Dangerously His

Chapter 004

Ten years later

"To Emily!" Daniela raised her glass, and the table erupted around me — five of my closest people in this city, all here because I'd let them be, all completely unaware that this date meant something entirely different to me than a birthday.

"Twenty-five and still won't tell us your secret to never aging," Clara teased, clinking her glass against mine.

I laughed, easy and natural, the kind of laugh I didn't have to think about anymore. "Good genes."

The restaurant buzzed around us — candlelight, low conversation, the smell of garlic drifting from the kitchen. I looked around the table: Daniela mid-laugh at her own joke, Clara stealing fries off my plate, Peter and his fiancée arguing over dessert. Ten years of building this, one careful conversation at a time.

"Okay, but seriously," Daniela said, leaning forward. "Remember freshman year, when you showed up to that mixer in the wrong building?"

"I will never live that down."

"You shouldn't. It was iconic." Clara grinned. "God, we've known each other so long. I still remember you in that dorm room, so quiet I thought you hated all of us that first week."

"I didn't hate you. I was just adjusting," I said with a shrug.

"Adjusting," Peter repeated, laughing. "So wait — where even is home for you? I don't think I've ever heard you actually say it."

"Millbrook," I said, easy, automatic — and then heard it a half second too late, the way you hear a glass slip before it hits the floor.

Millbrook wasn't the town on my paperwork. Millbrook was real — four streets over from the house that didn't exist anymore, the one I'd burned to the ground with my own hands.

Clara tilted her head. "I thought you said Ohio?"

"I am — Millbrook's just what my grandmother used to call it, some old nickname." I reached for my glass, casual. "Doesn't even exist on a map anymore." The wine went down my throat painfully as I swallowed.

"Cute," Clara said, already distracted by the dessert menu. "Grandmothers and their weird nicknames."

The conversation moved on. Nobody else had caught it. I smiled, laughed at the next joke, ordered another round — every gesture exactly right, exactly Emily. One slip, buried under a decade of practice. It wouldn't happen again.

I was fourteen minutes late for work the next morning — a personal record, and not the good kind. My head throbbed faintly from too much wine, and I'd barely managed lipstick and a blazer before running out the door.

Daniela raised her eyebrows as I rushed past reception. "Look who's finally living a little."

"Don't," I warned, already moving toward my desk to get the file for the morning briefing.

Mr. Rivers's door was open when I got in, which was unusual. He looked up the moment I appeared.

"You're late," he said. No edge in it. Almost amused.

"I'm sorry, sir."

"It's fine. Sit. We need to go over the Hartley proposal before the ten o'clock."

I handed him the folder, and his fingers brushed mine as he took it — longer than necessary. I pulled my hand back a half second too fast. If he noticed, he didn't show it. He scanned the first page, then looked up at me over it.

"You look nice today." Like an afterthought, like it wasn't strange for him to say it at all. "That color suits you."

"The — blazer?"

"The lipstick." His eyes held mine a beat too long. "Red. New?"

"I think so." My voice came out uneven, and I had no idea why.

He held my gaze a moment longer than the exchange called for, something unreadable behind it, then looked back down at the folder like nothing had happened. I didn't realize I'd been holding my breath until I let it out in a quiet sigh.

I told myself, firmly, that it was nothing — because that's exactly what it was. Thane Rivers dated women who looked like they'd stepped off a runway. I was his secretary, competent, occasionally late, entirely unremarkable next to the women I'd seen on his arm at company events. I filed the moment away and got back to work.

By the time I packed up, it was past eight. The office had emptied out.

"I'll have the car brought around," Mr. Rivers said, appearing at my desk. "I'm heading that direction anyway. I'll drop you."

"That's really not necessary—"

"I insist."

There wasn't a graceful way to say no without making something out of nothing, so I didn't.

The car was quiet at first, city lights sliding past the windows.

"So," he said. "Birthday dinner. How was it?"

I glanced at him, surprised he'd remembered the date at all. "Good. Really good, actually. My friends went a little overboard, but I didn't mind."

"What does overboard look like, for you?"

"Two bottles of wine and my friends trying to convince the waiter to bring out a cake with sparklers." I smiled at the memory. "It was a good night."

"Twenty-five," he said, half to himself. "Any resolutions? Anything you're chasing this year that you weren't chasing last year?"

I considered it. "Just more of the same, honestly. I like my life the way it is."

"That's rarer than you'd think," he said. "Most people I know are always chasing the next thing."

"Maybe I already found mine."

Something flickered across his face at that moment — I couldn't read it — before he looked back out the window, and the conversation drifted into easier territory: his terrible taste in coffee, a restaurant he thought I'd like. Nothing dangerous. Nothing that required careful footing.

The car pulled up outside my building. I reached for the door handle.

"Before you go." He reached into his coat and held out a small, neatly wrapped box.

I stared at it. "What's this?"

"Happy birthday, Emily." He said it with a small smile that ended as quickly as it came.

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know."

"Thank you," I said, and meant it, even as I climbed out still turning over the sound of my own first name in his voice.

"Goodnight, Ms. Vance." Back to normal, like the last five minutes hadn't happened at all.

"Goodnight, Mr. Rivers."

Upstairs, I sat on the edge of my bed and opened the box carefully, half-expecting something impersonal — a gift card, a company mug, some polite corporate gesture.

It wasn't that.

A thin gold chain, and hanging from it, a small pendant engraved with two letters: E.V.

I sat there for a long moment, turning it over in my fingers, something warm settling in my chest that I didn't examine too closely. I thought about the ten years it had taken to get here — the friends around that table last night, the career I'd built from nothing, the name that was mine now in every way that mattered. A life I'd made entirely on my own, out of the wreckage of the one I'd escaped.

I placed the necklace back in the box and set it aside, turned off the light, and went to sleep happier than I could remember being in a long time.