His Grandfather's Command

Chapter Seventeen — The Terrace

The terrace was cold and almost empty, which was exactly why Elias had taken me there.

A handful of smokers clustered at the far end, their conversation low and private, and beyond the stone balustrade the city spread out in its enormous indifferent glitter towers lit gold and white, the distant hum of traffic ten floors below, the particular hush that settled over rooftop spaces even in the middle of a loud city.

I breathed properly for the first time in two hours.

"Better?" Elias asked, beside me at the railing.

"Better," I said.

He was quiet for a moment, looking out at the skyline with his jacket still buttoned against the October chill, and I watched his profile in the half-light and thought, not for the first time, that there was something about Elias Vandermeer in stillness that revealed more than Elias Vandermeer in motion ever did.

"Marcus complimented you," he said. Not a question.

"He did."

"How was that."

I considered the honest answer. Decided, as always with him, to give it.

"Unsettling," I said. "Not because he was unkind, because he wasn't. He was warm and genuine and completely ordinary, and somewhere underneath that he's been stealing from your company for a year and a half, and both of those things are apparently true about the same person at the same time." I looked at the skyline. "I don't think I understood, before tonight, how easy it is for someone to be two things at once."

Elias was quiet.

"My father was like that," he said finally.

I turned to look at him. He didn't often offer things about his father. I'd noticed the absence over the weeks, the careful way conversations moved around the topic the way water moves around a rock, and I'd respected it enough not to push.

"You don't have to …" I started.

"I want to," he said. Surprising me. "You've been honest with me about things that weren't easy. I can manage this much."

I waited.

"My father was charming," Elias said, looking out at the city rather than at me, which I understood was its own kind of permission easier to say difficult things to a skyline than to a face. "Genuinely charming. People loved him. He ran half of this company's early expansion on nothing but charisma and good instincts, and everyone who worked with him in those years still talks about him like he hung the moon." A pause. "He was also absent for most of my childhood, unfaithful to my mother in ways she pretended not to notice for a decade, and eventually walked away from all of it,the company, the marriage, the family, for a woman he met at a conference in Geneva." His jaw tightened slightly. "He sends a card at Christmas. Sometimes."

"Elias .."

"I'm not telling you this for sympathy," he said, still looking outward. "I'm telling you because you said something true about Marcus and I wanted you to know I understood it specifically. The two-things-at-once part. I grew up watching my grandfather try to reconcile the father I knew with the man other people described, and eventually I understood that reconciling them wasn't the point. They were both real. Neither cancelled the other out." He looked at me finally. "That's the thing nobody tells you about people. You want the warmth to mean something about the character underneath it. Sometimes it just means someone is good at warmth."

I held his gaze in the cold terrace air.

"Is that why you were so closed off," I said quietly. "When we met."

Something moved across his face.

"Partly," he said. "I decided a long time ago that it was safer to assume the worst of people's motives and be pleasantly surprised than to assume the best and be …" He stopped.

"Devastated," I finished, gently.

"Devastated," he agreed.

We stood at the railing in the cold, the smokers at the far end of the terrace a low murmur behind us, the city glittering its enormous indifferent glitter.

"And now?" I asked.

He looked at me.

"Now I find myself standing on a terrace at a charity gala," he said, "having just told a woman I've known for two months more about my father than I've told anyone in years, and not entirely regretting it." The corner of his mouth moved, faint and real. "Which is new."

"I'm glad," I said. "That you told me."

"I am too," he said. "I think."

I laughed, surprised, and the sound of it broke something loose in the cold air between us something that had been tightly held since Marcus's compliment.

Elias looked at me laughing and something in his expression went very still and very focused, the particular intensity he brought to things he'd decided mattered.

"Aria," he said.

"Yes?"

He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at me the navy dress, my mother's earrings, the cold making my breath visible between us with an expression I had learned, slowly, over weeks of paying the kind of attention I paid to everything, to recognize as the one he wore when he was deciding whether to say something he'd been not-saying for a while.

"I keep finding reasons to be in rooms with you," he said quietly. "Even when I don't need to be. I told myself for a while it was responsibility. Making sure the arrangement was working. Then I told myself it was simply, habit, proximity, the natural consequence of living in the same house." He held my gaze. "I don't think either of those is true anymore."

The terrace was very quiet.

Behind us, distantly, the gala continued laughter, the clink of glasses, an orchestra easing into something slow.

"What do you think is true?" I asked. My voice came out quieter than I intended.

He was quiet for a long moment, like a man choosing whether to step off something solid.

"I think," he said, "that I look for you in rooms before I've decided to. I think I chose this terrace because I wanted ten minutes alone with you more than I wanted air. I think Marcus complimenting you tonight irritated me in a way that had nothing to do with the investigation." He paused. "I think this started as a contract and stopped being one somewhere I didn't mark properly, and I should have told you sooner, and I'm telling you now because I'm tired of being careful about something that doesn't feel careful at all."

I stood very still in the cold.

Felt my heart doing something complicated and enormous in my chest.

"Elias," I said softly.

"You don't have to say anything," he said quickly, something almost vulnerable moving across his face rare, unguarded, the version of him I'd glimpsed only twice before. "I just needed you to know. Whatever you do with it."

I looked at him.

At this man who had been cold and precise and closed off two months ago, who had called my dress fine like it cost him something, who sat beside me in libraries and kitchens and chose small restaurants because they reminded him of where I'd come from, who had just told me about his father on a terrace because he trusted me with the difficult things.

"I look for you too," I said quietly. "I have been, for weeks. I just didn't have a name for it I was ready to use out loud."

Something shifted in his expression relief, and something warmer than relief, breaking through the careful control all at once.

"Do you have a name for it now?" he asked.

"I think you said it already," I said. "Without saying it. On the terrace. Just now."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he reached up, slowly, giving me every opportunity to step back, and brushed a strand of hair from my face with a gentleness that didn't match anything I'd seen from him in a boardroom or a contract negotiation or a careful managed dinner with Vivienne watching from across the table.

"Aria," he said again. Just my name. Like it meant something specific now that it hadn't quite meant before.

"Elias," I said back.

He didn't kiss me.

Not yet there was something in his eyes that said he wanted to and was choosing, deliberately, carefully, not to. Not on a gala terrace with Marcus Webb's wife inside and Vivienne somewhere in the crowd and fourteen million dollars sitting unspoken between investigation and resolution.

Instead he took my hand. Laced his fingers through mine, simple and certain, and held it like something he'd decided to stop being careful about.

"Not here," he said quietly, like he'd read the thought directly off my face. "When I do, I want it to be because of this." He squeezed my hand gently. "Not because of a terrace and good lighting and an orchestra that's clearly trying to manipulate the moment."

I laughed, surprised, warm, real.

"That's annoyingly considerate of you," I said.

"I have my moments," he said, for the third time now, and this time when the corner of his mouth moved it went the whole way, into something that was unmistakably, completely a smile.

I had never seen him smile like that.

I filed it away, the way I filed everything except this one I didn't need to file. I knew immediately I would remember it without trying.

We stood on the terrace a while longer, hands joined, the city glittering below us and the gala continuing behind us and Marcus Webb and Vivienne Ashcroft and four million dollars and twenty six years and a parking garage all still sitting somewhere in the careful architecture of everything we were both carrying.

But for a few minutes, none of it mattered more than this.

His hand in mine. The cold air. The smile he'd never shown anyone quite like that before.

"We should go back in," I said eventually, not moving.

"We should," he agreed, not moving either.

Neither of us went back in for another five minutes.