The Vows We Never Said

Chapter Thirteen

Six years dissolved the moment his mouth found hers.

Nora had spent a long time convincing herself she remembered this wrong that memory had softened the edges of it, sanded down what must have been ordinary into something her mind had turned extraordinary out of grief. She was wrong. If anything, six years had made it sharper: the particular way Theo kissed, like he was trying to memorize something he was afraid of losing again, and the low sound he made against her mouth when her hand fisted in his shirt and pulled him closer instead of pushing him away.

"We shouldn't," she murmured, not stopping.

"Probably not," he agreed, not stopping either.

The study door was locked she registered that distantly, some small rational part of her brain grateful Theo had thought to turn the key before either of them had fully decided what this was going to be. His hands found her waist, careful at first, like he still expected her to change her mind, and when she didn't, when she pressed closer instead and felt him exhale her name against her jaw like it cost him something to say it, careful stopped being the operative word for either of them.

She'd forgotten how well he knew her. Or maybe he'd simply relearned it in the space of a week, watching her the way he'd watched everything else on this property closely, patiently, like a man cataloging every detail he intended to keep this time. His mouth traced the line of her throat, unhurried despite the two-day countdown hanging over both their heads, and Nora let her head tip back against the edge of the drafting table, let herself, for the first time in six years, stop bracing for the moment this would end.

"Tell me to stop," Theo said against her collarbone, voice rough, "and I will. Right now. No questions."

"Don't you dare stop."

He didn't.

What followed was slower than either of them expected, given the urgency simmering underneath everything else in their lives right now, slower, and somehow more devastating for it. Six years of unfinished sentences translated into something wordless instead: his hands finally learning the shape of her again, hers finding the warmth of his skin under a shirt she'd been staring at half-buttoned for a week without letting herself think about it directly. When he lifted her onto the edge of the drafting table, the old wood groaning faintly beneath them, she laughed, actually laughed, bright and surprised, the sound of someone who'd forgotten she still knew how and the look on his face when he heard it undid something in her that six years of careful independence had built up brick by brick.

"I missed that," he said quietly, forehead resting against hers. "God, Nora. I missed that sound more than I let myself admit."

"Don't talk," she reminded him, breathless, already pulling him back down. "We agreed."

He laughed too, then, low and warm against her mouth, and whatever words either of them might have said instead dissolved into something that needed considerably fewer of them.

Afterward, they lay tangled together on the old chaise by the window, sunlight slanting gold across the floor, the whole world outside the study continuing on entirely unaware of what had just shifted inside it. Theo's fingers traced idle patterns along her spine, and Nora let herself exist for a few unearned minutes, purely in the quiet of him beside her instead of the danger circling both their lives.

"We have a company to save," she said eventually, not moving.

"In a minute."

"Camille could."

"In a minute, Nora." His arm tightened around her, unhurried, certain. "I spent six years being the kind of man who ran toward the responsible thing before he let himself have the real one. Give me five more minutes of the real one first."

She let him have it. Let herself have it too, honestly, five minutes of simply being wanted, uncomplicated by contracts or embezzlement schemes or a wedding neither of them intended to let happen, before the world outside the study window reasserted itself and reminded them both exactly how little time was actually left.

Her phone, discarded somewhere on the floor in the urgency of the last hour, buzzed against the old rug.

Theo groaned. "Ignore it."

"It might be Eleanor."

It wasn't Eleanor. Nora reached for the phone, glanced at the screen, and felt every ounce of warmth from the last hour drain out of her at once.

A text from Camille, sent to the group chat Nora hadn't realized existed until this exact moment herself, Theo, and Camille, apparently created sometime in the last twenty minutes.

Change of plans. Moving the engagement party up. Tomorrow night instead of the fourth. My father's flight got moved up. It's too funny how these things work out. Looking forward to celebrating with you both.

Nora stared at the message, feeling the two days they'd been counting on collapse, in a single sentence, down to less than twenty-four hours.

"Theo. "Her voice had gone tight, urgent. "Read this."

He did. She watched every trace of the last hour disappear from his face, replaced by something considerably colder.

"She knows," he said quietly. "She has to know. This isn't a coincidence."

Nora was already reaching for her clothes, already reaching for her phone to call Eleanor, the fragile plan they'd built that morning now compressed into hours instead of days.

"Then we stop planning to catch her later," she said. "We stop tonight, or we don't stop her at all."