The restaurant was too expensive for what Serena Whitmore was about to say, but she'd chosen it herself, so Ethan Vale supposed she wanted the marble floors and hovering waiters as a backdrop for it."I'm marrying Kent," she said, before the appetizers even arrived. No preamble. She said it the way she'd once told him she wanted the corner booth instead of the window table, like it cost her nothing.Three years. Ethan set his water glass down slowly enough that his hand didn't shake. "Kent Whitfield.""His family owns most of Orange County, Ethan. He offered me a seat on his investment board this morning. A seat, not a job title someone hands you to be polite." She said it evenly, like she was reading numbers off a spreadsheet. Money. Status. The words she used instead of love, and she'd never bothered pretending otherwise.Her eyes moved over him, the plain gray sweater, the watch on his wrist that had cost him eighty dollars two Christmases ago. "You're still wearing that." She almo

The gate opened before Ethan finished giving his name, which meant someone had been watching for his car since he turned onto the street.Isabella stood in wait in her dark green dress, and for a while neither of them spoke."You look as if you're about to enter a deposition," she noted finally."Feel about right.""My father will ask what you do. Say investment consulting and let him assume it's a small firm. He loses interest quickly once he thinks there isn't a serious amount of money involved." she told quickly, quietly, as if it had been rehearsed in a mirror somewhere and she had trouble convincing herself it would do any good. "Do not correct him. Whatever he says tonight.""I wasn't going to.""I mean it. Whatever he says."Already seated as they entered the room, her father was handsome in his way but the charm had curdled slightly over the years into something colder; he did not rise to meet them but offered his hand across the table, a small test of who was going to have to

Ethan stared at the text for a long time before responding.Does that mean you're ready to hear whose handwriting it was, or do you want to pretend you haven't already guessed?He sent three texts, each one different, before hitting delete on all of them. He finally sent a reply of four words: Tomorrow. Not tonight. He was disappointed in the cowardice of it, but he had spent the morning carefully balancing the entire staff of a company that wasn't his own, and he had little to spare for whatever Marcus was about to throw at him.Isabella texted him twenty minutes later. Thank you. For today. I mean it.He read it three times before allowing himself to smile.They fell into something, over the following days, that neither of them named. She texted him things unrelated to the engagement, a picture of a dog she'd seen on her walk, a rant about her assistant's coffee order, a one-sentence story about a board member's tie that had somehow made him laugh out loud in an empty apartment. He

Ethan called Marcus back within the minute."Tell me he's okay.""He's fine. Shaken, but he's fine. He wasn't even there when it happened." Marcus sounded, if anything, more detached than usual, almost as if he were forcing himself to calm down. "Whoever did it knew precisely what they wanted. Didn't touch his computer, anything with value. Just the physical copies on the Veyron brief. In and out in under six minutes according to the building's security log, which, conveniently, has a gap in exactly that window.""Someone who has access to the cameras.""Someone that has access to very good things, apparently." He exhaled. "Ethan, this isn't Adrian's approach. Adrian operates under a low profile. This person was looking for an answer here tonight and never stopped to consider if anyone might catch them kick the front door open.""Victor.""That's my assumption as well." A paused. "Which means he's not just curious about the situation anymore. He's worried. Curious men wait. Worrying m