OFF LIMIT

CHAPTER 1

The last time I stood in this doorway, I was burying my father, and running from the only other thing that scared me as much as losing him.

It had been five years since I'd been home. After Dad died, I applied to finish my degree abroad then stayed for my master's, and told myself it was ambition.

It wasn't.

I was running from the grief, and from a desire I refused to name even to myself.

Now I was back, everything buried deep where it couldn't touch me. Or so I told myself, standing in front of the door I used to walk through without thinking twice.

The front door was heavier than I remembered, or maybe I was just weaker than I used to be.

It gave way anyway, and the house swallowed me whole.

The living room was chaos in the way it always was before one of my mother's parties. Staff moved in and out with trays and flower arrangements, someone arguing softly about where the extra chairs should go, and underneath it all, the house still smelled the same.

Polished wood and fresh lilies and something fainter I couldn't name, something that had always meant home before it started meaning everything I lost.

I found my mother in the middle of it, directing our butler with the calm authority of a woman who had run this house for thirty years.

She hadn't noticed me yet, so I let myself look at her the way you look at someone after too long apart, greedily, cataloguing every change.

Fifty-four now.

New lines around her eyes that hadn't been there five years ago, silver threaded through hair she used to dye every month without fail.

But she stood straighter than I remembered, like a woman who had survived something and come out the other side of it.

"Mom."

She turned, and for half a second her face didn't process me at all.

Then it cracked open into something so raw and happy I nearly lost my composure right there in the doorway.

"Oh, my sweetheart."

She crossed the room faster than I'd seen her move in years and pulled me into her arms.

"I thought you were coming this evening. Why didn't you call? I would have sent the car."

"I wanted to surprise you."

It wasn't a lie, exactly.

What I didn't say was that I'd needed the extra hours alone, on the drive, anywhere that wasn't here, to brace myself for a homecoming I'd been dreading and craving in equal measure.

She pulled back to study my face, still holding my arms like she was afraid I might vanish again.

"Well, you picked a chaotic day for it. I'm hosting a dinner tonight, to welcome you home."

A small, apologetic smile.

"Just close family friends."

My heart dropped and slammed at the same time, some impossible physics only he could cause.

Close family friends.

I knew exactly whose face lived inside that phrase.

I'd known, somewhere in the back of my mind, that seeing him again was inevitable the moment I booked the flight home.

I just hadn't let myself believe it would happen tonight, hours after landing, before I'd even had time to remember how to breathe around the idea of him.

"Your brother's still at the office," my mother said, already turning back toward the chaos. "We all thought you'd be arriving later, so everyone's plans are a bit backwards now."

I nodded and climbed the stairs, past the gallery of family portraits, my father's face catching me at every turn.

I still had his eyes, everyone said so.

I still missed him with a violence that hadn't dulled in five years, just learned to go quiet when I needed it to.

I had been nineteen when his heart simply stopped, no warning, no goodbye, just a Tuesday that ended with the whole architecture of my life collapsing at once.

In the wreckage of that year, when I couldn't get out of bed some mornings and my mother was too shattered to hold the rest of us together, there had been exactly one person who showed up every single day and never once let his own grief show.

Him.

Hard-faced, unreadable, steady as a wall.

Theodore Vincent Kingsley.

My father's best friend and business partner for over twenty years, the man who had built an empire out of nothing alongside my dad, inseparable until death did what nothing else could and pulled them apart.

He was also, in the cruelest twist of my life's design, the father of my best friend Sienna, the girl I had grown up beside since we were both in diapers, whose house had been my second home for as long as I could remember.

Which meant he had been around my entire life.

At every birthday.

Every holiday.

Every family dinner where I sat two seats down from him and tried not to notice the way he filled a room without ever raising his voice.

I had thought, at nineteen, that what I felt for him was just gratitude.

I had been wrong about that too.

My room was exactly as I'd left it.

The same pale blue walls.

The same string of fairy lights looped along the headboard I'd put up at sixteen and never taken down.

My desk still held a stack of old notebooks, corners curling, and my bookshelf still had gaps where I'd taken my favorites with me and never sent them back.

It felt like walking into a museum of a girl I used to be.

Someone who hadn't yet learned what it meant to lose a father, or to want a man she had no right to want.

I ran my fingers along the desk and my eyes caught on a small silver frame by the lamp.

A photo from my nineteenth birthday, the last one I ever had with him in it.

My father laughing at something off camera, my mother beside him, Sienna and I mid-giggle.

And at the edge of the frame, half cut off, a shoulder in a dark suit.

Theo.

He'd been at that party too.

He was at every party.

I remembered that night in pieces now, the way you remember things you've spent years trying not to look at directly.

The heat of the summer evening.

My father pulling me into a dance I was too old for and too fond of him to refuse.

And Theo, near the drinks table, watching it all with the same easy fondness he'd always looked at me with, like I was still the kid who used to fall asleep on his shoulder during long car rides home.

I hadn't understood what was happening to me that night.

I understood it four months later, at the funeral, when he was the only person who didn't cry, who stood beside my mother like a wall holding up a house about to collapse, and I couldn't stop staring at him anyway.

He caught me looking once.

His expression didn't change into anything complicated.

He just looked back at me the way he always had.

Steady.

Protective.

Like I was something fragile he needed to look after because my father no longer could.

That was the problem.

He looked at me like family.

I had started looking at him like something else entirely, and I hated myself for it every single day that followed.

I set the photo down and made myself look away from it.

The dinner was in a few hours.

I had exactly that long to figure out how to walk into a room and look at Theodore Kingsley like he was nothing more than my best friend's father.

I had never been very good at lying to myself.

I doubted tonight would be any different.

I hadn't even finished unpacking when I heard footsteps taking the stairs two at a time, fast and familiar in a way that made my chest ache before I even saw her.

"Isabella Sinclair, if you get to be back in this country without warning me first, I swear—"

Sienna appeared in my doorway, breathless, already crying and laughing at once, and I was across the room and in her arms before she finished the sentence.

She smelled like the same perfume she'd worn since we were seventeen, and for a moment I let myself forget everything except the fact that my best friend was hugging me so hard I could barely breathe.

"Your mom called me the second you walked through the door," she said into my shoulder. "I broke about four traffic laws getting here."

"You live ten minutes away."

"I said what I said."

We ended up on my bed the way we used to, cross-legged and facing each other.

She told me about her job, about how much she'd missed having someone who understood her without three follow-up questions.

Then, almost shy in a way I'd never seen her before, she told me about Marcus.

"He's different, Bella."

She was smiling down at her own hands like she couldn't help it.

"I know everyone says that. I probably said that about the last three disasters I dated. But I think he might be it."

Six months of quiet, steady happiness.

Dinners with his parents.

A key to his apartment.

And, judging by the way her voice dropped and her cheeks went pink, a strong suspicion that a ring was coming sooner rather than later.

"Please don't say anything to my dad."

Her smile faltered, turned nervous.

"He doesn't know yet. Not really. You know how he gets, Bella, he'll interrogate the poor guy like he's applying for a security clearance."

I love my dad, but if he scares Marcus off before he even gets the chance to propose, I will never forgive him."

I laughed because it was funny, and because it was easier than sitting with the small, sharp thing that opened up in my chest at the mention of her dad, again, so easily, so innocently.

We used to talk on the phone every week, the first year I was gone.

Then every other week.

Then once a month, if that.

I told myself it was the time difference, the workload.

That was true, as far as it went.

What I never told her was that every time she mentioned her father, my stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with shame.

She talked about him constantly and innocently, the way you talk about a parent you take for granted.

Dad said this. Dad's stressed about that deal. Dad would lose his mind if he found out about Marcus before I'm ready to tell him.

And every time, some guilty part of me had to sit there and pretend I wasn't hanging onto every word, wasn't quietly starving for any detail I could get about a man I had absolutely no right to want.

Betraying her.

That was the only way I'd ever been able to describe it to myself.

She was about to get everything, the love, the ring, the father walking her down the aisle without a single complication, once she found the courage to tell him.

And I was sitting across from her hiding the fact that I'd spent five years quietly in love with the very same man she called Dad.

I pushed the thought down and let her drag me toward my closet instead.

"Okay, what are you wearing tonight?"

"I don't know, I haven't even—"

"Isabella."

She was already flipping through my closet like she owned it, which, to be fair, she basically did.

"This is your homecoming dinner. You are not wearing whatever wrinkled thing is at the bottom of your suitcase."

We settled on a black dress, simple, fitted through the waist, the kind of thing that looked effortless and had taken me an embarrassingly long time to pick out.

Sienna did my eyeliner because my hands wouldn't stop being unsteady, and I told her it was jet lag.

She didn't push.

I put in the small gold hoops my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday, and heels that made my legs look longer than they had any right to, and stood in front of the mirror trying to convince myself the extra effort was for my mother.

For anyone except the one person I knew would be walking through that door tonight.

I wanted to look pretty for him.

I hated myself a little for admitting it, even just to my own reflection.

Five years and an ocean between us and some part of me was still nineteen years old, still aching for a man who had never once looked at me like I was anything other than a girl who needed protecting.

"You look gorgeous," Sienna said, appearing behind me in the mirror, resting her chin on my shoulder the way she used to when we were teenagers getting ready for something that mattered.

"Everyone's going to be so happy you're back."

I smiled at her reflection and said nothing about the one person whose reaction I actually cared about.

From somewhere downstairs, faint but unmistakable, I heard the front door open, and my mother's voice lifting in delighted greeting.

My whole body went still.

He was here.