He Kissed Me Before He Knew My Name

Chapter 2: Dinner for Two Devils

She's in his arms before she even remembers falling asleep.

His hands find the hem of her dress and the fabric tears away like it was never there—like it was always meant to—and her skin burns everywhere he touches. He lifts her, drops her onto crisp white sheets, and when his mouth finds hers she stops thinking entirely. She stops fighting entirely. There is nothing left of her that wants to.

Avery wakes up gasping.

She sits up in the dark of her childhood bedroom with her heart slamming against her ribs, her nightshirt damp at the collar, one hand

pressed flat to her sternum like she's trying to hold herself together. The digital clock on the nightstand reads 2:47 a.m.

Again.

These dreams have followed her for six years. Through Portland. Through her wedding. Through two pregnancies and a life she built

with careful, deliberate hands—and still, still, he shows up in the dark like something she never got to finish grieving.

She gets up. Drinks water straight from the mini-fridge bottle in three long swallows. Stares at her reflection in the dark window.

She cannot survive staying in this house another day.

She gets dressed and goes to work.

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By nine a.m., something close to peace settles over her shoulders.

Lucas isn't in the building. Maya tells her quietly that he has an off-site meeting—tentative return, possibly late evening. Avery

allows herself one full breath of relief and opens her laptop like the world makes sense again.

Please let the meeting run through tomorrow. Please.

She loses herself in spreadsheets and acquisition reports for three beautiful, uninterrupted hours. The Chicago skyline through the

floor-to-ceiling windows is steel-grey and gorgeous. Her coffee stays hot. The numbers behave. This is what she came back for—this

clean, uncomplicated version of herself that exists only inside work.

She's deep into a quarterly analysis, fingers moving fast across the keyboard, when the room goes dark.

Two warm hands cover her eyes from behind.

She goes completely still.

I locked that door. She is absolutely certain she locked that door. Where is Maya? Why didn't Maya—

"Miss me?" His voice, low and close to her ear, unravels something in her spine.

Temptation, stay the hell away from me.

"How did you get in here?" She keeps her voice flat and cold.

Lucas uncovers her eyes and spins her chair around in one smooth motion until she's facing him. He's crouching to her eye level,

entirely too comfortable, holding up a large paper bag from the Italian place on Michigan Avenue that she hasn't been to in six years

but used to order from obsessively.

"I sent everyone home," he says, like this is reasonable. Like this is normal. "It's just us tonight. I brought dinner."

"You what—" She twists toward the door. "Maya!"

"Gone." He's already unpacking containers onto her desk, cheerful as a man who has never once been told no and believed it.

"Overtime, just the two of us. I've got the Aldridge Construction contracts right here." He taps a folder sitting on top of the bag. "We

eat, we work. Very professional."

She stares at him.

He smiles back, utterly unrepentant.

The containers are open now, and the smell of garlic butter and fresh seafood hits her before she can build any more defenses. King crab legs. Jumbo shrimp. Linguine with clam sauce. Every single thing she used to order.

He remembered. After six years, one night, no last name—he remembered.

She doesn't say anything. She sits back in her chair and watches him c***k crab legs with the ease of someone who has done it a

hundred times, peel shrimp cleanly and set them on her side of the desk, and she hates that it's—

Fine. It's fine. It means nothing.

They eat in something that almost passes for comfortable silence. Almost. She can feel his eyes on her between bites, cataloguing her

the way he used to—like she's a problem he's determined to solve.

Then her phone lights up on the desk between them.

Derek - Video Call

Her hand doesn't move.

Lucas looks at the screen. Something in his jaw shifts. "Your husband's calling." His voice is flat now, the warmth gone. "Answer it."

"I will, just—"

He reaches across and hits Accept.

"Lucas!" She grabs for the phone but it's too late, the call is already connecting, and she has half a second to arrange her face into

something that looks like a woman who was not just sitting in a darkened office eating crab with her ex—

"Hey, babe." Derek's face fills the screen, easy smile, the Portland skyline visible through the window behind him. "You're working

late."

"Finishing up something urgent." She shifts the camera so only her face is visible. "How are you?"

But before Derek can answer, a small tornado enters the frame from the left.

"Mommy!"

And just like that, every wall she has dissolves.

Two six-year-old faces crowd into the screen—Caleb, grinning wide enough to swallow the room, and Connor slightly behind him,

quieter, watching her with those serious dark eyes that always see everything.

"Hey, my babies." Her voice goes soft in a way she can't control. "God, look at you two. Did you grow again?"

"Caleb grew," Connor says with the authority of someone who considers this a personal failure on Caleb's part.

"Mommy, are you coming home?" Caleb is practically vibrating. "Dad said maybe. Can we come visit you? Can we fly?"

"When you finish the school year," she promises. "Then you'll come stay with me, okay? We'll do the whole city."

Caleb erupts into the kind of joy only a six-year-old can sustain—jumping, shouting, informing the ceiling about the trip. Connor just

watches the screen with that careful, too-old expression.

"You left us," he says simply.

The words hit harder than anything Lance said in that boardroom. "Baby—"

"We have a babysitter every day. I don't like babysitters." Connor pauses. "And I don't like Sierra. She's always here."

The word registers a half-second before she sees Derek's face change—color draining, something flickering fast behind his eyes

before he reassembles his expression.

"She's helping with the business," Derek says, too quickly. "You know that, bud."

Avery watches his face. Watches the way he doesn't quite meet the camera.

Across the desk, Lucas is very still. He's looking at Derek's face on the screen with an expression she can't read—something halfway

between recognition and suspicion, like a man who can't quite place where he knows someone from.

The call wraps up in the usual way—Caleb blowing exaggerated kisses, Connor saying a single quiet bye, Mom that somehow costs

more than Caleb's entire performance. Derek says I love you and she smiles and waves and lets the screen go dark.

The silence that fills the office afterward is suffocating.

Lucas leans back in his chair, arms crossed, looking at the black phone screen.

"Is he sleeping with her?"

"Excuse me?"

"The cousin." He meets her eyes. "Sierra. Is your husband sleeping with her?"

"That is none of your business—"

"Do you love him?"

She opens her mouth.

Closes it.

"Of course I do," she says. The words feel like a shape she's practiced, familiar in her mouth but hollow somewhere underneath.

Lucas sees it. She knows he sees it because he's always seen through her, even when she had no name for what he was doing.

"You don't," he says quietly. "So why are you still there?"

"Lucas—"

"I've spent six years looking for you." His voice is even. Terrifyingly even. "I found out you were married and I told myself to walk

away. But I can't. So I'm not going to." He leans forward. "End the engagement—mine means nothing, it's a business arrangement,

I'll dissolve it tomorrow. File for divorce. Come back."

She stares at him. "I am legally married."

"Then I'll be your affair." He says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. Like it's already decided. Like she's already said yes.

"We're done talking about this." She shoves the contract folder across the desk. "Business. Now."

He reaches for the folder—

And pulls her with it.

One moment she's in her chair. The next she's in his lap, his arms locked around her, the folder forgotten, her pulse spiking into

something she has no clinical term for. She can feel every point of contact between them like a live current. His breath warm at her

temple. His heartbeat steadier than hers has any right to be.

Fight this, Avery. Your family. Your boys. Fight this.

But his arms don't loosen. And her body, God help her, stops fighting first.