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I’m a fucking survivor.

I put on the red lipstick, the one Birdie gave back to me when she learned what I needed it for. I expect Theo's version of what Beck wanted—one hour of undivided, filthy attention, the sweet one finally getting greedy.

That is not what I get.

"Hi," he says when I come on. Just that. Warm, unhurried, a voice with no rush in it.

"KindRegards." I settle back, amused, reaching for a strap. "You paid a small fortune for this. I want you to leave happy."

"I know what I paid." Okay. "It can wait a minute. First I want to know something, and don't give me the version you'd hand a stranger. Are you taking care of yourself?"

Something in my chest does a slow, dangerous thing, because he's asked me that before, many times, my protective KindRegards. But tonight, there's nobody else in the room to be kind in front of. It's just him. Asking after me and caring about me.

"Of course," I say.

"You work too hard," Theo says. "I don't know what's chasing you, and I don’t want to. But I watch you every night, and you're tired in a way that's got nothing to do with the hour."

I don't have a line for that. Diablo always has a line. I've got nothing.

"So here's what I'm paying for tonight. You're going to lie down. Not for me but for you. I'll stay on. You don't have to say a word or take off a single thing. You're just going to rest, for one hour, with somebody watching who's glad you're here. That's the whole booking."

So, I turn the lamp down low and I lie down on my crappy comforter with the laptop camera focused on my lower body, and I let a man watch me do nothing.

We don't talk much. Now and then his voice drops in, low and certain. There you go. That's it. Good girl. Once, so quiet I almost miss it: You have no idea how long I've wanted you exactly like this.

And that's what undoes me. He doesn’t ask me for a single thing. Not to take my clothes off, not to touch myself. I mean, he’s a guy who could obviously take whatever he wanted, spending a small fortune to watch over me instead, like I'm something worth guarding. Wanting me, and holding all of it back, on purpose.

Because this isn't lust. I know what to do with lust. I can run a whole room of it like a card table and walk away counting my money. This is worse. This is a man with the control to wait me out and the nerve to be gentle on purpose, and me letting him.

I can walk away from three men who want my body.

I have no idea at all how to walk away from one who wants me to rest.

When the hour ends, he says good night and the screen goes dark, and I lie there in my quiet apartment feeling more undressed than I have ever felt with my clothes off.

I'm winning. I keep telling myself I'm winning.

But somewhere in that last hour, I stopped playing a game and started falling, and you cannot put a price on that. It can’t be paid off like Birdie’s goat yoga ranch debt, and it doesn’t matter at all that some of the loan is gone, erased, and paid off.

I'm winning.

I am in so much trouble.

A house of cards, which is what I’m pretty much living in now, doesn't fall one card at a time. No, that would be too easy, and the universe does not do easy when it comes to me. In fact, it pretty much never, ever gives me a fucking break. No, a house of cards comes down all at once, usually on the morning after you finally let yourself stand back and admire it and think you’ve got shit figured out and that, for once, you’re coming out on top.

It starts at 8:50 a.m. with the single wrongest thing to walk through the lobby of Ardent Capital. Silence.

Not quiet. Silence. Beck comes in with no phone glued to his ear, no grin, no morning, gorgeous for the espresso machine or anybody else. He doesn't even look up. Beck Cross, who has never once crossed a room without working it, crosses this one like a man walking to his own sentencing, and shuts his office door hard enough that the glass shivers in the frame.

Ten minutes later, Theo, who says good morning to everyone and everything, walks straight past my desk with his mouth set and his eyes red at the rims, and doesn't say a single word to me for the first time since I've worked here. Needless to say, there is no coffee.

And Elias never gives anything away, but even he is wrong this morning. There's an edge coming off him, cold and breezy, and when I bring him the contract he asked me for yesterday, he takes it without a word. I watch his knuckles go white around the pages.

The guys do not look at each other. Not once, not all morning. Three men who share everything, who built an entire firm on being able to stand in a room together, spent all morning Not In A Room Together. They’re taking separate meetings, separate calls, in their separate offices with shut glass doors. And me, I’m watching it all, routing their calls and keeping my head down.

And I know, the way I know my own name, what this is about.

They found out. Not about me but about each other. Beck slipped off to have me to himself, and then Theo did the exact same greedy thing, and Elias was next in line to do the same. Somewhere between last night and this morning, it all came out, and now, three best friends are sitting behind three glass doors realizing they each betrayed each other for a woman they started out sharing.