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ROWE
I’d worried that having Bash’s friends come to the Hamptons would pop the iridescent bubble we’d been floating in, but it hadn’t. Not at all. The brotherhood were nothing but kind, and Silas had even pulled me aside to apologize for being slow to trust me.
“It wasn’t personal. I’d side-eye anybody these guys got serious about,” he’d admitted, gesturing to the men laughing in the living area. “Wouldn’t matter if you came with a PhD and a recommendation from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Besides,” he added with a grin, “Bash always said he’d end up married to Sterling Chase. Now maybe he will.”
I laughed at the time—a kind of frantic laugh, though Silas didn’t know me well enough to recognize it. “Serious about”? “Married to”? I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t realize Bash had feelings for me, not after he’d done something as heart-shatteringly, mind-bendingly wonderful as telling me the true story of the founding of Sterling Chase, but I still couldn’t comprehend what anything beyond this week with him would look like. Me, showing up at his penthouse apartment with my delivery sombrero after a shift? Him, coming over to chill on Joey’s futon after a long day of buying and selling small countries? What about my parents? What about the Tech Barn?
So I simply didn’t think about it. I focused on preparing for Monday, on the future of Daisy Chain, on making sure the bubble didn’t pop.
But when we arrived back in the city on Saturday afternoon and the elevator doors opened into the palatial entrance hall of Bash’s Park Avenue apartment, I felt the bubble pop anyway, trampled beneath the feet of commitment and lost in the shuffle of reality.
A reality that included ten-foot ceilings and a private elevator.
“Hey!” Kenji said, materializing out of nowhere. “You guys made good time.”
“This… what… is…?” I didn’t even know where to begin in my quest for answers about Bash’s living space. If his Hamptons house had screamed wealth to me, this pretty much deafened me. The furnishings alone were probably worth millions, and that was before I even began asking about the art on the walls.
“Rowe, you’re set up in the guest room. Third door down the far corridor on the left,” Kenji said, waving in the general direction of an honest-to-god gilt-framed mirror hung over an antique mahogany console table in a hallway carpeted by a luxurious Persian runner.
“Set up?” I repeated, still gawking like a tourist at Versailles. “I have my suitcase here.”
“Keep moving,” Kenji said, barely holding back a knowing smirk. “You can gawk after we see how well the tuxedo fits.”
“Joey sent over his tux?” I asked a split second before I entered the guest room and saw an Alexander McQueen garment bag hanging from a small rolling clothes rack.
“Not exactly,” Kenji called down the hallway after me. The laugh in his voice wasn’t funny.
“Fuck,” I whispered, reaching into the garment bag like it held a venomous snake but instead pulling out the most gorgeous tuxedo I’d ever seen. “We aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
“Please don’t tell me this is the thing that finally makes it all too weird for you.” Bash walked into the room behind me and gave me an uncertain smile. “It’s off-the-rack.”
“An off-the-rackAlexander McQueen,” I squeaked, running my hand over the ultra-smooth wool. “This had to cost… five thousand dollars?” That was enough to buy a used car. To pay my parents’ mortgage for months. “I… I…”
Bash’s smile fell. “You don’t have to wear it,” he said quickly. “I’ll be proud to have you on my arm wearing the bunny tux. Or those pajamas with the goldfish that you wore at the beach. I just know you like beautiful things, and I thought… But it doesn’t matter. My date’s going to be the most gorgeous, quirky man at the banquet. And I care about the man inside the tux, not whose name is on the jacket.”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a second.Rowe Prince, what the fuck are you doing?Daisy’s voice was clear in my head. Hadn’t I been the person, two weeks ago, telling Miranda Baxter-Hicks that she needed to wear dressessheliked and not to worry about whether they were good enough for anyone else?
And here I had the man of my dreams, a guy whose only goal was to make me happy, handing me a tuxedo beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. And instead of thanking him for being so thoughtful, instead ofrejoicingthat I got to wear something I loved on the arm of the man I’d fallen head over heels for… I was worrying thatIwasn’t good enough for the fucking tuxedo.
I touched the tattoo on my hip. For years, I’d worked hard, focused exclusively on Daisy Chain, and told myself I was doing it for my sister. But that tiny, lightless existence was never what Daisy would have wanted for herself. It wasn’t what she’d want for me.
It was about time I did thebrave, exciting thing.
I turned to Bash and kissed him fiercely, with all the love in my bruised and hopeful heart. “Thank you. For the tuxedo. For putting up with my nerves. For being so much more than I ever expected.” I kissed him again. “I can’t wait to wear it, Sebastian. I can’t wait to be on your arm.”
That might have been overstating the case somewhat—I was still a jangly mass of nerves about the party—but Bash was too kind to call me on it. Or maybe I’d simply exploded his brain with the force of my kisses. “But I’m putting Joey’s magic scarves in the breast pocket,” I added breathlessly.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, eyes glassy. “Yeah.”
Kenji barked from somewhere out in the hall. “Sebastian Dayne. Focus.”
Bash almost ran into the doorframe on his way out of the room, and it was enough to help me let go of some of my nerves. If the world’s hottest billionaire was a regular guy who could be knocked senseless by a hot kiss, then maybe we weren’t so different after all.
Maybe, just maybe, we could find a way to work things out.
I ran my hand over the buttery wool and satin of the jacket once again, then closed my eyes and prayed to my imaginary fairy godmother.
Let tonight go smoothly. No pumpkins.
