Just checking in. How's it going with Silver Fox? Still playing with fire?
The timing was almost cruel. I think I just burned everything to the ground.
Coming over. Wine or whiskey?
Whiskey.
Definitely whiskey.
As I waited for my best friend to arrive with liquid comfort and unconditional support I didn't deserve, I confronted the truth I'd been avoiding for weeks.
I was falling in love with Lucas Turner.
And I might have just lost him before I'd found the courage to admit it to myself.
Chapter 13
Lucas
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - LUCAS
I'd spent twenty years controlling everything—my business, my feelings, every person in my life.
It was who I was.
Without control, I didn't exist.
That truth had never wavered until Savannah Blake.
As I stood in my penthouse foyer, staring at the door she'd just knocked on, I felt that control slip through my fingers like sand.
Four days since the hospital.
Four days of silence between us, broken only by her increasingly desperate texts that I'd left unanswered.
Four days of rage and desire warring within me, neither gaining clear victory.
I shouldn't have asked her to come.
Shouldn't have sent that text after midnight:My home. One hour. We need to talk.
Shouldn't have opened that door to the one vulnerability I couldn't afford.
But I had.
When I finally opened the door, she stood there in the dim hallway light, those green eyes wide with uncertainty.
She wore a simple green dress, modest yet clinging to her curves in ways that made my blood heat despite everything. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, the way I preferred it, and I hated that I noticed.
Hated that my body still responded to her as if she hadn't betrayed the fragile trust we'd been building.
"Come in," I said, my voice revealing nothing of the storm raging inside me.
She stepped past me, her familiar scent—jasmine with undertones of vanilla—wrapping around me like a memory.
I closed the door with deliberate precision, each movement calculated, controlled.
"Lucas," she began, turning to face me.
