Page 48 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“Why didn’t you check it?”

“Because I don’t want to see any eggplants that could land me in therapy. You’re welcome.”

I reach for my phone. Notifications from Maddox that I clock and immediately set aside because I need to be emotionally prepared before I open those. One from Asher. One from Killian that is just my name and a period, which in Killian’s communication style constitutes an entire paragraph. I’ll deal with all of those later when I have coffee in my system and a functioning nervous system to go with it.

And then, below those, from an unknown number with a New York area code.

Four missed calls.

I stare at them.

The warmth drains out of me in one clean pull.

Below the calls, a text.

Unknown: Sweet pea, we raised you better than this. We know where you are. Call us back.

I go very still.

The sunshine is still coming through the windows. Sophia is still warm beside me. The vineyard rows are still out there in the morning light, silver-green and quiet. None of it feels the same as it did thirty seconds ago.

I know that number. I deleted it eight months ago with the deliberate intent of someone closing a door for good. But I know that area code. I know sweet pea in my mother’s handwriting. I know the exact flavor of that sentence, the passive menace dressed up as concern, the implication folded into it that I have done something wrong simply by existing somewhere they didn’t put me.

They know where I am.

“Harper.” Sophia’s hand finds my arm. Her voice has changed. “What is it?”

I set the phone face down on the nightstand.

“Nothing,” I say. Steady. “I’m fine.”

I’m not fine. But I’ve been not fine before with a lot less underneath me than I have right now. I got through all of it.

I’ll get through this too.

I just need a minute.

And coffee.

Definitely the coffee first.

17

KILLIAN

It’s late afternoon and I’ve had to stop myself from blowing up her damn phone.

This is, for me, genuinely difficult.

I’ve been at my desk since seven this morning and I’ve returned fourteen emails, approved two vendor contracts, sat through a forty-minute call with legal about the east wing proposal that Evelyn has been sitting on for reasons that have everything to do with leverage and nothing to do with the actual building, and I have not once picked up my phone to text Harper Brooks, which is a more active exercise in self-control than any of the other things I’ve done today combined.

I want her.

That’s not a new development but it’s sharper this morning than it’s been since the night she climbed out of my pool in that dress and my brain went offline for two full seconds. Last night didn’t dull it. Last night made it significantly worse in the way that having something you’ve wanted for a long time tends to make the wanting of it worse, not better, because now I know exactly what I’m not contacting her about.

If I were twenty years younger I’d have gone to her suite at six in the morning, put her over my shoulder, and brought her back to my bed until she understood the situation fully. Which is an unhinged thing to do and I was twenty years younger once and I understand the instinct and I’m also fifty-one years old and I know better. She works for me, technically. She is Sophia’s best friend. She slipped out before sunrise because she needed space to breathe and the appropriate response to that is to give her space to breathe and not to go find her.

I am a patient man.