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Then Ross adds, “That doesn’t mean I won’t be there.”

Something cold settles beneath the heat already moving through me.

He means it.

This isn’t courtesy.

It isn’t coincidence.

He is telling me, very clearly, that he intends to remain part of this.

I adjust my clutch beneath my arm.

“Well,” I say, “then I suppose I’ll see you at the next stage.”

“You will,” Ross replies.

I give him a small, controlled smile.

“Good night, Ross.”

“Good night, Blaire.”

I turn and walk back toward the main gallery without looking behind me. By the time I reach the coat check, my pulse is still too fast.

The assignment has not changed. The file has not changed. The timetable has not changed.

Ross has.

The man standing in that gallery is not behaving like someone prepared to keep his distance. And that changes everything.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ross

Blaire’s name sits halfway down the collection schedule on my screen. I’ve been looking at it longer than necessary.

Blaire Wilson — Client Advisor.

Yesterday, she was standing six feet away from me for the first time in years, wearing a black dress and an expression that made it clear she would’ve preferred almost anyone else in London to walk across that gallery toward her.

This morning, she’s back to being a name attached to a mandate. I close the schedule and turn my attention to the financial report waiting beside it, but the numbers hold me for less than a minute before my thoughts return to her.

Seeing Blaire again answered one question I stopped asking myself a long time ago: Time didn’t cure anything.

If anything, distance made it easier to believe I’d learned how to live without wanting her. That belief lasted until I saw her across the reception.

She’s changed. That was obvious before I even reached her.

The younger woman I remember could hold her own in any room, but there was still a carefulness to her then, an awareness that she was establishing herself among people with more money, more influence and longer résumés.

That’s gone.

Blaire doesn’t enter a room wondering whether she belongs there anymore. She knows she does. The difference is compelling. So is the fact that she was furious to see me. I expected anger. I earned it. What interests me more is everything underneath it.

She watched me too carefully. Measured every answer before she gave it. Tensed when the conversation moved even slightly away from work. She was controlled enough that anyone who didn’t know her would’ve missed it. I knew her once. There’s something beyond irritation there. I have no idea what it is.

A knock sounds at the door before my executive assistant steps inside carrying her tablet.