He Kissed Me Before He Knew My Name

Six years. Six years, and the wound still breathes. Avery Cole sits in the glass-walled boardroom on the thirty-second floor of Hargrove Tower and tells herself she's fine. She tells herself the past is sealed, buried under six years of distance and decisions she can't take back. She tells herself Portland cured her. She almost believes it—until he walks through the door. Lucas Vance. The name catches in her chest like a fishhook. CEO. Of course he's the CEO. Of course fate has a sense of humor that cruel. He's broader now. More certain of himself, wearing authority the way he once wore nothing at all—effortlessly, devastatingly. His jaw is sharper. His eyes are the same wicked shade of dark brown that used to make her lose entire arguments before she even opened her mouth. She doesn't hear a single word of the merger discussion. Not one. She sits through an hour of projections and Q3 forecasts and her own company's future, nodding at the right moments, smiling at the right people, while every nerve ending in her body screams look away, Avery, look away. She doesn't look away enough. ❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖ The meeting ends. Everyone filters out in clusters of handshakes and LinkedIn promises. Avery waits. She lets the room empty. She needs thirty seconds alone to remind herself who she is now—not the girl she was at twenty-two, reckless and breathless and completely undone by a man she had no business wanting. She's standing, gathering her portfolio, when his voice hits her from behind. "Where have you been?" Low. Quiet. Like a match struck in a dark room. She doesn't stop walking. "Six years, Avery." His footsteps follow hers. "That's all I get? You just keep walking?" Don't react. Don't you dare react. "My love—" The words land like a detonation. Memories rupture through the carefully constructed wall—his hands, his laugh, the way he used to say those exact two words against her temple at 3 a.m. like they were the only words that mattered. She stops. He steps around her, blocking the door. Up close, he's worse. He smells like cedar and something warmer underneath, and her body remembers things her mind spent six years trying to forget. "Excuse me, Mr. Vance." Her voice is glass—smooth on the surface, fractures underneath. "You're in my way." He doesn't move. He laughs instead—that low, devastating laugh she used to live for—and the sound of it carves something hollow behind her sternum. "You walked out without a word," he says, and the laughter dies. What replaces it is harder. Rawer. "Six years. And that's your opening line?" "I don't know what you're—" "Don't." His jaw tightens. "Don't insult me." He steps back to check the door—someone passing in the hallway—then turns the lock with a sharp click that echoes through the empty room like a verdict. Of all the people. Why Lucas? Why now? "I have nothing to say to you." She lifts her chin. "Whatever you think happened between us—" "I finally know your name." His voice cracks on the word name, just barely, just enough. "Do you understand that? Six years, and I didn't even know your name. I've been looking for a ghost." Her heart moves. She hates it for moving. "That's not my problem," she says. His face darkens. He crosses the room in three steps and pins her against the door—not rough, not threatening, just present, his forearms bracketing her on either side, close enough that she can feel the warmth radiating off his chest. "I miss you," he says quietly. And God help her—she kisses him back. For three terrible, perfect seconds, she kisses him back like six years collapsed into nothing, like time is negotiable, like she hasn't built an entire life around the decision to leave. Her hands find his lapels. Her body leans in before her brain can stop it. Avery. Stop. This is not who you are anymore. She shoves him back. Hard. The slap comes before she fully decides to deliver it—sharp c***k of palm against jaw—and Lucas goes very still. "I will take legal action." Her voice shakes but her eyes don't. "Don't touch me again." Something flickers across his face. Shock. Then a slow, dangerous burn of something she can't quite name. She walks out. She walks straight to the elevator, and the moment the doors close, her knees give out. She catches herself on the chrome railing, heart slamming, legs trembling. She stands there in the mirrored elevator watching herself breathe. Afraid? Or something worse? ❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖ She doesn't go into the office the next day. She sends her assistant. She stays in her childhood bedroom in her father's house on the North Shore—the room with the window seat and the white curtains she picked out at fifteen—and tells herself this is manageable. Lucas Vance has always been a category error. A beautiful, infuriating, impossible mistake. She just has to avoid him. That's all. Then the doorbell rings. And she hears his voice downstairs, warm and easy, charming her father's housekeeper in under thirty seconds. He came here. She presses her back to the bedroom door. He actually came here. She can hear him below—visiting her father, apparently, like they're old friends, like six years means nothing, like he didn't pin her against a door yesterday and shatter every wall she'd spent half a decade building. Thirty minutes later, knuckles rap against her door. "Miss Cole?" His voice through the wood. Low, controlled, infuriatingly warm. "You in there?" She doesn't answer. He knocks again. And again. "I can do this all day," he says pleasantly. "I cleared my afternoon." She yanks the door open. He's leaning against the doorframe, jacket gone, tie loosened, holding a manila folder and wearing the most devastatingly unfair smile she's ever seen in her life. "There she is." Like she just appeared from somewhere wonderful. "What do you want, Lucas." "Your signature." He holds up the folder. "That's it. Merger paperwork. Very boring. Thirty seconds of your time." She stares at him. That's it? What were you expecting, Avery? Erase that thought. Immediately. She steps back to let him in—a mistake, she knows it's a mistake, she makes it anyway—and he crosses her threshold like he belongs there, looks around the room once with those careful dark eyes, and sits down on the edge of her bed. Right on the edge of her bed. Like he isn't trying to kill her. "The papers," she says flatly. He pats the folder. "Come get them." She crosses the room. She reaches for the folder. And in the half second it takes her to register what's happening, his arm loops around her waist and she's sitting in his lap, his chin near her shoulder, both of them looking at the merger documents like this is a completely normal Tuesday. "Lucas—" "Sign the papers, Miss Cole." "Let go of me." "Nope." He says it so easily. So cheerfully. Like he's commenting on the weather. "This is what I told you yesterday. Shadow. Wherever you go." She signs the papers. She signs them in the most humiliating position of her professional life, sitting in the lap of the man she can't stop thinking about, hand trembling slightly on the pen. He watches her the whole time, and she feels every second of it. "Done," she says. "Next time, send your assistant." "Come back to work and I won't have to." She turns to face him—another mistake—and finds his eyes closer than expected, searching her face with an intensity that makes her want to look away and can't. "Lucas." She steadies her voice. "I'm married." The smile disappears. His face doesn't crumble. It doesn't shatter. It goes somewhere darker and quieter and far more frightening than anger—a controlled, careful stillness that makes her chest ache in a way she refuses to name. "I don't care," he says. He stands. He takes the folder. He walks out of her room without looking back, and she listens to his footsteps fade down the hallway until the front door closes. I don't care. Three words, and she doesn't know whether to be furious or terrified or something she has absolutely no business feeling— something that sounds dangerously close to relieved.