I wasn’t going to fix him. Miles didn’t ask me to, and I wouldn’t have agreed if he had. I had enough broken things in my own life without volunteering for someone else’s.
But I could bring him orchids. A peace offering. An apology that didn’t require words, because Jace Hunter clearly wasn’t a man who trusted words.
I needed this job. And if earning a truce with Jace Hunter meant learning his language, I’d learn it—one flower at a time.
CHAPTER 6
Jace
The orchid was the first thing I saw when I walked into my office Tuesday morning. A Phalaenopsis, white with pale violet streaks, sitting on the table near the window where the light caught its petals.
Someone had placed it there deliberately, angled it so the blooms faced the door, so I’d see it the moment I walked in.
I had about four seconds to register that it was beautiful before my sinuses declared war.
The sneeze came out of nowhere, so hard my glasses nearly flew off my face and hit the desk. My eyes flooded. My chest seized. I grabbed the edge of my desk because my throat was already swelling and my lungs were tightening and through the watery blur I could see the orchid sitting there, innocent and lovely, its pollen already circulating through my ventilation system like a biological weapon.
"Who put that there?" I wiped my eyes with the back of my gloved hand and tried to breathe through a throat that was narrowing by the second.
Anna appeared in the doorway. She was smiling—wide, warm, and with a hint of something that said she was waiting to be thanked.
"I did." Her chin lifted. "I read that you collect orchids, so I thought…"
"You thought." My eyes were still streaming, which undercut whatever authority I was trying to project. "You thought you’d bring a plant into my sealed, climate-controlled office without asking."
"I was trying to be nice."
"Nice." The tightness in my chest wasn’t just the allergic reaction anymore. It was the memory of a space too small. Walls too close. Air too thick. That memory didn’t ask permission. It arrived when it wanted, and when it arrived, everything else went to hell.
"Get it out," I said.
"Mr. Hunter, I really was just…"
"I said get it out. Now. Take it and go."
"I didn’t know you were allergic. I’m sorry…"
"I collect them at home." I braced one hand against the desk. Drew a breath that didn't come easy. "In a separate room. With a filtered air system." Another breath. My voice was thinning. "Because I am severely allergic to the pollen." I pulled my glasses off to wipe my eyes and felt my hand shake before I pressed them back into place. "Which you would know if you'd bothered to ask before deciding to improve my environment without my consent."
"I-I’ll take it out, I’m deeply s-sorry." She pulled back with a small retreat of the shoulders. I should have stopped there.
"You have been here less than two weeks," I said, and my voice was cold in a way I recognized, "and in that time you have spilled coffee on me, assaulted me with your mouth, vomited on me, and now you’re trying to send me into anaphylaxis. Is there a plan here? A timeline? Should I prepare a will?"
She didn't say anything. Her expression shifted—confused to hurt in the space of a breath—and she grabbed the orchid withboth hands and turned for the door. Fast. But not fast enough. I caught her eyes before she got her face pointed away from me. She held the pot against her chest and walked out. The door closed behind her.
The office went quiet.
I stood there. My sinuses still burning, my chest still tight, and a feeling settling into my stomach that had nothing to do with allergies.
I knew what guilt felt like. I'd carried it most of my life in one form or another. And this one came from watching someone's face change because of words I'd designed to cut—because cutting was easier than explaining that I was afraid.
I hated making women cry. Not in some abstract, civilized way. With a raw, gut-deep revulsion rooted in a sound I couldn’t unhear. My mother, weeping through the walls of our London townhouse when I was ten. Catherine thought the walls were thick enough. They weren’t.
I lay in bed and listened, night after night, and understood, even then, that she was crying because of what happened to me. The woman who used to paint seascapes and laugh with her whole body now cried in the dark and took pills to sleep—because her son had been taken from a school parking lot and held in a basement for eleven days. And even though he came back, something didn’t come back with him.
I made Anna Wilson cry and the sound my mother made was playing on repeat in my skull.
I took the antihistamine from my desk drawer. Swallowed it dry. Sat down. Picked up the Rubik’s cube.Click, click, click.Twenty-two seconds. Seven off average. My hands were wrong.
