Page 97 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“I scheduled them onto my terms. My property, my timeline, my witnesses. A controlled visit I can end the second it stops being controlled, instead of an explosive scene that ends with them as victims and Harper as the story.” He pauses. “The tour today was the second visit. There won’t be a third.”

“And Evelyn?”

“Evelyn is the actual problem,” he says, and for the first time his voice loses some of its control. “She’s the one who told the Millers where Harper was. She’s the one who put them on the midsummer guest list behind my back. The Millers are a symptom. Evelyn’s the disease, and she still holds a board seat I can’t remove her from unilaterally, no matter how badly I want to.”

“So you’ve been doing what, exactly, for eleven days?”

“Working the board.” He says it flatly, like it costs him nothing, which I don’t believe for a second. “Quietly. One vote at a time. If word gets back to her that I’m building a majority to remove her before I actually have it, she finds a way to dig in or do worse. I need the votes locked before she knows the fight’s happening.”

“How close are you?”

“Close. Not done.”

I let that sit for a second, the anger in my chest cooling just enough to make room for something closer to disappointment, which honestly might be worse. I came in here ready for a fight, ready to throw a few more punches if that’s what it took, and instead I’m standing in a wine cellar watching my oldest friend admit, in pieces, that he genuinely thought silence counted as protection. It’s such a Killian mistake. Smart enough to outmaneuver an entire board and somehow still convinced that the people he loves need less honesty than the people he negotiates with.

“You know what the actual problem is, right? It’s not the plan. The plan’s fine, the plan’s smart, the plan’s exactly the kind of thing you’d do. The problem is you decided Harper didn’t get to know any of it. Not the strategy, not the timeline, not even the part where you tell her ‘hey, this is hard, I’m handling something, I need a minute.’ You just went quiet and let her sit there for eleven days thinking she did something wrong, or you stopped wanting her, or both.”

“I was protecting her.”

“From what? Information? She’s spent her entire life being managed by people who decided she couldn’t handle the truth, Kil. Her parents did that to her for twenty-four years. You did it to her for eleven days. I’m not saying it’s the same thing. I’m saying it rhymes, and she’s going to hear the rhyme whether you meant it or not.”

Killian’s quiet for a long moment, looking at nothing in particular, somewhere past my shoulder into the rows of barrels.

“I didn’t think,” he says, finally, slower than I’ve ever heard him say anything. “I was so focused on removing the threat that I didn’t consider the cost of the silence itself.”

“Yeah. Well. Now you’re considering it.”

“The vote’s in a few days.”

“Cool. Tell her that tonight. Not the whole strategic breakdown if you don’t want to, but tell her something. She doesn’t need the vote to be finished to stop wondering if you’re done with her.”

He looks at me, and for once there’s nothing controlled about it.

“And if she’s done with me by the time I get there?”

“Then you’ll deserve every second of finding that out the hard way. But she’s not. She’s been asking Asher and me if we know what’s wrong with you, not if we know how to get rid of you. There’s a difference, and you’d know that if you’d been in the room for any of it.”

Killian exhales, long, and for a second looks fifty-one years old in a way he usually doesn’t let anyone see.

“Four days,” he says again, like he’s negotiating with himself instead of me.

“Tonight,” I say. “The vote can wait four days. She’s already waited eleven.”

He doesn’t answer that, but he doesn’t argue either, which from Killian Thorne is basically a signed contract.

I open the chai door and the cellar staff are hovering exactly where they were told to wait, and somewhere above us, out in the vineyard, Evelyn’s still got the Millers on her arm like a prize she hasn’t realized she’s about to lose.

35

KILLIAN

Princess: We need to talk.

Fucking goddammit.

Four words and my whole chest goes tight around them. I’ve read worse texts from her, sharper ones, the kind that come with exclamation points and a clear demand attached, and somehow this one is worse precisely because it isn’t any of that. It’s flat. Controlled. The exact register I’ve been using on her for eleven days, handed back to me without comment, which tells me everything about how thoroughly I’ve taught her to talk to me this way.

I’d answered the group text within ten seconds, told everyone to meet in my suite once I finished up the work day, and then spent the rest of the afternoon unable to focus on a single line of the contract sitting open on my desk. The past week’s been hell without her. I’ve missed her in a way that doesn’t fit cleanly into a fifty-one-year-old man’s vocabulary, and I’ve had to keep doing what I’m doing anyway, because protecting her is worth every hour of distance it’s cost me, even if it’s proving to be one of the harder choices I’ve made in five decades.