The Billionaire's Stolen Shadow

For three years, I was Harrison Ashcroft's best-kept secret.

Tonight, in a room full of the people we both called friends, someone finally asked him about me.

Come on, Har. Genevieve's gorgeous. Three years running around with her and you've never once been tempted?

I watched him swirl his glass. Somewhere under my ribs, something stupid and hopeful leaned forward.

He didn't even look at me.

"Don't be ridiculous," he said, easy as breathing. "Genevieve and I are strictly friends."

The hopeful thing folded itself back up, small and quiet.

"Right," I said, and smiled. My thumbnail found the old scar on my ring finger and pressed in until it hurt. "We're just friends."

Three years. And the only two people on earth who knew were him and me.

Chapter 1

The words landed in the middle of the table and the whole room went still.

Two seconds. Three.

Then someone laughed to cover it. "Well. Great news, honestly. A buddy of mine's been dying to ask Genevieve out." He grinned at me. "Want me to send you his number?"

I opened my mouth.

Harrison set down his glass.

He stood, crossed behind my chair, and draped an arm around me, loose and careless, the way you'd sling an arm over a piece of furniture you owned. He looked straight at the guy who'd spoken.

"She's my one good friend," he said. "Sweet girl. The real kind. Don't go letting your pack of idiots ruin her."

Every word out of his mouth said friend. Everything his body did said mine.

The guy across the table lost his smile. Somebody's fork went quiet against a plate. Nobody looked straight at either of us.

I lifted his arm off my shoulders and set it down like something I was returning.

Then I smiled at the friend across the table, the one going red at the ears.

"Send it," I said. "I could use a new friend."

He fumbled for his phone. I saved the contact right there, thumb steady.

When I looked up, Harrison was watching me with that half-smile. The one that never reached anything.

Something behind my sternum went dull, then sharp.

I reached for my bag.

His hand closed over my wrist.

"Genevieve. Look at the camera."

He'd already lifted his phone. Front-facing. Our two faces filled the little glass square. His, handsome, laughing, lit from the inside. Mine, pale, eyes gone somewhere far away.

He tapped post before I could turn my head.

Three words, under a photo of a man and the thing he would never say out loud:

Long live friendship.

I excused myself to the restroom and stood at the mirror for a while.

Then I opened the post on my own phone and, letter by letter, typed the only reply I had left.

Long live friendship.

I left before dessert.

He called twenty minutes later.

"Where'd you run off to?"

"Not feeling great," I said.

"Get some rest, then." Easy. Unbothered. He hung up.

I didn't go back to my apartment. I went to his.

I had a key. Well, my fingerprint on his lock. I'd stayed over plenty of nights across three years. You'd never know it from his place. Nothing of mine in the living room. Nothing in the kitchen, the hall, anywhere a guest might look. My toothbrush, my things, all of it lived in a drawer in the master bath, out of sight.

I don't want my private life laid out for people to pick over, he'd told me the first time. If you can live with that, we can be together.

I'd never been in a position to say no. His family had taken me in when I had no one and handed me a whole life. You don't get to set terms on how you're kept.

For three years I'd been too grateful to see the plain thing standing in his dark, spotless living room with me.

It was never his private life he kept out of sight.

It was me.

I pressed my thumb to the lock and went in.

I was halfway to the bedroom when I saw it. On the couch, propped against a cushion: a teddy bear covered in little printed strawberries. Pink. Cartoonish. The kind of thing you give a girl to make her laugh.

Not mine. I'd never owned anything like it.

And far too silly to be his.

So that was who tonight's photo had been for.

I waited for it to hurt.

It didn't, really. That was almost the worst part.

I went into the bedroom and took my things out of the drawer one handful at a time. Then I reached up and unclasped the necklace I'd worn for three years, the one that sat under my collar where no one ever saw it.

The pendant was a ring.

He'd given it to me. I'd never once worn it where the light could catch it.

I closed my hand around it and stood there a moment, deciding what came next.

Chapter 2

For three years I'd kept a ring I was never allowed to wear.

There was no reason to keep it now.

On my third day in Santa Barbara, Harrison called.

I let it ring out.

About half an hour later, a message came through: I'll hold onto the ring for three days.

I knew exactly what that meant. It was how he ran everything. We'd fight, he'd go cold and quiet, wait me out, and I'd be the one to swallow it and come back. That was the shape of us. College in Boston, then his move to New York, and me trailing behind him through both like something tied to his wrist.

I'd never once thought about cutting the string.

I was so tired.

I typed back: Don't. Throw it away.

He didn't answer.

I looked at the screen for a moment. Then I blocked him.

Harrison's jaw went tight when they brought her up.

He knocked back another drink.

"My buddy's in deep," someone was saying. "Called me at two in the morning. Says he's serious about her."

Harrison set his glass down a little too hard. "She'll say no. Tell him to save himself the trouble."

"Come on, Har. How would you even know?"

He didn't look up from his phone. "Because Genevieve's already in love with someone. The kind that guts you. Your buddy, a saint, the second coming of anybody. Doesn't matter. No."

He grabbed his cigarettes and went out to the balcony.

The door shut behind him and took all the noise with it.

He lit up, pulled the phone out again. The thread was still there, her last message glowing at the top.

Throw it away.

He dragged on the cigarette hard enough to burn it halfway down, and it did nothing for the thing crawling under his skin. So he thumbed out one more line, meaner than he felt:

Already did.

It wouldn't go through. A little red exclamation point sat there instead, loud and stupid.

Blocked.

He stared at it. Then he laughed, short and ugly.

Cute. She actually wanted to make a thing of it, for once.

Fine. He'd see how long she lasted.

Santa Barbara went fast, the way borrowed time does.

A week, gone. My last night before the flight back to New York, I went out with the girls.

Which is how I ended up looking up from my drink to watch Julian Sinclair walk through the door.

Black suit. Tall enough that the room seemed to rearrange itself around him. He'd been the boy who never smiled in high school, and the years had folded that quiet into something deeper and colder. The kind of stillness that makes you sit up straighter without knowing why.

Both girls elbowed me at once.

"Genevieve. Long time." His eyes came to my face and stayed there. He didn't bother hiding it.

I stood up too fast. "Julian. Hi. It's been... yeah."

He took the seat across from me. Under the table, one of the girls tugged my sleeve and leaned in.

"Okay, so. I might have posted that you were in town." A pause. "He liked it. Same day. Gen, he lives overseas. He is never here."

"He said he was just passing through," I said.

"Nobody's ever just passing through for you." She grinned. "Not buying it."

I glanced at him. He'd half-turned to answer something the man beside him asked, and for a second all I could see was the clean, sharp line of his jaw, and the way he held himself, like someone who had never once had to raise his voice to be obeyed.

I looked back down at my drink.

By the end of the night, when everyone was pulling on coats and calling cars, it was Julian who stepped in.

"I'll take you back," he said.

It wasn't a question.

Chapter 3

Julian hadn't been drinking, so there was no driver. Just the two of us and the city sliding past the windows.

Halfway back, my phone lit up. A friend from New York.

"Gen! Tomorrow night, come out. Harrison's bringing his girlfriend around to meet everyone. First time he's ever done that, so"

"I don't think I'll make the flight," I said.

"Don't be like that. He asked for you specifically. You two are best friends."

I watched the lights smear past the glass, all that gold and mirror, and I laughed under my breath.

"We're just friends," I said. "It won't matter whether I'm there."

"Gen"

"I have to go."

I hung up before she could finish. More calls came in. I let each one die in my hand, one after another, until the screen went dark and stayed that way.

The car slowed. Stopped.

Julian turned to look at me. "Genevieve. We're here."

I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes on all that glittering nothing outside the window until it started to sting.

Inside my chest there was only a flat gray quiet.

"Julian." I could see my own reflection in the glass. Hollow-eyed. A stranger.

And then it was out of my mouth before I'd decided to say it.

"Do you want to come up with me?"

The door clicked shut and he had my face in both hands.

He kissed me like he'd been holding it back for years. Deep, then deeper. Some startled animal part of me tried to bite down. He caught it, turned it soft. My head went white. My knees stopped agreeing to hold me up.

He gathered me in against his chest. Cedar, faint, and tobacco under it. It went to my head worse than the wine had.

When he moved to keep going, I didn't push him off.

Except it wasn't what I'd braced for.

"Julian. Your hands. Too hard." A breath. "That's not right. You're hurting me." I pulled back an inch to look at him. "Have you honestly never done this?"

"Sorry." His voice came out rough. "Genevieve."

"You've never had a girlfriend?"

He went still, breathing hard, a drop of sweat falling to my collarbone. It cost him something to stop.

In the low light his face was all clean angles. He almost smiled. Or I imagined it.

"No," he said. "Somebody turned me down once. Messed me up. Never bothered after that."

It knocked the words clean out of me.

A hallway. His face a year older than mine, waiting for an answer I already had and gave anyway. I had turned him down, in school. And the truth I'd never told a soul was that it hadn't been because I felt nothing.

It had just been the way things went.

"Genevieve." He brushed the damp hair off my forehead. "Can we try again?"

I looked up and found myself in his eyes, black and close, a version of me I didn't know. It made me shy.

This time he wasn't careful because he didn't know how.

He was careful because it was me.

When it was over I couldn't have lifted a finger if I'd tried. He tipped half a glass of water into me, slow, and my eyes fell shut.

At the very edge of sleep I felt his hand close around mine.

"Julian?"

A kiss landed light on my forehead.

"Good night, Genevieve."

Chapter 4

The girl beside Harrison was beautiful. The kind that turns a room on the first look.

She just wasn't the kind you kept looking at.

That seat had been Genevieve's, every time, for years. The swap sat wrong with everyone, though nobody said it. It was the first girl he'd ever brought out in the open, so they were warm about her, generous.

"Guess Genevieve really couldn't get back."

"Santa Barbara's a long way. Can't blame her."

"Should we just start, Har?"

The girl leaned into him. "Harrison, who's Genevieve?"

He smiled, easy. "Just a friend."

"Then we'll get her out next time. I'm starving."

"Sure. Let's eat."

He picked up his glass. The table warmed up around him. He had a few drinks, and the girl got prettier the more she had, and his friends were loud, and none of it was a problem.

The world turned fine without Genevieve in it. Women, friends, all of it circled him exactly the same. Her, not her. No difference.

"Man, what is it with today. Everyone's going public at once."

"Who now?"

"Julian Sinclair. You remember him. Bigger deal than Har, back in school."

Something moved in Harrison's chest. "What about Sinclair?"

"First thing he's ever posted, dropped it today. Guy's obviously announcing a girlfriend."

The friend slid the phone across.

One line of text: Old wishes, all granted. Next year, a new one to make.

Under it, a photo. Two hands, one folded tight inside the other.

Harrison knew the smaller one before the thought finished.

The deep scar across the ring finger. He'd know it anywhere. He'd told her once it sat in the perfect spot. A ring would cover it clean. She'd been upset, and one sentence from him had turned it into a laugh. He'd bought her the ring after that.

He'd just never once let her wear it where anyone could see.

And now that hand was folded up inside another man's.

Julian Sinclair's.

Harrison laughed, once. Like it was funny.

Then he set the phone face-down, stood, and every degree of warmth drained out of his face.

"Harrison?" The girl's voice thinned. "Harrison, are you"

He didn't hear her. Didn't look at her. She scrambled up and caught his sleeve.

"Can I come with you? I don't want to sit here alone"

He peeled her hand off his arm and set her back a step. "You don't want to stay? Then don't ever come back."

He walked out.

Down the hall, into the elevator, down. It wasn't until he was in the car with the engine turning over that the noise in his skull dropped low enough to think.

To do what.

To go where.

She wasn't in New York. She'd cleared her things out of his place. She was two thousand miles away letting another man

His fist came down on the wheel. The horn tore a long hole in the dark and held it open.

His phone rang.

His mother's voice, smooth as ever.

"Harrison. When are you coming out to the house?"

Chapter 5

"Bring Genevieve. Come together."

"Can't. Not for a few days."

"Why not?"

"We had a fight." Harrison rolled the lighter across his knuckles. "She won't talk to me. Blocked my number."

His mother laughed, low and fond, at whatever she heard in his voice. "All right. I'll call her myself." A pause. "What did you do this time, to get her that angry?"

"No idea," he said, and smiled.

The call ended. He tossed the phone into the console, and there it was, catching the light. The necklace she'd left behind at his place. The ring on the chain. The stone had always struck him as a little small.

Her birthday was November eighth. Almost here.

He could buy her a new one. Eleven-point-eight carats. Put it in her hand on the eighth.

Then go public. The way she'd always wanted.

Then ask her to marry him.

It was, he thought, a very good plan.

Julian came back to the suite with his arms full of paper bags.

I was out on the terrace, buried in a cashmere throw, staring at nothing. It had turned to cold rain over Santa Barbara, the temperature sliding all afternoon. He'd gone out in a thin coat. The tips of his ears had gone red with it.

He crouched and put something warm in my hands. "Best bubble tea in the city. Try it."

"Thank you." I looked up at him before I could help it.

"Drink some yourself. Warm up."

"Okay," he said, and didn't drink any. He came around behind me instead and folded both arms around the throw and me inside it.

I took a small sip. His mouth found the shell of my ear.

It tickled. I turned my face away from it, and his kiss simply followed me around to my mouth.

I could feel him smiling into it. "Didn't you just tell me to have some too?"

I opened my mouth to argue and lost the whole sentence.

The cup went over somewhere. Warm tea soaked into the rug, and more of it into the front of his shirt, spreading dark.

Rain and gray outside the glass. Something else entirely inside it.

I couldn't hold his eyes. There was too much heat in them, from a man who kept himself on such a short leash, looking at me like the leash had already snapped.

I turned my face into his shoulder instead.

"Genevieve." Low, rough, half a laugh in it.

He pulled me in tighter and kissed me slower, and in the dark glass of the window I watched the two of us blur into one shape and lose our edges.

It was a long while before the room went quiet again.

Afterward he showered, came out to find me slumped against the headboard, and carried me off to wash the day away. Wrapped me in a robe. Dried my hair.

A strand slipped loose behind my ear. I lifted my hand to tuck it back, but he'd already done it.

"Thank you," I said. Again.

Something moved across his face, close to helpless. "Are you going to keep being this polite with me, Genevieve?"

I didn't know how to answer that.

We'd been reckless again, and it still felt like something I would wake up from. The sweetness of the tea was still on my mouth.

And under it, without warning, I was somewhere else. Years back. A different cold, a colder street. The first time this exact quiet had ever settled over me.

I had never told him about that night.

I had never told anyone.

Chapter 6

The last time this quiet settled over me, I was seventeen and it was snowing.

Tutoring had run late. The street was long and dark and nearly empty, and Julian Sinclair happened to be standing at the crosswalk in a black coat, like the cold couldn't reach him.

"Hey. Genevieve. Small world."

He smiled. Barely. At school he never smiled at all, and that faint version of it stopped me where I stood.

He walked me home that night, the way an older kid walks a younger one. Halfway there he bought a paper cone of roasted chestnuts off a cart, cracked them open, and gave me the warm half.

The wind came up. It started to snow. He turned so it hit his back instead of my face, and when he leaned down to say something his forehead grazed mine.

Then he straightened, and the space came back between us.

For one second my heart had moved.

I thought it was the start of something young and sweet. It turned out to be a thing you catch a glimpse of and never get to hold. Then, and now, and every time in between.

Fifteen minutes ago, while Julian was in the shower, my phone rang.

Mrs. Ashcroft.

"Come out to the house for dinner, sweetheart. You and Harrison, together." Warm. She was always warm. "It's been too long since I've had you at my table."

I started to make an excuse.

"Vincent's home," she said. "He's so rarely here. He'd love to see you."

Vincent.

His name went through me like ice water. My hands went cold. I sat there gripping the phone like something guilty, something that belonged in a room with the blinds drawn.

She was still talking, gentle as ever, when I finally got off the call, and I still couldn't get my breath back.

There'd been a year, a long time ago, when whatever I felt for Julian Sinclair was so new it hadn't even broken the surface.

One phone call from that house ended it. Ended a lot of things.

They own you, when they've handed you your whole life. You come when they call. You don't get to explain why the sound of a name can turn your hands to ice.

And I was too much of a coward to let Julian see even an inch of it. The ugly parts. The parts I'd been raised to be ashamed of.

"Julian."

I pulled easy and light on over my face like a coat. "So."

"What's wrong?"

"I'm flying back to New York. Tonight."

Under the throw, my hands had knotted together without my noticing. My thumb was working the old scar on my ring finger, back and forth, hard enough to hurt.

I couldn't make it stop.

I just kept smiling at him. "And after this, don't reach out again."

"These two days were something we both wanted. Nobody owes anybody." I stood. "Let's call it nothing happened."

I made for the bedroom before the next second could arrive and take my tear ducts with it.

His hand closed around my wrist. "Genevieve."

"Tell me what happened. Please."

I couldn't.

How do you say a thing like this out loud.

That my mother worked in that house, and the story they told afterward was that she'd gone after the man who owned it. That a driver on the estate found out and used it to press her for himself, and when she turned him down, he got drunk and put his car through her.

That his parents nearly divorced over it. That I was what was left. An orphan.

That Mrs. Ashcroft took me in anyway. Paid for all of it, school and everything after. Hired the lawyer who put that driver away for murder.

That kind of mercy sits on a child like a stone.

Harrison never once held any of it against me. Just the opposite. For years, he was good to me.

And I could never let Julian Sinclair see the rest of it. Not one inch.

Chapter 7

If it hadn't been for those three years with Harrison, maybe Julian and I could have just stayed friends. For good.

Except now neither of us could get back to that.

I pulled my wrist free.

I could feel his eyes on me, hot and hurting at once, covering all of me. I still didn't have the nerve to look up.

"Nothing happened," I said. "I just have to go back."

"Back where?"

His hands came to my shoulders. Slid down my arms. Then he gave up on all of it and pulled me in, hard, his face going down into the side of my neck.

"Don't go back, Genevieve. He's not good to you. He never was."

He held on like he was trying to fold me in behind his own ribs.

"Don't go back to him." A breath against my throat. "Even if it isn't me. Just not him."

The tears came anyway. Soaked into his shirt without a sound.

"Julian."

I didn't know how to tell him any of it. That Harrison was already over. That the thing knotted around that family would never come loose. That I would rather take my own hand off than let this man see the worst of me.

"It's late. I have a flight."

I got a grip on his arms and pushed him back, an inch at a time.

His eyes were red. So were mine.

I smiled at him anyway. "Take care of yourself, Julian."

He didn't say anything. He reached out and wiped the tears from the corner of my eye with his thumb.

"If New York makes you unhappy," he said, "you tell me. Any hour."

I nodded, hard. I wanted to give him one more smile.

The tears wouldn't wipe dry, no matter what I did.

New York in winter has teeth.

I shivered the second I came off the jet bridge and pulled my coat tight, and when I followed the crowd out into arrivals I picked Harrison out of it in a single look.

He's tall. That face is too much. Being overlooked was never really on the table for him.

"Mom told me to come get you."

He walked over, took my suitcase straight out of my hand, and turned to go. Two steps later he looked back and dropped it flat and cold.

"Not that I wanted to."

I smiled. Kept my face clear of anything extra.

"Thank you."

I heard his back teeth grind. Then he turned and stalked off with the suitcase, long legs eating the floor.

I didn't speed up. I kept my own pace, slow, and let him pull ahead.

By the time I reached the car he'd already loaded the bags. He stood at the passenger door with a look like I was burning his whole evening. "Quit dragging. I've got somewhere to be."

I didn't go to the passenger seat.

I opened the back door instead.

"Genevieve."

His face went darker than the sky over the city.

I looked at him, calm. "Isn't the front seat the girlfriend's seat?"

That pulled a laugh out of him, the furious kind. He slammed the door.

"You really know how to make a scene. Fine. Sit wherever the hell you want."

We didn't say one word the whole way.

When we pulled up to the house, I looked up at the main wing with every window blazing.

My legs turned to lead.

Chapter 8

Harrison stopped walking too.

In the last of the dusk he looked down at me, that tilt to his head. "What are you so scared of? He's not going to eat you."

I wasn't scared. I just didn't know how to stand in front of him.

Didn't know how to look at the man I'd once called Uncle Vincent without wanting to disappear.

"Fine. I'll cut out early. You leave with me." He walked on ahead.

I didn't move.

He turned back and clicked his tongue. "What are you standing there for, Genevieve. Come on." He waved me over.

I knew that gesture. I'd known it for years. Him at the school gate, waving me toward the car, waiting on me the way he had a hundred times.

Something in me loosened without permission.

Maybe ordinary friends wasn't the worst thing in the world.

I smiled at him. "Coming."

He froze for half a second. Then, for no reason I could name, he shot me a glare.

But his steps slowed to let me catch up.

Dinner was calm.

Vincent had been in poor health for a couple of years, and he was talking about moving back to New York for good. Mrs. Ashcroft said nothing either way. Whatever had once been between the two of them had frozen solid a long time ago. Almost nothing crossed the table.

No arguing, either.

And that was the thing that sat on my chest like a brick. That quiet. Wrong-shaped. Too smooth.

After dinner Vincent called Harrison into the study.

Half an hour later Harrison came down the stairs with his jaw set, took my arm, and hauled me toward the door.

On the way out, I couldn't help looking back.

Mrs. Ashcroft stood in the lamplight. Grave. Shadowed. Not a flicker of expression on her face.

Something in my chest jolted.

I'd lived in that house for long stretches over the years. I'd sat across from that woman more times than I could count, and every single time her face had been kind. Warm. A mother's face.

This was the first time I ever saw the other thing underneath it.

The thing that raised the hair on my arms.

I didn't get the chance to think about it. Harrison already had me at the car.

He drove home like the road had wronged him, whatever the study had done to him still burning off him.

At my building he told me to go up, voice flat and hard.

I'd moved out of that house of his. I was never moving back in. Same as the three years I'd spent as his secret. I was done, and done meant done. You couldn't have dragged me back with a team of horses.

"Genevieve. Out of the car."

"I'm not going up with you."

I took out my phone and thumbed the screen awake, watching him through the open door, calm. "If you make me, I'll call the police."

"So call them. Ask them while you're at it. Since when is it a crime for a man to take his girlfriend home?"

"Harrison. We broke up."

"I never said we broke up."

"Is this actually worth doing right now?" It should have been funny. I was too tired to find it funny. "I don't want to fight with you. I'm exhausted. I want to go home and sleep."

"You told me at the airport you had something on tonight."

"Then go do it. I'll take a cab."

He stood outside the car with the dark closing over him, and whatever was in his eyes was just as dark, and just as deep.

After a long moment, he did the thing he almost never did.

He gave in. "I'll drive you."

Then, harder: "Refuse me one more time and you're not going home at all tonight, Genevieve."

I shut my mouth.

There's a streak in Harrison that does not bend. Pushing it never once worked out in my favor.

When the car reached my building I thanked him and reached for the door.

He turned in his seat and stopped me.

"The eighth is your birthday." A beat. "That's next week."

Chapter 9

"When your birthday comes," Harrison said, "we'll end it. Clean. All the way."

I wanted to tell him there was no need.

Ending quietly like this was fine. We'd be able to see each other again without it turning strange. Around the people we both knew, we could go on exactly like before.

"Mom and Dad already decided. Everyone's in the city, so they want to do it right for you." A pause, aimed. "You wouldn't throw your benefactors' kindness back in their faces. Would you."

And just like that I had no reason left to say no.

"Fine," I said. "However you want it."

I got out. He didn't wait around. He swung the car back the way we'd come and was gone.

The winter wind cut straight through me. A few steps from the door and I was frozen to the bone, head down, coat clutched shut, moving fast.

Almost at the building, I caught something off to one side, in the shadow of the trees. An orange streetlight stretching a tall figure long across the pavement.

Julian. In a thin trench coat. Standing in the dead-of-night cold of a New York December.

No way of knowing how long he'd been there.

I stopped. I stared at him. "Julian?"

He started toward me, and the first snow of the year came down over the city.

It caught in his hair, on his shoulders. He didn't so much as brush it off.

He only reached out and, gently, swept the snow off my bangs.

Time came roaring back to a winter years gone.

And Julian Sinclair reached into his coat and took out a roasted chestnut, still holding its warmth.

He broke it open and handed me half.

I took it without a word, and then the sweetness bloomed on my tongue and the tears came out of nowhere.

He bent his head. His forehead brushed mine, and again, and again.

We stood there like a couple of fools in the first snow of New York and ate the chestnut down to nothing.

"Genevieve."

His fingers came to the corner of my mouth and wiped away a little smudge of char.

"Here's my problem," he said. "I told my family where I stand, and they didn't care for the answer."

"What answer?"

"They wanted me to walk away from you. Because of where you come from. What's attached to your name." His mouth curved. His eyes stayed level. "I told them I'd walk away from the Sinclairs first."

He was smiling. There was nothing light in his eyes at all.

My heart gave one small, precise ache, and the sting spread out from it fast.

Maybe the snow was just coming down harder. That would explain why he'd gone blurry.

"Julian, I don't need you to take responsibility for me." The words came thin. "And it isn't as if I'm your first anyth"

He kissed the rest of the sentence out of my mouth.

His lips were cold, snow melting on them. The kiss was not. The kiss could have turned me to meltwater where I stood.

"Genevieve. You already know." He cupped my face and kissed the tears off it, one side, then the other. "I'm in love with you. None of the rest matters to me."

"So here's what I did tonight. I made myself a bet.

"If you didn't come back, I was going to talk myself out of this. Let you go. Stop being one more thing that happens to you."

"But if you came back." His gaze burned into me, and under it, buried, something almost afraid to show itself. "Then this time I don't let go. Not for anything."

That flicker of hope in him was so small, so careful, that I couldn't make myself be the one to put it out.

We didn't make it past the entryway.

He kissed me again while he was still working the coat off my shoulders, my scarf loose in his hand, and then his arm hooked around my waist and pulled me flush against him, every line of us fitted together with nothing left between.

And I felt it. The impatience in him that didn't match the calm, careful man he showed the rest of the world at all.

Chapter 10

"You're in a hurry, Julian." I could barely get it out.

His fingers found the hem of my cashmere sweater and rolled it up an inch. The rough pads of them dragged over the soft skin at my waist. Then his whole hot hand closed there and pressed me back into him.

He kissed me hard. Deep.

I shut my eyes and went up on my toes to meet him. "Slow down. We've got the whole night."

He drew back just enough to look at me, and he smiled.

I think it was the first time since we'd found each other again that a real smile reached his eyes.

He laced his fingers through mine and brought them down.

"Genevieve." A beat. "Then that's the deal. A whole night. We don't skip a single second of it."

It snowed all that night.

And all that night, the snow melted.

Harrison Ashcroft was old money's old money.

His whole life was one long glittering blur of it. Friends on every side, never bored, never alone. And somehow this week the clock had started to drag, and every pleasure he used to sink into had turned to wax in his mouth.

Up on the top floor of the club, in the room he kept year-round, his friends were loud over cards and the billiard table, and the boredom came down on him all at once, huge, unbearable, a thing he couldn't sit inside for one more second.

He dropped his cue and took his phone to the window wall.

The screen was still waking up when a message landed.

A few photos. Grainy. Shot in a crowded, noisy grocery store. A man and a woman in front of the shelves, turned toward each other, laughing.

In one of them, Julian Sinclair had his arm around her waist.

And nothing in the way she leaned into it said she minded.

His eyes narrowed by degrees.

The clasped-hands photo, he'd waved off. It hadn't cost him a thing.

These went in like bright knives and took a piece out of him before he registered the cut. No pain yet. Just the blood.

He was a man, and a man who'd had women. He could read it in one glance.

They'd been together. Really together. And more than once.

He caught his own reflection in the glass. Eyes gone red. Something splitting behind them. A face he half recognized, wrong at the edges.

He fought it down and lost.

The phone hit the floor and burst apart.

The whole glittering room stopped at once. Everyone turned, startled, a little afraid.

Harrison brought himself back down, degree by degree.

He faced them, calm, his voice level. "Keep playing. Don't let me stop you."

He walked for the door. "I'm heading out. Don't wait up."

The door shut behind him. The hallway was empty.

He kept walking until he found a waiter.

"Your phone."

The kid didn't understand, but he handed it over fast, both hands.

Harrison dialed her number.

When had it burned itself into him, that number? He couldn't say. Didn't matter. He needed her voice in his ear now. He needed to see her. He needed to take her back out from under Julian Sinclair. Out from under the dog who'd walked off with her on the strength of one warm chestnut and a sad story.

She heard his voice and hung up.

Chapter 11

He called again. This time she wouldn't pick up.

Harrison lit a cigarette and bit down on it.

He sent one line: Don't make me come find you in person.

She picked up on the third call, quiet and quick, like someone who'd been caught. Hiding from Sinclair, probably. Afraid he'd hear.

Something in that thief's whisper of a voice sent Harrison's pulse through the roof, his blood up to a boil, the heat of it eating him alive from the inside.

"Genevieve.

"Go tell Sinclair, right now, that he was a lapse in judgment. That you don't want him. That you never could. Send him back overseas where he belongs.

"Do that, and I'll act like none of it happened. I'll forgive you. This once. The only time you get."

Half a minute of nothing on the line.

He could hear his own breathing. His own heartbeat. Those few seconds stretched until he thought he might suffocate on them.

"Santa Barbara might have been a lapse in judgment," she said. "This isn't.

"I was in love with him in high school. Falling for him again seems fair enough.

"And, Harrison. We are just friends. Friends don't get a vote in who the other one chooses.

"The whole time I was with you, I never once got you to admit I existed. So whatever I do now, with someone else, isn't yours to forgive."

A pause. Even. Unhurried.

"Move on. Let's part on good terms."

She didn't wait for an answer. The line went dead a second time.

Harrison sat with the phone in his fist and couldn't make himself lower it.

Outside the window the snow was coming down over the whole city, the way it had last year.

Last year she'd been in his apartment. They'd made hot pot together, and after, she'd folded herself into the corner of his couch with some show on, and he'd put his head in her lap and drifted off. Right before he went under, he'd felt her lean down and kiss him, quick, like a secret.

He'd let her think he was asleep.

And some soft, stupid part of him had gone sweet over it for hours.

She looked like her mother. That kind of beautiful. The kind men decide they want to marry.

Which was exactly why, from day one, he'd told her it would never be public. Couldn't be. He wasn't going to hand the guys he'd grown up with the joke of it: the housekeeper's daughter, the way her mother had gotten her hooks into his father, and now she had them in him. Two generations of Ashcroft men brought down by one mother and one daughter. Nothing about that was a story he wanted told.

So he'd kept her. Wanted her, sometimes badly enough to scare himself. And told himself, clear-eyed the whole time, that a man like him does not marry a girl like that.

He'd thought he had all of it handled. The family had done so much for her, after all. She'd always done what he said. Soft. Easy. His.

Three years, and he'd nearly forgotten that Genevieve had once been a straight-backed, quick-laughing girl who could pick a thing up and set it right back down.

She'd set him down.

Cleanly. No door left open behind her.

Exactly what he'd said he wanted. Friends. Nothing more, ever.

Then his hand went to his jacket, to the velvet box that hadn't left his pocket in days.

Eleven-point-eight carats. He'd meant to put it in her hand tomorrow, on her birthday.

It just sat there in the box now, throwing off light.

Laughing at him.

Chapter 12

Harrison handed the waiter both the phone and the box.

"Thanks for the phone." His voice came out oddly gentle. Almost soft. "I've got no use for the ring. Keep it."

The kid stared, stunned, and started to push it back.

Harrison had already turned and gone.

On my birthday, Julian and I made a plan.

I'd go to the Ashcrofts', get it over with, and come back to him. Then the two of us would celebrate alone, properly. Just us.

He wore the black cashmere coat I'd bought him when he came down to see me off, and it made him look unfairly good. He had that reluctant, hollowed-out look, like he didn't want to let me out of reach.

So I went up on my toes and kissed him, light. "Wait for me at home. We'll do hot pot."

He nodded. Then he pulled me back in and kissed me anyway, slow, until the Ashcrofts' car rolled up and we finally came apart.

I got in. The car pulled away and kept going, and Julian was still standing at the curb.

The snow came down in sheets, like it meant to bury the whole city.

I stayed pressed to the window watching him until I couldn't see him anymore.

Harrison didn't come to the birthday dinner his family threw for me.

He'd said he wanted to end things cleanly, on my birthday. There was no need now. After what I'd said to him on the phone, a man that proud would never bend a second time.

Better this way. We'd passed clean through each other and come out the far side as the thing we actually were. Friends.

The second I stepped out of the car, the old house felt wrong.

Too quiet. Barely any staff in sight.

Something cold started up in me, low and shapeless, and for no reason I could name I thought of Mrs. Ashcroft's face that night. Grave. Shadowed. The other thing under the kindness.

I stopped on the drive and pressed my hand to the phone in my bag.

I called Julian. Let it ring three times. Hung up.

It was a bit from a show we'd binged that week. Three rings and a hang-up meant something's off. Something's dangerous.

He'd understand. And he'd come, fast. I knew he would.

The staff walked me up to the main house and left.

Mrs. Ashcroft sat on the sofa in a high-collared dress the color of frost. She saw me and smiled and waved me over for tea.

Elegant. Serene. That same warm, motherly face.

I actually wondered if I'd imagined all of it. If maybe, that night, I'd only seen it wrong.

"Come, sit with me, sweetheart. Have some tea."

The tea was pale green, steam curling off it, sweet to the nose. I lifted the cup and took a small sip.

Mrs. Ashcroft rose all at once. "I nearly forgot your gift. Wait right here. I'll run up and get it."

I started to stand too

The room turned a full slow circle around me.

She had my arm at once. "Genevieve? What's the matter, sweetheart?"

"You've gone so pale. Let me help you to a room to lie down." Her voice was honey. "Your old room. We've kept it clean for you this whole time."

I couldn't hold my eyes open. My body had gone soft, wrung of any strength I had.

Somewhere in the fog, the hands holding me up changed. Different hands.

I fought to open my eyes wide enough to see whose.

The vision wouldn't clear, no matter how hard I pushed at it.

Then a voice I knew came out of the dark.

"Genevieve. You've grown up even lovelier than your mother ever was."

"Uncle Vincent?"

The name cut one clean second of clarity through me, and the drug swallowed it whole.

The floor swung up. Hands shoved me down onto the bed.

And the door began to close.

Chapter 13