Page 86 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“You invited Harper’s parents.”

“I did.” She doesn’t even attempt to look apologetic. “Sophia gets her parents at her launch. Why shouldn’t her little friend?”

“You called them. Three times. You left a personal invite code on a voicemail thanking them for being grateful, and you let Rebecca Miller think she’s about to pitch you and me on an investment.”

Something flickers behind her eyes, gone fast, replaced by the composure she’s spent a lifetime perfecting. “You’ve been digging through my voicemail.”

“You should have cleared it with me.”

“Why? You used to care about my opinion.”

“You used to be worth the sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice.” She laughs, short and sharp, the sound she’s perfected for moments she wants to feel bigger than she is. “Listening to me was a sacrifice?”

“Having to spend any amount of time on you is a sacrifice, Evelyn. One you’ve abused and manipulated for as long as I’ve known you.”

She tilts her head, considering me with an amusement that’s never once carried real warmth. “You didn’t seem to think it was a sacrifice for the first ten years, but I guess Harper must have had some otherworldly pu⁠—”

I’m across the room before she finishes the word, close enough that she has to tip her chin up to keep looking at me, jaw tight, voice low and even because if I let it climb any higher I won’t be able to bring it back down.

“I dare you to finish that sentence.”

She doesn’t.

She holds my eyes for a long moment and then leans back, the smallest smile pulling at her mouth, hands lifting in mock surrender. “Fine. Whatever, Killian. Have your little summer fling.”

“This isn’t⁠—”

“We both know it won’t last past the season.” She touches a hand to her chest, right over the heart, and the gesture would read as sincere on anyone who hadn’t spent twenty-six years learning exactly how she operates. “And her reconnecting with her loving parents,” the words landing with exaggerated tenderness, “would surely give her the push she needs to become something more than that one woman from that one summer who slept with her boss and his friends.”

I don’t say anything because there isn’t anything to say that doesn’t make it worse, and because she’s right about the part that matters most right now.

I can’t pull the reservation without raising questions I’m not ready to answer, not until midsummer’s behind us and I have something solid enough to take to the full board, and she knows it. It’s written all over her face like she’s already won something, like she’s banked this for later the same way she banked Rebecca Miller’s voicemail.

I leave without another word, because there isn’t a version of staying in that room that ends well for either of us.

I make it back to my own office before I let myself feel any of it properly, closing the door behind me and standing there for a moment with my back against it, running the math on everything I still can’t say out loud yet. Only a few more days until I have the votes locked. Four days of Evelyn thinking she’s still holding every card, and Harper walking into Midsummer with no idea what’s waiting for her on that terrace, and me standing here unable to warn her without unraveling a plan that’s taken six weeks to build.

I think about telling her anyway. I run the scenario more than once, walking into the tasting room right now, pulling her aside, laying out everything I know in plain language and letting her decide for herself how to handle her own parents at her own event. It would be the honest thing. It might even be the right thing. But the moment I tell her, Evelyn knows I know, and the moment Evelyn knows, four weeks of careful, patient vote-counting collapses into a fight I’m not ready to win yet, fought too early, on her terms instead of mine, with Harper standing in the middle of it without the protection a few more days would buy her.

I’ve made worse trades than silence before. I’ve never made one that cost this much to watch play out.

30

HARPER

The midsummer event is only a few days away, and to say that I’m nervous is an understatement.

So much so that a fresh pan bagnat was waiting at my desk this afternoon in the business tower, which made me smile at how Asher always seems to know when to intervene on my stomach’s behalf.

I’ve showered, eaten, and I’m camped out on the sectional in Killian’s condo with my tablet, going through the final vendor confirmations one more time even though I’ve already gone through them twice. I’m wearing one of his white button-downs and nothing else, which is the standard uniform once we’re past business hours, an arrangement the three of them have made very clear they prefer and one I’ve stopped pretending I don’t enjoy just as much as they do. What woman doesn’t want to peel off her bra the second the workday’s over.

The florist confirmation makes me smile before I even get to the line items. Garden roses in a soft champagne blush, sweet pea in pale lavender as a quiet nod to Killian’s nickname for me that nobody else on the vendor side will ever know is intentional, and trailing eucalyptus woven through everything to keep the whole arrangement from feeling too precious. The archways are being delivered the morning of, two of them, reclaimed wood wrapped in greenery and string lights, one for the entrance to Sophia’s boutique and one framing the path down to the great hall. I’ve looked at the rendering Odette sent over so many times I could probably build the things myself at this point.

The setup list is the longer document, the one that actually keeps me up at night, because midsummer isn’t run the way most events are run here. Mallory explained it to me my first week and I didn’t fully understand what she meant until I watched it happen at the opening event in miniature. Every other event on this estate gets staffed top-down, normal hierarchy, field crews and junior staff handling the physical labor while leadership oversees from a clipboard.

Midsummer doesn’t work like that.