STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 5: Two Worlds Collide

Chad Wenthworth had never lost a negotiation, and he was about to lose an argument with his best friend over a punching bag.

"One hour," Rafe said, shoving a pair of gloves into his chest. "Your doctor, your mother, and I have formed a union. You faint in a board meeting, and I'm the one who has to explain it to the press."

"I don't faint."

"You haven't slept in four days. Your assistant told me she's started leaving sandwiches on your desk like you're a stray."

Chad looked at the gloves. He was thirty-eight years old, the head of the Wenthworth conglomerate, and he had two phones, six pending acquisitions, and a hostile bid on his desk from a firm he despised. He did not have time to hit things.

But he took the gloves. Rafe was the only person alive who could make him do that, because Rafe was the only person alive who wanted nothing from him.

That was the thing nobody understood about being a Wenthworth. People assumed the difficulty was the power. It was not. The difficulty was the handshakes. Every hand that reached for his arrived with a request folded inside it: a loan, a license, a seat on a board, a daughter's introduction. Chad had learned by the age of twelve to read a man's intention before he finished saying hello. By thirty, he could no longer turn the skill off.

He had tried once. Her name had been Camille. They had been engaged for seven months, and he had told her things in the dark that he had never said to anyone, including a half-finished merger he was ashamed of, because he thought a person who loved you could be trusted with the shameful parts. Three weeks later, the merger was on the front page of every financial paper in the country.

She had cried when he confronted her. She had said, they offered so much money, Chad. I didn't think it would matter.

It hadn't mattered, financially. It had mattered in other ways, and he had never looked at them directly since.

Then, six years ago, his father died.

Edmund Wenthworth had collapsed at the family dinner table in the middle of a sentence about soup, of all things. A stroke, the doctors said, instant and merciless. Chad had been closest. He had caught the old man before his head hit the plate and held him on the floor of the dining room while the servants screamed and his mother stood frozen in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.

Edmund had looked at him with one clear eye, and gripped his wrist with a strength that should not have been possible, and said three words.

Protect the family.

Then he was gone. And Chad, thirty-two years old and still wearing his napkin tucked into his collar like a boy, had understood that the family was now a weight that lived between his shoulder blades, and that nobody was ever going to help him carry it.

He had not been touched kindly since. Not really. Not in a way that asked for nothing in return.

He had stopped noticing, the way a man stops noticing a limp.

Shyne had been standing in the elevator for twenty seconds before she realized she was not breathing.

The forty-first floor was glass and silence. A long room of pale wood and chrome, empty at ten in the morning except for a man in a gray T-shirt at the far end and a trainer wiping down a rack of weights. City lay beyond the windows, a bright map of everything she had once believed she could conquer.

She stood in the doorway and was afraid.

It was a ridiculous fear, and she knew it. Nobody here knew her. Nobody would ask where she'd been or why she was late. But her body did not believe that. Her body remembered a hundred nights of being asked, and it clenched like a fist around her ribs. Her palms were cold. Her heart thumped in her throat. She had the wild urge to turn around and take the elevator down and drive home and have dinner in the oven before Marcus returned.

She looked at the black card in her hand.

One hour, she told herself. Hit something. Remember you have a body that belongs to you.

She walked in.

The floor felt strange under her sneakers, too bright, too exposed. Mirrors lined the far wall, and she caught her reflection in one and did not recognize the woman looking back. Thin, pale, hair scraped back, wearing the cheap black leggings like a dare. She looked like a girl who had been waiting a long time for a bus.

Then, in the mirror, something else caught her eye.

The man at the far end of the room had turned. He was across the floor from her, wrapping his hands, a phone pinned between his shoulder and his jaw. And he was looking at her, not rudely, not even particularly, but with a quality of attention that arrived in her chest like a hand on a door.

He was tall, broad through the shoulders, with dark skin and a stillness that suggested a man who could outwait anyone. His forearms were bare. She noticed them with a small, shocked heat, the way she might notice, in the middle of a funeral, that someone was beautiful.

Stop it, said a voice in her head. It was Marcus's voice, mild and amused. You're a married woman, Shyne. Don't embarrass yourself.

She looked away fast, with her cheeks burning, and walked to the heavy bag at the far wall.

But the heat did not leave. It sat low in her stomach, bright and unwelcome and alive, and she stood with her hands in their ragged wraps feeling something she had not felt in three years: that her body was a thing that noticed. That it could want. That it had been asleep, not dead.

It terrified her. It also felt like opening a window in a sealed room.

Across the floor, Chad Wenthworth ended a phone call mid-sentence and looked up.