Page 65 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Killian makes a sound that is not a laugh and is also not not a laugh. Harper points at him. “You too.”

“I’m drinking coffee,” Killian says.

“You’re doing it while drinking coffee.”

Asher says nothing, which is its own verdict. Harper looks at him. He refills her coffee with perfect innocence. She accepts it with profound suspicion and the specific expression of a woman who is surrounded by men who are doing something and can’t prove it yet.

I look back at my phone before she turns those eyes on me again.

The Milan calendar block is open on my screen. The New York leg underneath it, separate calendar, visible only to me and Kyle, who I trust completely and who has been with me long enough to understand that some things don’t need to be in the shared system.

I close the New York calendar.

“I’m going to Milan,” I say, still looking at my phone. Casual. Informational. The kind of thing you mention the way you mention a weather forecast.

The table goes slightly quiet.

Not alarmed quiet. Just attentive.

“For how long?” Harper asks.

“A week. Maybe ten days. I’ve got investor meetings, a portfolio review, a property thing in the seventh arrondissement that I’ve been pushing for two weeks.” I set my phone down and pick up my coffee. “Kyle’s been sending me increasingly concerned emails. I should probably look like I run a business occasionally.”

Harper looks at me for a moment. Not the suspicious look from before, something quieter. Measuring.

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

She nods slowly. Looks at her coffee. Something moves through her face that I file away carefully, the specific expression of a woman who is deciding whether she’s going to say the thing she’s thinking or let it sit.

She lets it sit. But she looked.

That’s new. Two weeks ago she would have had her face completely under control. The fact that I caught it means she’s stopped performing the control as much and I feel that in the back of my chest in a way that has nothing to do with Milan.

“You should go,” Killian says, and I know the register he’s using, the one that means something other than what the words say, and Harper doesn’t have twenty years of this friendship to read it the way I do. To her it’s encouragement. To me it’s confirmation.

“I’ll be back before the midsummer event,” I tell Harper specifically.

She looks up. The quiet thing in her expression settles into something warmer. “You’d better be. I need someone who actually appreciates good lighting choices at the boutique launch.”

“Maddox doesn’t know anything about lighting,” Asher says.

“I know that warm bulbs are better than cool ones and I learned that from you,” I tell Harper.

“Sophia’s boutique is going to be beautiful because of me,” she says, “and I’m going to need at least one person there who acknowledges that out loud.”

“Consider it done.”

Killian looks at his phone. “I have a board call in twenty minutes.” He stands, which is a signal to the table that breakfast is winding down. Asher starts clearing plates with the automatic efficiency of a man who cannot leave a table without straightening it first. Harper stands and stretches and says something to Asher about the Thursday walkthrough and he answers and they have a whole small logistical conversation that I watch from my chair without participating because I’m looking at her and thinking: a week. I’m leaving for a week.

The week is necessary. The work is real. New York is for her even if she doesn’t know it.

She finds me in the corridor while I’m heading back to my suite to start packing. I hear her behind me first, the particular sound of her footsteps, and then her hand is on my arm and I stop and turn.

She’s looking up at me with that measuring expression from breakfast, and then she puts both hands on my chest and rises onto her toes and kisses me. Not brief. Not casual. The kind of kiss that has weight in it, that’s saying something in a language neither of us is putting into words yet.

I put my hand at the back of her head and kiss her back and take my time about it because I have a week of not doing this to account for in advance.