hotter

CHAPTER 4

I couldn't move.

That's the thing nobody tells you about shock — it doesn't feel like shock. It doesn't announce itself. One second you're standing at the edge of a pool at a party you didn't want to attend, and the next second the world has rearranged itself into something you don't have a name for yet, and your legs just stop working and your mouth closes and everything inside you goes absolutely silent.

He was walking toward Luca.

Unhurried. Like he owned the ground he was crossing, which — I was beginning to understand — he did. This was his estate. His name on the gate. His son standing by the pool trying very hard not to look like he was straightening his spine.

I watched Luca's whole personality change in real time.

The lazy entitlement, the easy grin, the behave yourself Zara energy — all of it folded up and put away in the span of three seconds. What replaced it was careful. Measured. The specific alertness of someone who understood that the wrong word in the next thirty seconds had consequences.

"Father." Luca's voice was steady. Practiced. "Didn't know you were coming today."

"I didn't require your knowledge of it." His voice. Low. Unhurried. The same voice that had said I have you in a dark hotel room forty-eight hours ago, and my entire nervous system responded to it before my brain could intervene.

Something pulled tight in my chest.

I looked away.

They embraced — brief, functional, the kind that was about optics rather than warmth. Then his father stepped back and looked at Luca with an expression I couldn't fully read from here. Assessment, maybe. The look of someone taking inventory.

"Training went well?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"You look the same."

Something flickered across Luca's face. "I've only been gone three months."

"Three months is enough time." His father's eyes moved across the party — the women, the pool, the general atmosphere of a young man celebrating his own return — and whatever he thought about what he saw, he kept it entirely behind his face.

Then his eyes found me.

I stopped breathing.

He looked at me the way you look at a stranger. Calm. Neutral. A brief, polite acknowledgment of a person he had never encountered before in his life. Not a single thing in his expression shifted — not recognition, not heat, not the faintest trace of the man who had pressed his mouth to my jaw and told me to stay with him.

Nothing.

Like I was nobody.

Like Thursday night was a room neither of us had ever been inside.

I felt something crack open in my chest that I did not have a name for, and I locked it down immediately, looked away, fixed my eyes on the pool's surface and told myself the burning behind my sternum was anger. Just anger. Nothing else.

Luca turned.

"Come meet my fiancée." His voice had a performance quality to it — the kind that meant this moment was being staged for an audience of one. He waved me over.

My legs moved. I have no idea how.

I crossed the space between us and came to stand beside Luca, and for the first time since he'd walked through those doors, Xavier Blackwell was directly in front of me with nothing between us.

Up close, he was worse.

That was the only word for it. In the dim bar I'd seen a handsome stranger. In the hotel room I'd seen a man who knew exactly what he was doing and did it with a patience that had taken me completely apart. But here, in full daylight, in his own estate, with the authority of everything he'd built sitting on him like a second skin — he was simply worse. More real. More present. More every single thing I was trying very hard not to think about.

"Seraphine," Luca said. "This is my father. Xavier Blackwell."

Xavier extended his hand.

I shook it.

His grip was firm and brief and completely businesslike and his skin against mine lasted exactly two seconds and I felt it go through me like a current — low, immediate, humiliating — and I made absolutely certain nothing showed on my face.

"Seraphine." He said my name like he was hearing it for the first time. Perfectly. Without a single seam. "Luca's told me about you."

"Has he." My voice came out level. I don't know how.

"Very little," Xavier said. "Which tells me more than he intended."

Luca laughed — too quickly. "She's private. You'll like that."

"I'm sure." Xavier's eyes stayed on me for one beat longer than a stranger's would. Long enough that I felt it in my spine. Then he looked back at his son and the moment closed like it had never existed. "Walk with me. There are things we need to discuss."

Luca glanced at me. "Give us a few minutes?"

I nodded.

I watched them walk toward the far end of the garden — Luca half a step behind his father, which I doubted he even noticed — and then I found the nearest chair and sat down and pressed my hands flat against my thighs and tried to locate something inside myself that resembled composure.

He's Luca's father.

The man from the hotel was Luca's father.

Xavier Blackwell had been sitting alone in that bar the same night I'd decided to detonate my own life, and I had walked up to him and said I want you like I was daring the universe to make things worse.

Apparently the universe had accepted.

Across the garden, I could see them talking. Xavier's posture was the same as always — completely still, completely controlled, no wasted movement. Luca was nodding. The nod of someone receiving instructions and indicating compliance.

I needed to go home.

I found Luca twenty minutes later and told him I had a headache.

He looked relieved, which said everything. "I'll have someone call you a car."

"I can get my own—"

"Seraphine."

Xavier's voice.

Behind me.

I turned around slowly and made my face do exactly nothing.

He was standing closer than I expected — not inappropriately close, not in any way that would register as anything other than a polite host. He had a glass of water in one hand. Jacket still on. The picture of ease.

"I was leaving anyway," he said. "I'll drive you."

"That's not—"

"It's not a question of necessary." His eyes moved briefly to Luca, then back to me, and in that half-second of direct contact something moved in them that no one else at this party was positioned to see. Not a challenge. Not a warning. Something quieter. Something that reached inside my chest and pulled. "It's on my way."

Luca said, "That works, actually."

He was already turning back toward the pool.

I looked at Xavier.

His expression was patient. Neutral. A future father-in-law making a reasonable offer.

I had no exit that didn't create a scene I couldn't explain.

"Thank you," I said.

His car was black, long, and quiet in the way that expensive things were quiet — not silent, but insulated. Separated from the world outside by money and intention. The driver raised the privacy partition without being asked the moment we pulled through the estate gates, and then it was just the two of us and the city moving past the windows and the specific quality of silence that builds between two people who are not saying the thing they're both thinking about.

I sat as far to my side as the seat allowed.

He sat in the center of his, one arm resting along the back, completely at ease. Looking out at the road ahead like a man with nowhere to be and no particular hurry getting there.

I watched the city. I counted the seconds. I did not look at him.

At three minutes exactly — I'd been counting — he said: "You don't have to pretend."

"I'm not pretending anything."

"Your hands haven't moved since you got in the car." Still not looking at me. "You're pretending very hard."

I didn't answer. I turned further toward the window.

"I want to forget it happened," I said. "I'd like you to do the same."

"I know what you want."

"Then—"

"I didn't say I wanted the same thing."

The quiet that followed had weight. He let it sit there — didn't fill it, didn't rush past it. Just let it exist between us while the city went by outside, completely indifferent to the fact that I was coming apart at the seams in the backseat of a stranger's car.

Not a stranger.

That was the problem.

"You knew," I said finally. "When Luca introduced us. You already knew who I was."

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Two days after."

I closed my eyes. "And you came to the party anyway."

"I came home." His voice was even. "I live there. Luca's the one throwing parties in my house."

I opened my eyes. "This can't happen."

"Define this."

"Whatever you're thinking." I turned to face him directly, because if I was going to say it I was going to say it clearly and look him in the eye while I did. "I'm marrying your son. What happened at that hotel was a mistake I made when I didn't know who you were. I need you to act like it didn't happen."

He turned his head and looked at me.

In the dark of the car his eyes were the same as they'd been in that hotel room — steady and unreadable in the way of something with real depth behind it. The kind of eyes that had watched me across a dim bar and waited without impatience for me to make my decision. The kind that had looked at me afterward like I was something worth understanding.

They were looking at me that way now.

I felt it in my stomach. Low and immediate and deeply inconvenient.

"Leave him," he said.

Two words. Calm as a weather report.

"Excuse me?"

"Leave Luca. End the engagement." He held my gaze without effort. "Be with me instead."

The siren somewhere outside rose and fell. The city kept moving.

I looked at this man — this controlled, dangerous, impossible man — and felt two completely contradictory things happen inside me at the same time. The part of me that knew what his hands felt like on my skin wanted to lean across the seat and close the space between us. The part of me that knew what I was sitting in the middle of wanted to open the door and walk directly into traffic.

"I love Luca," I said.

Something moved across his face. Not dismissal. The expression of a man hearing something he already knows isn't the full truth. "Do you."

"We're getting married next month."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the only answer I'm giving you."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, quietly: "Why did you come to my room, Seraphine?"

The question went in like a blade.

Because I was angry. Because I wanted to burn something down. Because when I walked into that bar I was looking for something I didn't have a name for and you were sitting there looking like you'd always known I was coming —

"I didn't know who you were," I said. "I was upset. I made a bad decision. I would take it back."

"You're lying."

"I'm giving you what you're getting."

The car slowed. My building outside. My street. The ordinary world where none of this existed.

The driver didn't move. The partition stayed up.

Xavier didn't reach for the door.

"I can keep what happened between us," he said. "Luca doesn't have to know. Your family doesn't have to know. It stays in that hotel room and it stays there permanently."

Something in my chest loosened — one single unguarded second of relief — and then he said:

"But that comes with a condition."

The relief evaporated.

"What condition."

He looked at me. No apology. No performance. Just a man who had spent his entire adult life deciding what happened next and was doing it now, in the back of this car, with the same quiet certainty he'd do anything else.

"Stay," he said. "Not for the engagement. Not for Luca. For me. When I want to see you — you come. When I call — you answer." A pause. The city sat still outside. "Give me that, and Thursday night disappears."

I stared at him.

My heart was hitting my ribs so hard I was certain he could hear it. And underneath it — underneath the shock and the fury and the part of my brain that was composing the speech I was about to deliver — something else was happening in my body that I refused to look at directly. A pull. Low and specific and nothing like anger. The same pull I'd felt in that bar when he'd looked at me without flinching and said come with me like he already knew what my answer was going to be.

He had been right then.

That was the part I could not afford to think about.

"You're threatening me," I said.

"I'm making you an offer."

"Those are the same thing."

"Are they." He tilted his head slightly. A fraction. "I'm not asking you to do anything your body hasn't already decided it wants."

The words landed somewhere they had no business landing.

I felt heat move through me — fast and involuntary and absolutely humiliating — and I held his gaze and made absolutely certain none of it reached my face and said:

"You don't know what my body wants."

"Seraphine." My name in his mouth. Low. Patient. The same way he'd said it in the dark. "I know exactly what your body wants. I spent four hours learning it."

The silence in the car was total.

I could feel my pulse in my throat. In my hands. In places I was actively refusing to acknowledge. I was furious — genuinely, cleanly furious — and underneath the fury was something that was not fury at all and was so much worse for it.

"And if I refuse everything?" My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.

The corner of his mouth moved. That almost-smile. The one that wasn't warm and wasn't cold and was somehow the most dangerous thing in the room.

"Then we'll see what Luca thinks about his fiancée's Thursday night."

I held his gaze.

He held mine.

My building stood outside in the ordinary dark. Normal. Indifferent. Completely unaware that the ground had shifted under everything I thought I understood about the next month of my life.

I opened the car door.

Got out.

Didn't look back.

I made it through the entrance. Made it to the elevator. Made it through my front door and got it closed behind me and stood in the dark of my own hallway with my back against the wood and my eyes on the ceiling and my heart still running like I'd sprinted the whole way.

My hands were shaking.

Not from fear.

That was the part I couldn't say out loud. The part I pressed down flat and covered over with anger and practicality and every reasonable reason why what he was asking for was out of the question.

My hands were shaking and it wasn't from fear and I already knew — standing alone in the dark with his voice still inside my head, I spent four hours learning it — that I was not going to be able to think my way out of what my own body had already answered.

Xavier Blackwell didn't make offers.

He made decisions.

And somewhere between that hotel bar and the back of his car, without asking my permission, he had decided on me.

The worst part wasn't that.

The worst part was the thing I wouldn't say to anyone, not even myself

, not directly — the thought I shoved down as soon as it surfaced because it had no business existing:

Part of me didn't want him to change his mind.