Chapter Seventeen

The Airport

I booked the flight two days later. Paris Fashion Week — I had a legitimate reason, a real one, four scheduled meetings and a runway appearance I'd been confirmed for three months ago.

I packed everything this time. The studio would handle the rest remotely.

Lucas didn't stop me. He said nothing about the suitcase in the hall, nothing about the car I'd booked, nothing when I came to say — whatever I was going to say.

He was in the study. He looked up when I knocked.

"I'm going to Paris." Unnecessary. He knew. "For Fashion Week."

"I know." He looked at me steadily. "Have a good trip."

I stood in the doorway for a moment. Looked at him. Looked at all of him — the composed surface, the careful hands, the way he'd rearranged himself into something untouchable again.

Then I left.

* * *

I was at the gate when I heard it.

Not a sound — a shift in the ambient noise of the terminal. Heads turning. Phones going up. The particular stir that happens when someone unexpected walks into a space.

I turned.

Lucas Lancaster was walking through the terminal.

No luggage. Still in his suit. The same suit he'd been wearing when I'd knocked on his study door an hour ago. He was moving with the singular focus of a man who had decided to do something that terrified him.

He stopped in front of me.

Around us, the gate area was very still.

"I don't do feelings," he said. His voice was low, controlled — but barely. "I made that rule before I understood that some rules exist to protect you from things you haven't faced yet." He looked at me. "My father loved with everything he had and destroyed my mother. I watched it happen. I decided I would never be that — I would never lose myself to something I couldn't control."

"Lucas—"

"I'm not finished."

I closed my mouth.

"I have been methodical my entire life," he said. "I have controlled everything I could control. I signed a contract that said I wouldn't feel anything — and for eight months I have been failing that contract in every possible way." His jaw tightened. "When you packed your bag, I couldn't breathe. I sat in my study for two days and told myself it was rational. That you had every right. That I'd known from the beginning this was temporary."

The gate agent called final boarding.

Neither of us moved.

"I don't know how to love someone the right way," he said. "I have never tried. I don't have a model for it that doesn't end in damage." Something cracked in the composure — just the edge of it. "But I know that I have been watching you for eight months and finding excuses to stay in whatever room you're in. I know that I memorized how you take your tea without deciding to. I know that the night you had a fever, I canceled a thirty million dollar meeting because the thought of being somewhere you weren't seemed"—he paused—"impossible."

The gate agent called final boarding again.

I was crying. I didn't remember deciding to.

"Say something," he said quietly.

I looked at him. At the man who'd structured his entire life around not needing anyone, standing in the middle of a public terminal, dismantling that structure word by word.

I turned. Picked up my carry-on.

Walked down the jetway.

He didn't call after me.

He understood — I thought he understood — that some things need to be felt in private before they can be answered out loud.

But at the end of the jetway, before I turned the corner, I looked back through the window.

He was still standing there.

Watching.

Waiting, for the first time in his life, for something he couldn't control.

Chapter Eighteen

Choose You

Paris is easy to get lost in. That's partly why I'd wanted to come.

I moved through the first two days on professional autopilot — meetings, fittings, the particular focused energy of an industry week that demanded presence. I was present. I was professional.

I was also carrying an airport around inside my chest.

The third day, my studio manager Ji-woo called with a question about our three new interns — the ones who'd started a month ago through a design scholarship program.

"The Bennett Initiative placement?" I said.

"Yes. Do you want to sign off on their project assignments, or should I—"

I stopped walking. "What's the Bennett Initiative?"

A pause. "The scholarship program. The one funding the interns. It's been running for — I thought you knew? Six months now."

Six months.

I was in the middle of a Paris side street when I called Lily.

"The Bennett Initiative," I said when she answered. "Who set it up?"

A long pause. "Sophia—"

"Lily."

"It's anonymously funded through a trust. I didn't ask questions because the money was legitimate and the candidates were excellent."

"Find out."

She called back in twenty minutes.

I already knew before she said it. Some part of me had known the moment Ji-woo said six months.

Six months ago, I was still sleeping under the same roof as a man who'd told me on our first meeting that he didn't do feelings.

I called Daniel, Lucas's driver.

"The night I had a fever," I said. "The meeting he canceled. What was it?"

A pause. "Miss Sophia, I'm not sure I should—"

"Please."

A longer pause. "The Singapore acquisition. Thirty million dollar window. It closed without Lancaster Group."

Thirty million dollars.

He'd sat in a chair and watched me sleep through a fever and called it unimportant.

I thought about every cold evening he'd been waiting when I came home late. Every time he'd deflected a journalist's pointed question with phrasing that placed me not beside him but with him, differently. The acquisition offer — the one that was so fair it was almost a gift. His hand in mine in the lobby, three seconds too long.

He'd been telling me.

For months, in every language except the one that terrified him, he'd been telling me.

I stood in Paris and looked at the sky and thought about a man standing in a terminal watching a jetway long after the plane had pushed back.

I opened my laptop and booked the first available flight home.

Then I went back to my hotel and packed faster than I'd packed in my life.

This time I was the one running toward something.

Chapter Nineteen

No More Contracts

The Lancaster Fashion relaunch press conference was at noon.

I landed at ten forty-five.

Clara had told me — not because I'd asked, but because she sent a message that just said noon, Lancaster Tower, conference floor — and I'd understood.

I went straight from the airport. Still in my Paris clothes. My hair in the particular condition of someone who'd slept on a plane and stopped caring.

The lobby of Lancaster Tower recognized me. Heads turned. People moved aside. Someone from PR appeared, looked at my carry-on, and had the excellent judgment to say nothing.

The elevator. The conference floor.

I could hear the press event through the doors — the professional murmur, the camera shutters, a microphone being adjusted.

I pushed the door open.

Lucas was at the podium. Behind him: three screens displaying the Lancaster Fashion relaunch — the new collection, the creative direction, the vision.

My designs were on those screens.

He'd used my work. The midnight blue silk. The architectural white. Six pieces I'd left on the dining table over six months, sketched and abandoned and — he'd kept them. Developed them. Built a relaunch around them.

I stood at the back of the room.

He was mid-sentence when he saw me.

He stopped.

Two hundred journalists, photographers, and industry figures followed his gaze to the back of the room.

I must have looked exactly like what I was — a woman who'd just crossed an ocean.

He reached into his jacket pocket.

He produced a folded document.

I recognized it at thirty feet.

The contract.

He held it for a moment. Then, in front of every camera in the room, he tore it in half.

The room went very quiet.

"The only arrangement I intend to honor from this point forward," he said, into the microphone, into the silence, "is a permanent one."

He stepped away from the podium.

Walked through the room toward me. Every camera tracked him.

He stopped when he reached me. So close I could see the slight fatigue around his eyes — he hadn't slept. I could tell.

He put his hands on either side of my face. Both of them. Like I was something he'd been afraid to touch for a long time.

He pressed his forehead to mine.

No kiss. Not yet. Just — that. Forehead to forehead. His eyes closed.

Like he was making sure I was real.

Around us, the cameras went absolutely wild.

I reached up and held his wrists.

"I read the contract when it was already too late," I said quietly. Against his forehead. For him only.

"So did I," he said.