like it might go off in her hands.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Okay. Start from the beginning.”

“There’s no beginning, Talia, there’s just this. Somebody was on that boat with us. Somebody stood outside that cabin door and took this and never said a word, and now they’ve decided I need to know they have it.”

“No demand? No message, no number, nothing?”

“Nothing. Just the photo and a timestamp.”

Talia sat back in her chair, arms crossed, doing the thing she always did when she was working a problem out loud, which was mostly just staring at a fixed point on the wall like the answer might be written there. “Who was on the boat that night,” she said. “Besides you and Kian. Walk me through it.”

“Standard crew. You, me, Priya on engines, Jonah running lines, a couple of the deckhands.”

“Jonah,” she repeated, and something in her voice caught just slightly, the way it always did whenever her brother’s name came up in a context that wasn’t entirely flattering. “He’s been weird lately. Distracted. I keep meaning to ask him what’s going on and I keep not doing it because I don’t actually want to know the answer.”

“You think it’s him?”

“I don’t know what to think. I just know my baby brother has been coming in late, dodging calls, and once I caught him arguing with someone on the phone in the parking lot who he refused to name. Doesn’t mean anything on its own. Probably doesn’t mean anything at all. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s impossible either.”

I rubbed my hands over my face, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. “Great. So now I get to add wondering if my own crew is selling photos of me to the list of things keeping me up at night.”

“We don’t know that’s what’s happening. Maybe it’s random. Maybe it’s some dockside creep with a long lens and too much time on his hands.”

“Maybe.” I didn’t believe it, and from her face, neither did she.

The knock on my office door an hour later came sharper than I expected, three hard raps that had nothing polite about them, and when I opened it I found myself face to face with Damian Ashcroft for the first time in ten years, standing there in a suit that probably cost more than my first boat, looking exactly like the kind of man who’d never once in his life had to knock twice for anything.

“You could have called,” I said, not moving to let him in.

“I did call. You didn’t answer.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“So I’ve heard.” His eyes moved over me for a second, quick, assessing, the same way he used to look at contracts he wasn’t sure he wanted to sign, and something about that old familiar coldness made my skin prickle in a way that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with muscle memory I’d spent ten years trying to unlearn. “May I come in, or are we doing this on the doorstep like teenagers.”

I stepped back and let him in, mostly because the alternative was having this conversation where dock workers could hear every word of it, and he walked into my office like he owned it, eyes cataloguing the framed salvage licenses on the wall, the model ships on the shelf, all the proof of the decade I’d spent building something entirely without him.

“You’ve done well for yourself,” he said, and it didn’t sound like a compliment so much as an observation filed away for later use.

“I don’t need your approval on that, Damian.”

“I wasn’t offering it.” He sat down across from my desk without being asked, folding one leg over the other, settling in like he intended to take up as much time as he wanted. “I’m here about the contract. Effective today, all communication runs through my office directly. No more delegating to Kian.”

“Why. He’s handled this professionally from day one, you said that yourself yesterday, and then took it back the second it inconvenienced you.”

“This isn’t about his performance.”

“Then what’s it about?”

Damian’s jaw tightened, just slightly, the kind of tell I remembered from years ago, back when I used to think I knew every single one of his expressions well enough to read his mind. “It’s about the fact that my brother has apparently developed some kind of personal investment in this account,” he said, choosing each word carefully, “and personal investment makes people sloppy. I won’t have sloppy running a contract with this much liability attached to it.”

“You mean personal investment in me.”

“I mean exactly what I said.”

“Say it plainly, Damian. You’re not usually this much of a coward about your own words.”

Something flashed across his face, quick and sharp, gone before I could name it for certain, though I would have sworn it looked almost like hurt if I hadn’t known better than to think Damian Ashcroft still had access to that particular emotion where I was concerned. “Fine,” he said. “Plainly. I don’t like the idea of my brother getting tangled up with the one woman on this coastline who has every reason in the world to use that against this family. Against me. Is that plain enough for you.”

“You think I’d use him. To get back at you.”

“I think ten years is a long time to sit on the kind of anger you had when you walked out of my life, and I think you’ve never once given me a reason to believe you’ve let it go.”

I stood up so fast my chair scraped hard against the floor, and I felt something in my chest crack open that I’d kept sealed shut for a decade, all that old fury rising up fast and hot and completely unwilling to stay contained one more second. “You think I orchestrated this,” I said, voice shaking with the effort of keeping it from turning into a full shout. “You think I built a company, took ten years to build it, all just waiting around for the exact moment your little brother would wander into my life so I could use him to hurt you. Do you hear yourself right now?”

“I hear a woman who hasn’t denied being angry.”

“I have every right to be angry, Damian. You didn’t just end an engagement, you ended it in front of half the industry, told every single client we shared that I couldn’t be trusted, that I’d known about Ivy and Nate the whole time and let it happen because it was convenient for me. You destroyed my reputation on your way out the door and never once asked if maybe I was just as blindsided as you were.”

The room went quiet enough that I could hear the ceiling fan turning overhead, slow and steady, completely indifferent to the fact that ten years of unspoken things had just come pouring out between us in under a minute. Damian’s face had gone very still, and for the first time since he’d walked in, some of that cold control slipped, just enough that I caught a glimpse of something underneath it that looked almost like doubt.

“I never asked,” he said quietly, “because I couldn’t stand to hear the answer if it made me wrong.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. We stood there, the two of us, staring at each other across ten years and a decade of assumptions neither one of us had ever bothered to check, and I might have said something else, might have let that crack in his composure pull something honest out of me too, except the office door swung open behind him without a knock at all this time, and Kian stood in the doorway, jacket still on, looking between the two of us with an expression that made it very clear he’d heard at least the last part of that.

“Sorry,” Kian said, voice flat, eyes locked on his brother. “Didn’t realize this was a private conversation. I just came to tell Rory something, but it can wait until you two are finished catching up.”

“Kian, this isn’t what it looks like,” I started.

“It never is,” he said, and turned to leave the way he’d come, and I watched Damian watch him go with an expression I couldn’t read at all, something complicated passing between two brothers who clearly had a decade of their own unspoken things sitting just as heavy as mine.

“I should go after him,” I said.

“Let him cool off first,” Damian said, standing, straightening his jacket like the whole conversation hadn’t just cracked something open in both of us. “He’ll come around. He usually does, eventually.”

“You don’t know him as well as you think you do.”

“I know him well enough to know he’s already halfway in love with you,” Damian said, and the plainness of it landed harder than anything else he’d said that morning, “which is exactly the problem I came here to solve, and exactly the thing you’re apparently not going to make easy for me.”

He left without waiting for my answer, and I stood alone in my office feeling like I’d just survived two entirely different storms in one morning, one of them ten years old and one of them barely a day, and I hadn’t even had the chance to tell either brother about the photo still sitting unanswered on my phone.