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"I need to tell you something," I say before I'm able to chicken out. The words hang in the air like smoke from a just-blown-out candle, sucking all the oxygen from the sunlit bedroom.
He props himself up on one muscular forearm, his sleep-tousled hair falling across his forehead as his expression shifts from languid satisfaction to sharp-eyed attention. "Nothing good ever starts with those words."
"Well," I say, my voice trembling. "I should've told you who I am before now." My heart hammers against my ribs like it's trying to escape. "My full name is Francesca Aliénor Foxworth."
He blinks. Once. Twice. His square jaw tenses, the muscle in his cheek jumping beneath his morning stubble.
"You mean, like—" He trails off, those piercing cobalt eyes scanning my face for any hint of a joke, his full lips parting slightly.
I nod, twisting the Egyptian cotton sheet between my fingers. "My dad is Charles W. Foxworth, the current Governor of Texas, and my older brother is Benjamin Foxworth, the U.S. Senator."
He whistles low, the sound cutting through the heavy silence. "I knew you looked familiar," he mutters, rubbing both calloused hands over his face, dragging the skin down. "Fucking hell." He sits up fully, the pearl-white sheets pooling around his narrow waist, revealing the sculpted ridges of his abdomen. For the first time since I met him beside my smoking Fiat, Seth looks genuinely shocked, his usual confidence cracked like a windshield. "I… did not see that coming."
"It's not who I am," I blurt out, words tumbling from my lips like marbles from an overturned jar. "I don't want to be just the Foxworth daughter with the perfect smile and the designer wardrobe." I got tired of that title years ago, of being a prop in family photos. "I work my own jobs, pay my own way. I don't touch the trust fund. I don't do charity galas where everyone whispers behind crystal champagne flutes. I just—" I run out of words, my throat closing like a fist as I watch his expression, hoping I haven't already blown my chance with the only man who's ever made me feel like more than a political accessory.
He stares at the eggshell-colored wall, jaw clenched so hard I hear the faint crackle of his molars grinding together like tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth. Then he turns, and those storm-blue eyes find mine, but where I expected lightning, I find only the calm after rain.
He scrubs a calloused mechanic's hand through his thick chestnut hair, making it stand on end above his high forehead. "You're really something, you know that?" The words roll out in that honey-gravel drawl that makes my toes curl against the thousand-thread-count sheets and sends a shiver racing down my spine like a drop of ice water.
“Something in a good way?” My stomach knots itself into a pretzel as I brace for rejection. But he surprises me.
“In the best way.” Those work-roughened fingers reach for mine, his grip tight enough to anchor a ship in a hurricane, grounding me when I feel like I might float away. "Doesn't matter if your family owns half the state," he says, voice low and raw as an open wound. "I'm not letting you go. You’re mine."
He says it like it's carved in stone. Like he's already mapping battle plans against whatever army, whether political, social, or familial, that might try to come between us.
For a second, I can’t breathe. No one’s ever chosen me before—just my last name, my pedigree, my ability to smile for the cameras and behave at dinner.
Seth looks at me and sees the real me, and he’s still all in anyway. Heck yes. My luck definitely has taken a turn for the better.
