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But he recognized the address.
He’d been there before.
Once.
* * *
“We’re here,”the Uber driver barked, glancing in the rear-view mirror.
Julian leaned forward to check outside the window, and despite knowing where he was, despite being prepared to see the mansion, his heart still seized in his chest. After tossing the driver a hundred-dollar bill, he stepped out of the vehicle, his shoes crunching against the white gravel. In front of him stretched a shrub-lined pathway to a stone staircase. Past the stone staircase was a mansion overlooking the city, its lights twinkling in the early dusk of lavender and ruby clouds.
The last time he’d been here, his agenda had been clear— help a pal. Fuck and be fucked. Get paid to do it, even if he couldn’t care less about the money.
It could have been anyone who caught his eye that night.
But it wasn’t.
It was Skylar.
Skylar with her white-blond hair. Golden eyes. Bristly nature. Incomparable wit.
Skylar with her tender heart. Her ruthless ambition.
She was soft and hard. Bold and vulnerable. Ice cold and fiery.
Uptight and sex personified.
She was so many things that he still hadn’t uncovered.
And she would always be his, even if, at the end of all this, she told him to go to hell and walked away from him forever.
He ran his finger along the edge of the invitation and sucked in a deep breath. She’d brought him here, and he still wasn’t certain why. To chew him out? To taunt him with what he could never have? Or to give him everything he never knew he needed?
He’d find out soon enough.
But while he was wearing the same tux he’d worn that night, he wasn’t wearing the gold mask. He hoped that Skylar recognized the significance of that.
Just as he’d written in his love letter, Julian wasn’t hiding who he was anymore.
Especially from her.
* * *
Uncharacteristically,Julian’s hand shook as he reached for the gold knocker clasped between the jaw of a gilded lion. He heard the echo carry down the velvet-lined hallways and curtain-entombed bedrooms inside the mansion. At first, there was no responding noise. Then came the clack of a quick stride across marble toward the door.
With a low moan, the door parted just enough for him to see the red-masked butler. He flashed the invitation for the man to see.
“Continue up to the ballroom,” was all he said
The crystal chandeliers that glistened and shined the night of the Masquerade Party hung ominously in the gloom above, dusty and unlit. Instead, another source of light illuminated his path up the stairs to a set of ornately carved double doors that had been open the night of the party.
Now they were closed.
He pushed them both open.
61
Agust of wind from the ballroom caught the doors Julian had just opened and sent them slamming into the wall. The thunderous boom filled the expansive empty room, and the floor shuddered beneath him.
