Rival Hearts

Chapter Four: The Face From the Bar

Three days passed before I saw him again, and I spent every single one of them refusing to think about the wedding my father had already started planning.

I told myself busywork would help. I spent the mornings at the office going over old client files, relearning the shape of a company I hadn't touched in five years, and the afternoons walking the city like I could out-pace my own thoughts if I moved fast enough. It didn't work particularly well. My mind kept circling back to the same useless loop — a stranger's name, a stranger's face I couldn't picture, a wedding date somewhere on a calendar I hadn't seen yet.

I was three blocks from the office, coffee in hand, cutting through the plaza near the old fountain, when I saw him.

He was crossing the street ahead of me, laughing at something one of the men beside him had said, and for a second I almost didn't place him. Then he turned his head, just enough that the streetlight caught his profile, and every detail from that night at the bar snapped back into focus at once — the jaw, the mouth that had called me exactly what it called me, the eyes that had looked me over like I was something to be priced.

My stomach dropped straight through the pavement.

It was him. The stranger from the bar. The man who had sat two seats down and asked, with a straight face, what my rate was.

I stopped walking. People moved around me on the sidewalk, muttering, but I didn't care. I stood there staring at him like staring hard enough might change what I was seeing, but it didn't change, because it was him, unmistakably, laughing with his friends like that night hadn't happened at all, like he hadn't ruined my first evening back in this city with one careless, ugly sentence.

He hadn't seen me yet.

That gave me exactly the head start I needed.

"Hey." My voice came out louder than I meant it to, cutting straight through the noise of the plaza. "You."

He turned, still smiling from whatever his friend had said, and the smile dropped the instant he found my face in the crowd. I watched it happen in real time — recognition landing, color draining, the easy posture he had been walking with stiffening into something braced.

"Oh, no," he said, mostly to himself, but I heard it anyway.

"Yeah. Oh, no." I started toward him, weaving around a woman with a stroller, my coffee forgotten in my hand. "I've been looking for you."

"I really don't think that's a good idea." He took a step back, glancing at his friends like they might help him out of this, but both of them looked equally lost, watching the scene unfold with no context for it at all.

"You don't get to decide that." I closed the distance faster than he expected, and his expression shifted fast, wary tipping straight into alarm. "You said some things to me the other night. Do you remember that? Or was I just another face to you, one of however many women you say that to on a given weekend?"

"Look, I was drunk—"

"That's not an excuse."

"I know it's not." He held both hands up, palms out, the universal gesture of a man trying to de-escalate a situation he had clearly not planned for. "I'm sorry. Genuinely. I don't even remember most of it, if that helps."

"It doesn't." My voice was shaking again, the same fury from that night rising fast and ugly. "You called me a—" I couldn't even finish the sentence in the middle of a public plaza, my face hot with the memory of it. "You humiliated me. In front of a bartender, in front of anyone in that room who was paying attention. And now you're standing here acting like it's nothing, like an apology three days late fixes anything."

"I'm not saying it fixes anything." His friends had gone quiet, exchanging a look I couldn't read. "I'm saying I'm sorry, and I mean it, and I would like to not have this conversation in the middle of the street if that's an option."

"It's not." I stepped closer, close enough now that he had to actually look at me instead of over my shoulder. "You told me I was going to regret coming back to Aldermere before I even set my bags down. I don't forget things like that."

His expression flickered, quick and complicated, and for one strange second I thought he almost recognized me beyond the bar, beyond that one ugly night — some private calculation working behind his eyes. It passed before I could name it.

"Fine." He exhaled, and the wariness in his posture hardened into something more defensive. "You want an actual conversation about it? Not here. Not with an audience."

"Why not here?"

"Because I don't know you, and you clearly don't know me, and shouting at each other in a public square isn't going to fix either of those things." He glanced past me, and I turned to see what had caught his attention — a woman walking toward us from the direction of the office building at the edge of the plaza, moving with purpose, clearly heading his way.

"Kael." She said his name before she had even fully reached us, professional and clipped. "Your father's looking for you. Something about the dinner arrangements."

The word landed in my chest like a dropped glass.

Kael.

I looked at him properly for the first time since I had started shouting, and every piece I had been carrying around for three days without a shape to hang them on — a name my father had said without weight, a wedding I hadn't wanted, a stranger somewhere in this city waiting for the same conversation I had had — collapsed into a single, horrifying certainty.

"You're Kael Voss." The words came out flat, disbelieving, like saying them slowly enough might make them untrue.

He went very still.

"How do you—" He stopped himself, and I watched the exact same realization hit him that had just hit me, his eyes widening, his mouth opening on a question he clearly didn't want the answer to. "Wait. Ashcombe. You're Wren Ashcombe."

Neither of us said anything for a long moment, the plaza noise fading into something distant and unimportant around us.

"You're the one my father wants me to marry," I said, and heard how absurd it sounded even as it left my mouth. "You. The man from the bar."

His face went through several expressions in rapid succession — disbelief, something close to horror, and finally, unmistakably, dread.

"This can't be happening," he said, mostly to himself.

Neither could I. And yet there we stood, on opposite sides of a sentence that had just rearranged both our lives.