Page 20 of Hostile

Aldridge Charity Gala. November 14th. Black tie.

I wrote two things beneath it:

Position: twenty-two percent parent company. Twelve percent of the Charleston development entity.

Objective: let him see what he’s dealing with.

I capped the pen and set it down. Below my window, Manhattan moved through its Thursday with its usual indifference.

In five days, Wyatt Aldridge would find my name in the Charleston disclosure. In twelve days, I would walk into his gala and let him look at me.

I’d spent ten years building something capable of this moment. Six years of executing it without a single misstep. Without flinching. Without looking back.

What I hadn’t spent nearly enough time thinking about was what it would actually feel like to be in the same room as him again. Close enough to read his face the way I used to—the way I’d been doing since I was seventeen years old in a parking lot in Savannah, watching him and telling myself I wasn’t.

Let him see what he’s dealing with.

I looked at the words I’d written and admitted, quietly and only to myself, that the instruction went both ways.

CHAPTER NINE

MEGAN: THE PAST

The Thursday coffee had become our thing without either of us officially saying so.

One hour, I’d told him the first time. That was the rule. I had a seminar at six, and a reading list a mile long and absolutely zero business turning a study break into something I looked forward to more than I should. One hour. In and out. No complications.

That was eight weeks ago.

Tonight it was past nine, the café was down to its last few customers, and neither of us had moved. The tea I’d ordered had gone cold an hour ago, and I’d drunk it anyway because touching the cup gave my hands something to do when Wyatt looked at me the way he was looking at me right now.

As if I were the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

Stop it, I told myself. You know better than this.

I did know better. I’d known better since I was seventeen years old in a parking lot in Savannah, telling Christine I was immune to his charm while my treacherous eyes found him every single time. I was still doing it. The only difference was that now I was doing it across a café table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where nobody knew my name, my family’s history, or which side of the iron gate I’d grown up on.

That was supposed to make things easier, but it did not make things easier.

“You went quiet,” Wyatt said.

“I think sometimes.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I know you do. What are you thinking about?”

You. “Nothing important.”

He leaned back in his chair and studied me with those blue eyes that had always seen more than I wanted to reveal. “You do that thing when you’re thinking about something you don’t want to say. Your pen stops moving, and you fix your gaze on a point about two feet to the left of where you’re actually looking.”

I glanced down. My pen had, in fact, stopped moving. I capped it.

“I don’t do that,” I said.

“You absolutely do that.” He wasn’t smug about it—just certain, as he was about most things. Easy and unhurried, like a man who had decided something and was content to wait. “You did it in the library on Wednesday. And in class last Thursday, when Harrigan was going over the Sherman Act.”

“You were watching me during the Sherman Act?”

“I watch you a lot,” he said simply. No apology. No deflection. Just the fact, offered the same way he offered everything—straight across the table, no games.