Page 7 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

My phone buzzes again. Rachel, a second message, and she’s clearly made herself very comfortable in the back of the jet.

I smile and pick up the phone to respond.

The lounge entrance opens.

I glance up expecting Sophia’s hat situation.

I get Sophia’s hat situation. And someone I’ve never seen before.

They come through the door arm in arm, Sophia mid-sentence about something with the energy of a woman who started the conversation in the parking lot and has no intention of stopping, hat slightly askew, free hand gesturing. The woman beside her is keeping pace and laughing at whatever Sophia’s saying, head tilted, and the laugh is genuine, the kind that makes the whole shape of her change.

Dark hair. A sundress in some warm color that moves when she does. One of those faces that looks like it’s on the verge of saying something and deciding whether it’s worth the effort. She’s looking around the lounge now with quiet, careful attention, cataloguing the space the way people do when they’re competent enough to want to know what they’ve walked into before they commit to anything.

She’s gotten my attention just by walking through a door.

I realize I’m still holding my phone without looking at it. Rachel’s message is still on the screen. I have absolutely no memory of what I was about to type.

Sophia spots me across the lounge and her face does the thing it does, bright and immediate, the specific expression she saves for people she’s actually glad to see. She’s already pulling her companion toward me and talking louder now that she has a target.

I stand up.

But my eyes go back to the woman with the dark hair, who glances over and meets mine for half a second before she looks away, like she caught herself doing something she hadn’t meant to.

Just half a second.

I put my phone in my pocket without responding to Rachel.

3

HARPER

When Sophia said we were going to France I pictured a red-eye out of Tampa International. Maybe business class if she was feeling generous. A glass of decent wine, a neck pillow, six hours of trying to sleep in a seat that reclines exactly four degrees.

I did not picture this.

The private aviation terminal sits at the edge of the airfield like it belongs to a different category of travel entirely, which it does, because it’s not an airport so much as a very expensive living room that happens to be adjacent to a runway. Marble floors. Climate-controlled air that smells like nothing, which is its own kind of luxury. Floor-to-ceiling glass looking out at a tarmac where actual private jets are sitting like it’s completely normal.

I’ve worn secondhand Prada. I’ve rented Valentino through a luxury borrowing app for galas I was coordinating so I’d look like I belonged in the room. I know what it looks like to be adjacent to serious money. I’ve spent most of my professional life being very competent inside spaces I couldn’t personally afford.

But a private jet is a different thing. A private jet is the kind of thing that makes you recalibrate the entire conversation you thought you were having about what wealthy means.

I stand on the curb outside and stare at it through the glass and think about how I almost didn’t come.

Behind me, Lorenzo and Raphael are pulling luggage from the back of the car with the practiced efficiency of men who’ve done this before. Lorenzo handles everything with the focused calm of someone who is always three steps ahead of whatever’s happening around him, which tracks for a man who’s apparently been running customer operations at a billionaire’s vineyard for five years. Sophia gravitates toward competence in people the same way she gravitates toward good shoes, instinctively and without apology.

Raphael hands me my carry-on with an easy smile and I take it and smile back because he’s genuinely hard not to like. He’s handsome in a warm, approachable way, dark eyes and a comfortable confidence that doesn’t have anything to prove. Sophia has been orchestrating what she clearly believes are organic opportunities for the two of us since Lorenzo first introduced them at dinner three months ago, and to his credit, Raphael has not played into it in any way that makes things awkward. He’s been friendly. Normal. Easy to be around without making me feel like I’m being recruited.

There’s just no spark. You can’t manufacture a spark. I’ve tried and it never ends well and I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for a situationship that requires maintenance right now.

If something happens organically over the summer, fine. But I’m not chasing it.

Sophia appears at my elbow and hooks her arm through mine with the satisfied energy of a woman whose plan is proceeding exactly on schedule. “Ready?”

“Definitely not.”

She beams and walks us through the entrance.

The woman at the front desk directs us to the lounge to wait while the plane finishes being prepared, and Sophia pulls me along with her, still talking, the same unbroken stream of enthusiasm she’s been running since we left the apartment. She’s telling me something about the vineyard pool and how I have to try the rosé they make specifically for summer events and how she’s already mentally decorated my suite, and I’m laughing because she’s ridiculous and also because the nervous energy has to go somewhere.