Page 83 of Hostile

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

He reached up with his free hand and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear the way he had in the rain outside my dorm eleven years ago, his fingers barely grazing my jaw, a touch so light it was almost imperceptible.

I didn’t stop breathing this time. I leaned into it.

He kissed me. Not the urgent kind, not the kind to make up for lost time. The quiet, unhurried kind—the same as the first time, in the October rain, like a man who had decided this was where he wanted to be and wasn’t going anywhere.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.

“I let you hate me,” he said quietly. “I thought it was the only thing I could give you that didn’t cost you anything. I was wrong about that.”

“Yes,” I said. “You were.”

His quiet laugh against my hair. The real one. The one that had always settled somewhere in my chest and apparently still did.

“What happens now?” he asked.

I thought about twenty-two percent, a board presentation, a disclosure response, and a shadow empire about to be formally dismantled, along with all the architecture of the next several weeks that would require both of us to work at full capacity toward the same goal.

I thought about what happens after.

“Now,” I said, “we finish what we started.”

“The board?”

“Among other things.”

He pulled back far enough to look at me. The real smile. The quiet one that never needed an audience.

“Among other things,” he agreed.

Outside the conference room window, Manhattan moved through its Friday evening, indifferent and relentless and entirely unbothered by the fact that two people had just stopped running in opposite directions and had finally, after ten years and one hostile takeover and a silver arrow and a Business Law textbook with a broken spine, arrived at the same place at the same time.

It didn’t ask what had taken so long.

That was still one of the things I loved most about it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

MEGAN: PRESENT

We left the building together at nine, which sounds unremarkable unless you know that I had never once left a building with anyone in ten years.

The lobby was empty except for the night guard, who wished Wyatt and me good evening and showed no reaction to the sight of the woman who owned twenty-two percent of the company walking out beside the man whose name was on the company. Good lobby staff are diplomats. Someone should tell them.

The December cold hit like a decision. We stood on the sidewalk in it, two people who had spent three hours saying ten years’ worth of baggage, suddenly confronted with the oldest logistical problem in the world.

“It’s late,” Wyatt said, in the tone of a man opening a negotiation he had no position in.

“It is.”

“You should eat something.” Then, catching himself—catching the decade of history in that statement, the fact that he had earned no right to say it yet—he amended, “I should eat something. You’d be welcome to supervise.”

I looked at him standing there in his good coat, hands in his pockets, thirty years old, running a company, negotiating for my company, and I watched the nerves rise beneath it all, exactly as they had once risen beneath a porch light, and something in me that had been clenched for ten years let go of one more notch.

“No restaurants,” I said. “Nothing with a hostess. I can’t sit across from you tonight at a table with a white tablecloth and pretend I still have table manners.”

The real smile. “Then I know a place with no tablecloths at all.”