Chapter 5: Love Triangle
1133 Words
Hardin’s POV
We've met.
Two words. And somehow they managed to do what two years of distance, a dozen failed relationships, and every wall I'd carefully built around myself couldn't.
They cracked something open.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Twenty minutes earlier, I had walked into the house with Julian behind me and told myself I had things to do. A call to return. Documents to review before dinner. Julian could get settled on his own — Mrs. Chen would show him around.
I made it as far as the bottom of the staircase.
Stood there for a moment, looking up.
Mrs. Chen can tell her dinner is at seven. That was the sensible thought. The correct thought. The thought a man with any self-control would have acted on.
I was halfway up the stairs before I finished having it.
I didn't examine that too closely. I just knocked on her door and said her name and waited, and when she opened it, and I saw her properly for the first time in two years — glasses slightly crooked, chin slightly lifted, the particular expression she wore when she was holding herself together through sheer stubbornness — I said the first safe thing that came to mind.
You look well.
Two years. That was what I gave her.
Even I knew it was inadequate.
I stood in the middle of my own living room, watching Tessa smile at Julian with that careful, composed expression she only used when she was hiding something, and I felt a tightness in my chest that I hadn't felt since the day I watched her walk through airport departures with her chin up and her shoulders squared and her whole body radiating the kind of dignity that made me want to call her back.
I hadn't called her back.
I'd stood there and let her go because it was the right thing to do. Because she was too young. Because my feelings were my problem and not hers to carry. Because sending her away was the most selfless thing I'd ever done even if it felt like tearing something out of myself.
And now she was standing three feet away from me, smiling at my supposed brother, and the word Paris was sitting in the middle of the room like a grenade nobody had pulled the pin on yet.
"How do you two know each other?" I asked. My voice came out even. Controlled. The way it always did.
Julian turned to look at me with that easy smile of his that I'd been trying to trust for six months. "We were at the same university. Crossed paths a few times."
I looked at Tessa.
She pushed her glasses up her nose — something she did when she was nervous, something she'd done since she was sixteen and it had always been the tell she didn't know she had — and nodded once. "Something like that."
Something like that.
I filed it away.
Julian had his hands in his pockets now, relaxed and unbothered, glancing around the living room like he was cataloguing it. He did that sometimes — that quiet, methodical way of taking in a room that I'd put down to general curiosity. Now, standing here watching him look at my house, my furniture, my life, something about it sat differently.
I pushed the thought down.
"I'll have Mrs. Chen show you to your room," I said to him. "We'll have dinner at seven. There are things we need to discuss."
"Of course." He nodded pleasantly. Then he turned to Tessa, and the smile warmed by several degrees. "It really is good to see you again, Tessa."
She smiled back. Polite. Tight at the corners.
I watched Julian follow Mrs. Chen down the hallway and waited until I heard the guest room door close before I turned back to Tessa.
She was already looking at me.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The house was quiet the way it used to be quiet on Sunday mornings when we'd both end up in the kitchen at the same time and pretend we weren't glad for the company. Some things hadn't changed. The quality of the silence between us was exactly the same as it had always been — full of everything neither of us was saying.
"You're tired," I said.
"I'm fine."
"You've been on a plane for seven hours."
"Hardin." She said my name the way she always had — slightly exasperated, slightly fond, trying to sound more certain than she felt. "I said I'm fine."
I looked at her for a second longer than I should have. Then I nodded.
"Dinner at seven," I said. "Mrs. Chen will bring you anything you need before then."
I turned to leave.
"Hardin."
I stopped.
"How is Margaret?" Her voice was quieter now. The composure softened just enough to let something real through. "Is she — how bad is it?"
I turned back. And for just a moment, standing in the hallway of the house my mother had filled with warmth for twenty years, I let myself look at Tessa the way I actually wanted to. Not carefully. Not with calculation.
Just looked at her.
"She's stable," I said. "She'll want to see you tomorrow morning. She's been asking about you."
Something crossed Tessa's face. Relief, maybe. Or the particular kind of pain that comes with being loved by someone you're afraid of losing.
"Okay," she said softly.
I nodded once and walked away.
I made it as far as my study. Closed the door. Stood in the middle of the room and exhaled slowly.
Paris. Julian had said it like it was a coincidence. Like two people bumping into each other at a museum. Crossed paths a few times. And Tessa had nodded along with that careful expression she used when she was agreeing to something she didn't fully agree with.
This can't be jealousy. I can't be jealous right?
Something was off. I'd built a company from nothing by trusting my instincts and right now every single one of them was telling me that Julian Cole and Tessa Morgan knew each other in a way that went far beyond crossing paths.
I moved to my desk and opened my laptop. Pulled up the private investigator's file I'd compiled on Julian over the past six months before accepting him to be my true long-lost brother. I'd been careful.
But I'd missed something. I could feel it.
I scrolled to the section on his time in Paris.
The university. The dates. The timeline.
Tessa had been there at exactly the same time.
I sat back slowly. Picked up my phone. Dialed, and immediately my secret agent had picked.
"I need everything you have on Julian Cross."
- Writer
