Page 31 of Suite 7

Her eyes light up like Christmas morning. “WHAT? Who? When? Tell me everything!”

Relief floods through me even as something sour settles in my stomach.

“It’s new. Really new. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”

“But you’ll tell me when you are?” She’s practically vibrating with excitement.

“Of course.”

Sloane grabs my hands across the table. “I’m so happy for you. You deserve someone amazing after Damon. That asshole didn’t deserve you.”

Damon. Who told me my wants in the bedroom were unattainable with someone like me. That my character made it impossible.

Sloane was there for all of it. Held me while I cried. Drove to my place at two AM with ice cream and wine. Convinced me he was wrong. But she only knew the version I gave her — that he thought I was too much of a hassle. That we wanted different things.

She never knew what things.

And now I’m keeping the biggest secret of my life from the person who knows everything about me.

“Tell me when you’re ready,” Sloane says, squeezing my hands. “No pressure. I’ll be over here vibrating with excitement.”

“I know you will.”

She lets go and her eyes shift past me, and her expression brightens.

“Hey, you.”

I don’t have to turn around to know who she’s talking to.

I look up and find Kane beside our table in workout clothes: black athletic shorts, fitted compression shirt. Hair damp, curling slightly at the ends. He’s carrying a takeout bag and wearing the expression he uses when he’s not wearing any expression at all.

He’s closed in a way I’d stopped expecting from him, after last night. After the amber light and the silk and more than enough and the way his voice dropped all the architecture and —

I pull my eyes back to my menu.

“Grabbing food,” he says to Sloane. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

“You’re not interrupting, sit down.”

“I shouldn’t —“

“Kane.” Sloane’s voice carries the authority of a lifetime of getting her brother to do things he’d decided not to do. “Sit.”

He sits. Across from me, beside Sloane. Sets the takeout bag on the edge of the table. His eyes move to mine for one second — calibrating, reading, doing the thing he always does — and then away.

I don’t like it. I don’t like that I don’t like it. I spent the entire morning trying to wash him off me, and the moment he sits down across our usual brunch table being unreadable I want to reach across and shake him.

He did something to me last night. He took years of carefully maintained distance and dissolved it in about four hours, and now he’s sitting here like I’m not supposed to notice.

I notice.

Sloane tops up her mimosa. “You just missed Vera’s news actually.”

“What news.”

Not a question. Just the shape of one.

“Nothing,” I say.