Page 197 of The Sweetest Return

“Found somewhere beautiful enough to make it harder for me to stay annoyed with you.”

“I’m strategic.”

“You are extravagant.”

“Sometimes.”

Business waited for me in the morning. Laila Hart. Marisol Grant. The fitting that had gone from next month to tomorrow. The opportunity Saint Aurelia had trusted me to handle.

Dre stepped from the car first and held his hand back for mine.

I looked at it.

At twenty-two, one of my deepest fears had been that loving Andre Jones would mean arranging my ambition around the size of his future.

This wasn't that.

He hadn't brought me across the country because his life required me here. He had helped me get where my work demanded I be, then stepped aside and left the accomplishment where it belonged.

With me.

I placed my hand in his.

His fingers closed around mine.

“All right, Ms. Bennett,” he said. “Let’s get you ready to make everybody want what Saint Aurelia already knew was worth wanting.”

I smiled and stepped out beside him.

The Pacific moved somewhere below us, my diamonds waited to be worn in the morning, and Andre Jones held my hand without trying to lead me anywhere I had not already chosen to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Los Angeles looked different when I wasn’t here for football.

No buses with police escorts. No equipment trucks. No hotel floors full of men pretending their bodies weren’t hurting before Sunday. No coaches walking around with tablets and tight mouths. No fans behind ropes yelling my name like ownership came with a jersey.

This time, I stood in the courtyard of Solara House with the Pacific throwing light across the edge of the property and watched Imani Bennett become the center of a room I was not meant to enter.

That suited me fine.

Mostly.

The estate sat above Malibu like somebody had poured money into the cliff and told it to behave. White stucco. Dark wood. Glass walls. Bougainvillea climbing over archways. Olive trees in stone planters. The ocean below, loud enough to remind everybody that even all this money did not own the view.

Laila Hart had rented the place for the week, which made sense the second we pulled through the gates. A woman like her did not borrow beauty.

She curated it.

Imani understood that before anybody said a word.

I watched her step out of the car in a cream sleeveless blouse tucked into wide-leg trousers the color of warm sand, gold hoops at her ears, braids pulled back from her face, Saint Aurelia’s diamond bracelet locked around her wrist. The jewelry case was in the hands of insured security, but somehow the whole courtyard moved like she carried the most valuable thing with her.

Because she did.

Herself.

Marisol Grant met us near the entrance in sunglasses, linen, and a face that said she had argued with six people before breakfast and won five of the conversations. Laila’s assistant hovered behind her with a phone in each hand.