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Chapter Seven

EVERETT

The lap pool sits at the far end of the gym. Three lanes.

My father built it because Conrad Kauffman didn't believe in going cheap on anything, including gyms, and because putting three lanes of heated water inside a skyscraper is exactly the excessive nonsense billionaires do when they run out of reasonable ways to spend money.

I inherited the nonsense. Along with the habit.

The gym is glass on three sides—Seattle sprawling out in every direction, the Sound flat and silver in the pre-dawn dark, the mountains just starting to catch the first pale edge of morning. The pool itself is twenty-five meters, heated, lit from below in a blue so deep it looks like someone liquified the sky and poured it into concrete.

No one is ever up here at four-thirty.

That's the point.

I pull on my goggles, step to the edge, and dive.

The cold hits first. Even heated, the water is a shock—a full-body reset, every nerve snapping to attention. Then the silence. That's the part I've been chasing since I was nineteen years old and discovered that the only place my brain would stop screaming was ten inches below the surface of a chlorinated pool. The world above—the board, the contract, the woman sleeping in my penthouse—all of it goes mute the second my head goes under.

There's nothing down here but the black line on the bottom and the rhythm of my own stroke.

I swim the way I did in college. Hard and fast. Flip turns that send water sheeting over the edge, arms pulling through the surface like I'm trying to outrun something that lives in the deep end. Four years on the Stanford swim team. Two school records that still stand, as far as I know. Not because I had the most talent—because I was the most willing to stay in it long after everyone else got out.

My coach used to say I didn't swim to win. I swam to disappear.

He wasn't wrong.

Fifty meters. Flip. Fifty more.

I got maybe an hour of sleep last night. The rest was spent in my bed, staring at the ceiling, hyper-aware of the woman sleeping thirty feet down the hall in the guest suite wearing my ring on her finger. Every time I closed my eyes, my brain served up another image I didn't ask for.

The warmth of her finger when I slid that ring on. The coolness of the metal against her skin. The way her eyes locked on mine—not on the diamond, on me—like I'd handed her something far more meaningful than ten million dollars of De Beers. Most women in my orbit would have expected a ring like that. Would have held out their hand and waited for it like it was owed.

Aria looked at me like I'd lost my mind.

Like no one had ever put something that valuable on any part of her body, and she couldn't understand why I would.

That's the part I can't stop replaying.

My shoulders burn by lap eight. My lungs find their rhythm by twelve—the cadence of bilateral breathing that my body remembers even when my brain is somewhere else entirely. Breathe left. Stroke. Stroke. Breathe right. The repetition is mechanical. Meditative. The closest thing to peace my nervous system knows how to produce.

By lap twenty, the thinking slows.

But it doesn't stop.

The arena steps two nights ago. Her fist in my lapel. Barefoot. That kiss in front of the town car while cameras lit up around us like a fireworks show nobody authorized.

And worse—the one before it. In my office. Her thighs on either side of mine, her weight settling into my lap, her hands on my jaw, her mouth on my mouth. I was three seconds from pulling her tighter against me. Three seconds from letting her feel exactly what she was doing to me. My hands stayed on the armrests by a margin so thin it should terrify me.

Then Jeremy walked in.

If he hadn't, I don't know what would have happened. And that's the problem. I have never almost lost control like that with a woman. Not once. Not with Sienna. Not with anyone. I have always been able to manage the situation, manage myself, keep the line exactly where I drew it.

Aria erased the line. I didn’t even see it happen.

Lap twenty-five. Flip turn.

She's a distraction I can barely afford for the next year, and with the possibility of annulment if we don't consummate the marriage, the idea of keeping this strictly professional just developed a structural flaw the size of the Grand Canyon.