STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 6: Just Shyne

"No," the man was saying into his phone. His voice carried easily, low and perfectly controlled. "Tell Halvorsen the answer is still no. Tell Maine his offer insults me, and the next time he sends a lawyer to my office, I'll send the lawyer back with a bill."

He hung up.

Across the room, Shyne had gone completely still.

Maine.

He had said it so casually. Maine, like a stone he had stepped over on the road. She felt the name hit her between the ribs. The room tilted a few degrees. Her hands, already clumsily wrapped, curled into fists against her thighs, and she stared at the floor with her jaw locked, and she did not breathe.

Chad noticed. It was what he did.

He noticed the tell in a CFO's voice before the CFO knew he was lying. He noticed the half-second silence before a man said yes. And now he noticed that the woman at the far bag, the one with the bad wraps and the careful posture, had flinched at a name the way a person flinches at a raised hand.

He watched her square her shoulders. Throw a punch.

It was a terrible punch. Wrist bent, elbow flared, her whole body braced as if the bag might hit back.

"You'll break your wrist," he said.

She spun around.

Dark eyes, wide and wary, set in a face that should have been ruthless and had been taught otherwise. For a moment he forgot what he'd meant to say. Not because she was beautiful, though she was, in a way that had nothing to do with softness, but because he recognized something. A woman holding herself together by force, like a coat held shut in a wind.

"I didn't ask for advice," she said. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.

"I know. That's why I'm giving it." He stopped a careful three feet away. He did not move closer. Something in the way she stood told him with absolute certainty that closeness would cost her. "Feet apart. Turn your hip. Don't punch with your arm. Punch with the floor."

She hesitated.

It was a very long second. He watched her weigh him. He saw her check the distance between them, and the position of the door, and the phone in the cubby across the room. The old reflexes of a woman who had learned to count exits.

Then she tried it.

The bag swung. Her breath left her in a startled laugh, short and real, as though something had slipped out through a crack that she hadn't known was there.

"Again," Chad said quietly.

She hit it again. And again. Her eyes grew bright and furious and alive, and he understood that she wasn't hitting the bag at all. Whoever had put that look on her face, she was hitting him.

After the tenth strike she stopped, chest heaving, and looked at him properly for the first time. He watched her place him. The tailored trousers. The watch. The way Rafe had drifted to the doorway and was pretending to read his phone.

She knew exactly who he was. Everyone did.

"You're a Wenthworth," she said.

"I'm Chad."

A pause. Something that was almost humor crossed her face. "Then I'm Shyne."

"Shyne what?"

"Just Shyne."

He studied her for a long moment. Nobody ever refused him a surname. It was strange how much he liked it.

"Just Shyne," he said, "who's afraid of a text message."

Her phone was buzzing in the bench cubby across the room, again and again, a small furious insect. She did not look at it. She did not have to. Her hands had gone cold; he could see it in the whitening of her knuckles.

"I'm late," she said.

"For what?"

"For being somewhere else."

She stripped off the wraps, walked past him, and for one second the air between them drew so tight that Chad almost reached for her wrist. He didn't. He stood very still and he let her go.

He had not wanted anything in six years. Not truly.

Now he wanted to know what that woman's name had been before someone taught her to make herself small.

"Well," Rafe said, lowering his phone. "That was the most you've spoken to a stranger since the Lisbon merger."

"Who is she?"

"You're asking me?" Rafe grinned, then saw Chad's face and stopped grinning. "Okay. Give me ten minutes."

He gave Rafe six. Rafe came back looking like a man who had stepped on something he shouldn't have.

"Her membership came through Aldee's hospital slot, and the name on the guest registry is Shyne Hale." He held out the phone. On the screen was an old magazine cover: a woman in a white coat, laughing, a sketchbook under one arm. SHYNE: THE LABEL THAT DRESSED A CITY. "Hale is her maiden name. She's a designer, Chad. Or she was. You bought your mother that coat, remember? The camel one."

Chad remembered. He remembered the coat. He remembered his mother wearing it to his father's funeral, and the only time he had seen her cry, her face pressed to the collar, in the back of a black car. He had not remembered the name.

"She's been married three years," Rafe said carefully. "She stopped working the day she did."

"To whom?"

Rafe swallowed.

"Marcus Maine."

The room went very quiet. Down below, the city went on glittering, unaware.

Chad Wenthworth looked at the phone in his hand, at the hostile bid on his other screen, at the name of the man whose offer he had just rejected. He thought of the woman's hands. Her cold white knuckles. The flinch at a single word.

He thought of the leather notebook in his office safe, and the name circled in his father's last entry hard enough to tear the paper.

Maine.

"Cancel my afternoon," he said. "And Rafe. Call Halvorsen back."

"You said no."

"I said no today." His voice was very calm. It was the voice that ended careers. "Tell them I'm reconsidering."