Page 25 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Evelyn receives this without blinking. She looks at him with the expression of a woman who has been receiving things from this man for decades and learned long ago not to let anything register on her face. Then she looks at me.

Her gaze moves over me one more time, unhurried, top to bottom. Something that might be a smile if it wanted to be curves at the corner of her mouth.

Then she loops her arm through Killian’s.

“We have the board pre-brief to get through before lunch,” she says smoothly, already turning them in the other direction. “Don’t let us keep you.”

And just like that, she walks him away.

Killian glances back over his shoulder once. Our eyes meet for exactly one second before the corridor takes them around the corner.

I stand there.

Mallory exhales beside me, a long breath through her nose.

“Whelp,” she says. “You’ve officially met Evelyn Thorne and survived.” She tilts her head and looks at me sideways. “How do you feel?”

I think about what I actually feel, which is small in a way that I didn’t walk into this corridor feeling, and young in a way I don’t usually register, and entirely too aware of the fact that a woman like Evelyn Thorne makes complete and obvious sense standing next to Killian Thorne. Same world. Same language. Same particular gravity. The kind of woman who was built for that life and shows it in every deliberate, elegant inch.

And then there’s me, in my wrap dress and my red bottoms and my AirDropped contact details, standing in a corridor in the south of France trying to remember what I was doing before I was reminded of exactly where I fit in the picture.

I smile at Mallory.

“I think,” I say, “I need a drink.”

Mallory raises her binder. “The tasting room opens at eleven. I will personally escort you.”

We keep walking.

I keep my shoulders back and my pace even and I do not look toward the corridor where Killian and Evelyn disappeared, because looking would mean I care about what I just saw, and I don’t care about what I just saw, and I’m going to keep telling myself that until it starts being true.

Four days until the event.

I have work to do.

10

HARPER

Vine is gorgeous without trying too hard. Basically, it’s Asher. It lets the food and the wine carry the room instead of suffocating both under white tablecloths and ambient string music. The lighting is warm and low, the ceiling beams are original stone, and the menu is the kind of thing where you read every option twice because you genuinely can’t decide which one you want most. Asher’s fingerprints are on every inch of it and I’ve been here four days and I already understand why people book months out for a table.

Tonight we have one without a reservation because Sophia Thorne has never once needed a reservation anywhere her father owns and she deploys this privilege with the cheerful lack of guilt of someone who earned it by proximity.

We’ve been here for two hours and I feel more like myself than I have since New York.

That’s the thing about Sophia. She has this specific gift for creating a pocket of warmth around the people she loves where the rest of the world just stops mattering for a while. Lorenzo is across the table from me nursing a glass of something deep and red and watching Sophia the way he always watches her, like she’s the most interesting thing in any room, which is both extremely sweet and occasionally a little intense. Raphael is beside him, loose and easy, laughing at something Lorenzo said, and I’ve decided somewhere over the last ten days that Raphael is genuinely one of the better people I’ve encountered in recent memory. No agenda. No performance. Just a warm, funny man who makes excellent conversation and has the good sense not to make anything weird.

Sophia raises her glass across the table at me.

“To Harper Brooks,” she announces, loud enough that a couple at the next table looks over. She doesn’t lower her voice. “Who walked into a conference room with a tablet and saved my entire presentation and then somehow also got herself hired in the same afternoon. Iconic behavior. Truly.”

I cover my face with one hand. “Sophia.”

“Don’t Sophia me. This is a compliment, receive it.” She tips her glass at me. “To you. And to Rosé’s first flagship location, which is happening because of both of us but mostly me.”

“Mostly you,” I confirm.

“Toast,” Lorenzo says, already raising his glass.