Dinner arrives. Trout for her, local, from the creek that runs through the Aldrich property on the north ridge. Elk tenderloin for me, because I am predictable in my choices even when I'm unpredictable in everything else, and because the kitchen knows my order the way Keaton knows my drink. We eat, and the conversation shifts to safer ground, and I tell her about the town, the history, the surface-level version that appears in the brochures and the walking tour pamphlets. She listens with the half-attention of a woman who is processing two conversations at once, the one happening out loud and the one happening underneath.
After the main course, she excuses herself to the restroom, and I sit alone at the table and feel the full weight of what I'm doing. I am having dinner with the woman whose property my family needs to acquire.
I am attracted to her in a way that I recognize as dangerous because it's specific, not a general pull toward a beautiful woman but a targeted, precise draw toward this particular one, this woman with June's eyes and her own edges, this woman who reads journals and photographs mine entrances and calls bullshit with the elegant precision of a scalpel.
My phone vibrates. A text from Ward.
How is dinner?
He's watching. Of course he's watching. One of the three diners I noticed earlier is probably reporting in real-time, texting updates from two tables away, because Ward doesn't trust anyone to handle things unsupervised, least of all me, least of all now.
Fine,
I reply.
She's cautious. This will take time.
We don't have time. The geological survey team is scheduled for November.
I pocket the phone as Greer returns to the table. She sits, and the candle between us catches the green of her dress and the light in her eyes, and she looks at me with an expression I can't read, which is rare, because reading people is the only skill I've ever been genuinely proud of.
"Walk me out?" she asks, after she declines dessert and I pay the check, because of course I pay the check, because every gesture tonight is a transaction and we both know it and the knowing doesn't make it less true.
The night air hits us on the sidewalk outside the hotel. Cold, thin, carrying the smell of wood smoke and the mineral sharpness of the river that runs through the valley below town. The sky is obscene with stars, visible only at this altitude, this far from any city, where the darkness is so complete that the Milky Way looks structural, like something holding the sky together. In this light, her skin is pale and the green dress is black and her eyes catch every available photon like they're hoarding them.
"My mother wrote about you," Greer says.
I stop walking. We're on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, under the copper awning, close enough that I can smell her, that rain-on-stone scent, clean and sharp and entirely wrong for this town, which smells like old money and careful lies. I should step back. I step closer.
"What did she write?"
"She wrote that you were the only Aldrich who had a conscience, and that it was going to get you killed."
The words hit me in a place I keep locked. I stand on the sidewalk in the cold mountain air and feel them land, one at a time:conscience,killed, and the space between those two words where my entire life exists, the narrow corridor between what I know and what I do about it, the gap between the man I am in this family and the man June Holden apparently saw when she looked at me across her kitchen table.
"Your mother had a talent for seeing people clearly," I say, and my voice sounds different than I intend it to. Stripped back. Less armored.
"She did." Greer steps closer. Close enough that I can see the freckle at the base of her throat, the pulse point beside it, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes. Close enough that if I reached out, and I want to reach out, with an urgency that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the particular hell of wanting to touch someone you have no right totouch, my hand would find the curve of her jaw before my brain could file an objection. "So do I."
She holds my gaze for three seconds, four, five, and I let her look, and I don't soften what she's seeing, and I don't perform. What she's looking at right now is the real thing, a man who wants her with a specificity that scares him, who works for people who would hurt her, who is standing close enough to kiss her on a public sidewalk in a town full of people who report to his uncle, and who is not stepping back.
I should step back. I know exactly what I should do, and I know exactly what I'm doing instead, and the distance between those two things is where I live now.
"Goodnight, Callum," she says.
She walks to her car. I watch her go, the line of her back, the way she moves through the cold air like she belongs in it, and I don't move, and the mountains stand around the town like sentries, and the stars blaze overhead in their vulgar profusion, and something behind my ribs has rearranged itself without my permission and refuses to go back.
I drive home. I pour bourbon. I sit in my expensive house on the ridge above the town my family built, and I don't call my uncle.
For the first time in my life, I don't call my uncle. Not because I've found my conscience; June was generous to think I had one. I don't call because Greer looked at me tonight and saw something underneath the surface, and instead of running she stepped closer.
And the possessive, consuming part of me, the Aldrich part, the part that sees what it wants and starts calculating how to keep it, has locked onto her with a focus that makes every other priority in my life feel like background noise.
Ward wants me to manage her. Ward has no idea what's actually happening, which is that I am looking at his carefullyconstructed plans and wondering what might happen if I fed it to itself.
And the woman standing in the wreckage beside me had her mother's eyes and her mother's jaw and no interest in being managed.
I pour bourbon and don't taste it. I pour another and taste her.
