Off Limits

Chapter 12: The Engagement Party

Sophie's parents' house in Connecticut was exactly the kind of comfortable, understated wealth Elena had expected from the Cole family — a sprawling white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, string lights already strung across the backyard for the evening's celebration, the specific, easy warmth of a family that had never needed to perform its money the way some of Elena's Manhattan colleagues did.

She spotted Damian almost immediately, across the crowded lawn, deep in conversation with Sophie's father, and felt her whole body respond to the sight of him with an intensity that made her grateful for the sunglasses she hadn't yet taken off.

"Elena! You made it." Sophie appeared at her side, radiant with pre-wedding joy, pulling her into a fierce hug. "Okay, I need you to meet everyone, and then I need you to help me survive my aunt's opinions about the guest list, and then we're doing champagne, in that order."

The introductions passed in a warm, overwhelming blur — cousins and family friends and Marcus's considerably more reserved parents, all of them kind, all of them curious about Sophie's mysterious best friend from the city — and Elena managed, for the first hour, to keep enough distance from Damian that the careful, charged tension between them stayed manageable, contained to occasional glances across the crowded lawn that neither of them let linger too long.

It was Marcus's cousin Tyler — handsome, confident, clearly encouraged by an open bar and Sophie's enthusiastic matchmaking — who broke that careful containment entirely.

"Sophie's told me all about you," Tyler said, appearing at Elena's elbow with two fresh glasses of champagne, one already extended toward her before she'd agreed to want it. "Harvard MBA, killing it at Halbrook. I'm impressed. Most people I know who work that hard don't know how to actually have fun."

"I have fun," Elena said, accepting the champagne mostly to be polite, aware, with a prickling awareness she couldn't quite explain, of exactly where Damian stood across the lawn and whether he'd noticed this particular conversation.

"Prove it. Dance with me." Tyler's grin was easy, harmless, exactly the kind of low-stakes flirtation Elena would have found perfectly pleasant on any other evening, in any other circumstance that didn't involve a man twenty feet away whose reaction she found herself, disloyally, considerably more invested in than Tyler's actual company.

She glanced toward Damian before she could stop herself, and found him already watching, his expression carefully neutral in the specific, deliberate way that told her, with unmistakable clarity, exactly how much effort that neutrality was costing him.

"Maybe later," Elena told Tyler, aiming for breezy, and excused herself toward the drinks table with rather more urgency than the moment strictly required.

Damian found her there three minutes later, his jaw tight, his voice pitched low enough that only she could hear it. "You don't have to come find excuses on my account. If you want to dance with Sophie's cousin, that's entirely your business."

"Are you jealous?" Elena asked, genuinely startled by the raw edge in his voice, something she hadn't expected from a man who'd spent three weeks so carefully, deliberately controlled.

"Yes," Damian said, with a bluntness that surprised them both. "Considerably more than I have any right to be, given the careful arrangement we agreed to. I watched him hand you champagne and felt something I haven't felt in ten years, and I don't know what to do with that information except stand here and tell you the truth about it."

Elena's pulse hammered, the crowded, cheerful party noise around them fading into something distant and unimportant against the sudden, charged intimacy of the moment. "Damian—"

"Ms. Reyes! There you are." Sophie's mother appeared, warm and oblivious, sweeping Elena into a conversation about the wedding's floral arrangements before either of them could say another word, and Elena found herself pulled away, glancing back once to find Damian still standing at the drinks table, watching her go with an expression that made her chest ache with the specific, unbearable frustration of a conversation interrupted at exactly the wrong moment.

She spent the next hour distracted, performing polite interest in floral arrangements and family gossip while every part of her attention remained fixed on the far side of the lawn, waiting for another chance to finish what Damian had just started, and understood, watching him laugh at something Sophie's father said, his eyes finding hers across the crowd for one brief, charged second, that whatever fragile arrangement they'd built together over the last three weeks was not going to survive this particular evening intact.