Page 27 of Hostile

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You look—” He cut himself off. Something in his expression shifted. “You know why you’re here.”

“I’m here because I received an invitation.”

“Megan.”

“And because I have a twelve percent stake in the Charleston development entity, which I believe is one of the projects highlighted tonight,” I took a small sip of my water. Steady. Composed. Ten years of practice keeping my face exactly as I put it. “I like to stay current with my investments.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Not flustered—I’d have given almost anything for flustered. What he looked like was far more inconvenient. He looked like a man who had been expecting this and had spent the weekend deciding how he felt about it. Like a man who had turned it over in his mind and reached a conclusion I wasn’t prepared for.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“I’m sure your guests need your attention.” I glanced past his shoulder at the room. “It would be rude to ignore them.”

“I’ll be rude.” No hesitation. “I’ve been rude before.”

Don’t smile. “I’m here all evening, Wyatt. We’ll have plenty of time to discuss the investment.”

He studied me for one more moment, those blue eyes doing what they’d always done—seeing past the surface of whatever expression I wore, reaching for what lay beneath.

Stop that, I thought. You don’t get to do that anymore.

“You haven’t changed,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a complaint.

“I’ve changed entirely.”

“Not where it counts.” He held my gaze a beat longer than was comfortable, then—and this was the thing that stayed with me for the rest of the evening—he smiled. Small, quiet, nothing like the practiced social smile.

The real one. The one I remembered.

“Enjoy the party, Megan.”

He turned and walked back toward the room, unhurried, as if the last sixty seconds hadn’t happened at all. As if he hadn’t just looked at me like no time had passed, as if ten years and a war between us were simply something that had happened, and here we both were, still standing.

I turned back toward the window and the city beyond it and took a slow breath.

That, I thought, was not how that was supposed to go.

He wasn’t supposed to be calm. He wasn’t supposed to smile like that. He was supposed to be rattled—off-balance, defensive, running the numbers on how bad this was for him. I’d planned for defensive. I’d planned for hostile. I’d even planned for cold.

I had not planned for the quiet. I had not planned for him to look at me as if I were still the most interesting thing in the room.

My pulse was doing something completely unacceptable.

Get it together, Hale.

I smoothed my dress, lifted my chin, and turned back toward the party. All those unwritten chapters of his life were left to be dismantled. I just needed to remember that the man across the room was the reason I’d spent ten years building the weapon I held.

The man across the room, the inconvenient part of my brain replied, also just smiled at you as if he’s been waiting.

I took another sip of water and went to find the board member who’d recognized me.

Work to do.

CHAPTER TWELVE

MEGAN: THE PAST

The weekend at the beach house was perfect.