I found Emery on the beach.
The one with waters more polluted than the Styx, probably mutating her into one of the X-Men by the second.
She stood waist-deep in the ocean, fully dressed, staring at the dark sky. Waves crashed against her back, but she remained an immovable force. I’d never seen anything so fierce. She reminded me of the Charmaine Olivia painting displayed in the Prescott Hotel in Paris. A sea of chaos and colors consumed the canvas, but all I saw was the subject.
You may not need me, but fuck, I need you.
I was an asshole with an ethical code that occasionally dipped as low as a genocidal dictator’s. Someone had to reel me in.
An entire day had passed. Enough time for Gideon to explain everything in excruciating detail. Now I’d get my girl back. Simple.
Pulling out my phone, I responded to Emery through text.
Durga: Tell me your favorite thing in the world.
Nash: You and whatever brought me to you.
She slid her phone from her pocket. Her tongue peeked past her lips, fingers flying.
Emery: That’s two things. You never follow the rules.
“Fuck the rules.”
She glanced up at me and waded through the water, hungry eyes eating a path down my body. The waves pushed her back and forth with their current. Each step she took seemed like a battle with gravity.
We met somewhere in the middle, where the waves hit her knees but didn’t do much damage.
“What threads tie us together?” No hello. Straight into the philosophical musings. So fucking Emery, my dick hardened. She splashed the water with her foot. “Isn’t it crazy how we mind our own business, not knowing our next step can be the one that determines our forever?”
I inched closer to her, settling into familiar territory, recognizing her like this. She always searched for meaning, for an explanation, for something to tell her why when the answer would likely do nothing for her.
But I’d give her the best response I could and hope she came back to me.
“Do you know what Moira is?”
“Moira?” Her head slanted. She tossed me a look that suggested she hated the fact that I knew a word she didn’t. If she could, she’d probably reach out and steal it, just like she’d stolen a piece of me.
“Moira is Fate. It’s the threads that bind us together.”
“You, me, Gideon, Virginia, Hank, Balthazar. We’re tied together.” Her hands wrung her shirt, bunching it at the front. “I know this, but Dad hasn’t explained everything to me. You won’t. So, I’m standing here, aware these threads exist and blind to what they look like. Help me, Nash. Dad is holding the info over my head until I return for each visit. I don’t blame him. I ditched him for four years.”
Fuck you, Gideon Winthrop. Fuck the position you’ve put me in.
I didn’t have an answer for her, other than I wanted her. “Come back to me?”
“Never.” Her lips quirked up, the moonlight performing a devious dance in her eyes. She kicked the water and watched the waves splash my suit slacks. “Not until you tell me.”
I wouldn’t. She knew this.
Every time she spoke of her dad, she made a face. Confused. Lost. Warring with whether to forgive him. She needed to hear this from Gideon, or she’d never recover the relationship they’d shared.
I toggled with the words, wondering how to say this without sounding completely whipped, then realizing I didn’t give two shits. “You are at war with yourself, and I’ve never wanted to pick up a suit of armor and fight for anyone more than I do now, but I know I can’t. This is your battle. This is your war. You’ll come back to me, Emery, or words like fate and destiny wouldn’t exist.”
“Fate? Destiny?” She shook her head. “You’re throwing some serious words around.”
I stepped closer, pushing a small wave onto her. “What are the odds I was in that bed the night you snuck into Reed’s room? That you are Durga? That I am Ben? That you ended up in the elevator with me? That it got stuck? That you worked for me? That I ran into you at the soup kitchen? I can go on, but what are the odds?”
“High!” She threw both hands up and began ticking her fingers. “You are Reed’s brother, and Betty took over your room. Of course, you’d sleep there. There aren’t that many people in Eastridge, and even less using the Eastridge United app. Makes sense that you’d be Ben.”
She ignored my you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me stare and continued, “I got a job from Reed, and he’s your brother. It was late, several people were trying to get into the elevator. There are power outages all the time during storms. And that’s the only soup kitchen in miles. Maybe there’s fate. Maybe there’s not, but are you really using us as proof it exists?”
“You—the girl who believes in magic words and starless skies—do not believe in fate?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know what I believe in, but it could all be a coincidence. Not fate.”
“It exists.” I closed the distance and wrapped a palm around the nape of her neck. “Fate is a hurricane. You think you know where it’s going. You think you’re safe. And just when you think you’ve weathered the storm, its path moves directly into yours. You, Emery Winthrop, are my hurricane. My fate. My Durga. My Tiger.”
I kissed her, running my fingers through her hair and tilting her head up to meet mine. Her fists clung to my shirt. A button flew off, but fuck if I cared.
She wrapped her legs around my waist. I brought my hands to her ass and pressed her against me. The waves pushed us deeper into the ocean. My cock fought to escape my pants, hard as fuck for her.
Emery pulled back and leaned her forehead against mine. She panted, still rubbing herself against me. Fuck. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
I knew she wouldn’t without knowing the full story, but I asked anyway, “Come back to me?”
“Not yet.”
Yet.
I’ll fucking take that.
Emery
KNOCK!
Knock!
“Coming!” I muttered, “Please, tell me you have not developed a habit of waking me up this early every morning.”
I padded barefoot to the door, passing a spare room, the living room, and the kitchen before reaching it. These upper-level suites were the real deal. Ida Marie once mentioned they went for a cool five-figures a night.
When finished, Nash’s penthouse would span two floors, the first story sharing real estate with two presidential suites. Delilah’s and, now, mine.
I swung the door open, expecting Nash. A cherubic face greeted me. I recognized him from a meet and greet with the staff. They came in last week to get a lay of the land before employee training began.
“Hi.” I kept a palm on my door. “Can I help you?”
He hopped from one foot to the other. “Mr. Prescott told me to sit outside and wait until you wake up.”
“I’m sorry.” I blinked, taking in his uniform. “What? He wants you to babysit me?”
“No. Oops.” Cherub Face reached down and collected a giant blue cooler. The type hospitals used to transport organs. He shoved it into my arms. “Here. I was supposed to get this to you when you wake up, but I really have to pee.”
“Thanks, I think?” I opened the cooler, heartbeat a fucking goner at the sight of my packed lunch. My fingertips ghosted my lips, remembering my kiss with Nash two nights ago.
Cherub Face’s feet tapped against the hall’s carpet. “Can I use your restroom?”
Uhhh… Hard pass.
Letting a stranger inside equaled the premise of every slasher flick.
Ceiling: Oddly sensible of you. Gold star.
“No.” I pulled out the lunch bag and set the cooler on my entryway table. “But you can use Mr. Prescott’s.”
“Are you sure?”
Lunch bag clutched in one fist, I pulled Nash’s keycard from my back pocket, led the guy down the hall, and let him inside. “Guest bathroom’s right there.”
As soon as he left, I tore open the bag. A note sat at the top.
HEY.
I’m not greeting you, Emery. You would think that. Control that ego, Tiger.
I’m saying hi to the voice in your head. The one you’re using to read this.
’Sup, sweetheart.
Tell Emery her ass looked fuck-hot in her jeans yesterday, her idea about alternating curtain colors was a stroke of Einstein-level genius, and it drives me fucking insane every time she whispers magic words.
Really, I think that’s you whispering them, isn’t it, Emery’s Inner Voice?
If you could tell Emery to come back to me, that’d be great.
NASH
I tamped a smile and rifled through a kitchen drawer for one of the hotel notepads. I wrote my answer on it.
Not happening.
EMERY
P.S. All you have to do is tell me.
And so the cooler saga began.
I’d wake up to one in the morning and drop it off in front of his door at night, along with my reply. On Saturdays, Nash drove me to see Dad, whose idea of telling me everything consisted of literally telling me every single detail as slowly as he could.
I wanted him to speed to the juicy bits, gloss over the yucky aspects of my conception, and get to the part where Nash somehow discovered everything before I had. At the same time, I knew Dad cherished my visits, so I let him take them at his pace.
Even if patience had never been my strong suit.
And every morning, when I woke up to a note in the cooler, I’d smile.
Fate is the Universe kicking Coincidence’s ass. We are an example of Fate proving to the world it exists. Come back to me?
NASH
I’d toyed with the paper, knowing Nash would ask this every day until I said yes, knowing I’d want to cave every time. Dad or Nash could put me out of my misery, but neither did, so I’d written back:
Never.
EMERY
P.S. Unless you tell me. In which case, I’m curious: If Fate and Destiny went to war, which do you think would win?
We worked together every day, with the exception of a few trips Nash took with Delilah. He’d leave by chopper on the roof, but he never failed to make me lunch and a note. The following morning, he replied:
Whichever brought you to me.
(Cheesy enough? Covering my bases here, since deep and philosophical didn’t work. I could also go with—the universe wants us together. Who are we to defy the universe? Pure gold. You could put that on a shirt.)
Come back to me?
NASH
I ran to my room and printed the shirt.
Who are we to defy the universe?
It felt like wearing Nash.
Chantilly left with Cayden, Ida Marie, and Hannah to do an interview with an architectural magazine about the hotel’s upcoming soft opening. Nash spent the morning with Delilah, schmoozing a local politician at an MLB game.
He entered the office around noon, sporting dark denim, a white Henley, and a baseball cap. When he caught me eating the sandwich he’d made, in the shirt he’d come up with, he leaned against the door frame, crossed his arms, and watched.
Self-satisfied and so damn cocky.
I popped the last bite into my mouth, incisors crunching on the Ruffles. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Will you trust that I have my reasons?”
“Yes, you want Gideon to tell me.”
“The fact that you’re calling him Gideon and not Dad is exactly my point.”
Actually, I always called him Dad to his face and mostly called him Dad in my head. In fact, I only used Gideon with Nash because I feared the unknown. So far, I understood the motivations behind everything Dad had recounted.
He stayed in a loveless marriage with Virginia, so he could keep me.
He made Balthazar partner, so he could keep me.
He didn’t turn them in, so he could keep me.
Understandable.
But what if the day came when he confessed he or Nash did something so bad, I could never forgive them? Or worse—I forgave them, because I wanted them both in my life that much.
I wrote my note in front of him and slapped it to his chest.
Nope.
EMERY
P.S. The only cheeses I like are white cheddar and string cheese eaten correctly (re: peeled).
A few days later, Nash arrived late to take me to Dad’s, which meant I’d walked to the bus stop, boarded, and watched him trail the bus until the next stop. I hopped down and ambled toward him.
“I got held up at the mechanic’s.” Nash raked his fingers through his hair. Once. “You could have waited. I doubt Gideon would care if you showed up late.”
He leaned against his car, arms crossed. He had replaced the roof. Through the windows, I noticed the leather chairs appeared reupholstered. All evidence of our night baltering… gone.
Pain lashed at my stomach. Ridiculous, but also proof I cared.
“Actually, I waited and texted you.” I opened my Jana Sport. “When I didn’t get a response, I left. Couldn’t risk it.”
I retrieved my sketchbook, barely glancing at the “Come back to me?” on his note from this morning. My pen moved fast across the paper. I yanked the note out, crumbled it into a ball, and handed it to him.
No.
EMERY
P.S. Out of all the lies, my favorite was you and me.
He unfolded it and read it with a raised brow. The amusement did nothing for my irritation. “I just realized something.”
I sighed, shoved the sketchbook into the Jana Sport, and dumped it into the car. “What?”
Nash closed the door for me and entered on his side. “Temper tantrums can be cute.”
Nash Prescott—the master of the backhanded compliment.
“For the record,” he continued, “my phone powered down. The mechanic forgot to return the charger to the car after he finished reupholstering.”
The following morning, my letter from Nash read:
You couldn’t look away from me yesterday. I know we’re waiting for Gideon and you fear what you’ll learn. I promise you, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Ask yourself: what do you have to lose when being scared? What do you have to lose when being fearless?
Come back to me?
NASH
P.S. Tell Gideon to hurry the fuck up. I’m impatient by nature and prone to getting my way. You could’ve finished a hundred fucking Ava Harrison audiobooks by now.
I did, in fact, relay the message to Dad the following week, who only laughed and told me Nash could wait. The answer would have pissed me off, but he said it with such ease and comfort, I’d never felt more certain that we’d be okay.
We spent the day talking about all the events that had to happen to lead Virginia to him.
“Things happen for a reason, Emery.” Dad pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You’ve got to trust that.”
That night, I struggled with a response for the first time.
No.
EMERY
P.S. What if it was fate that led me to you? When I ask myself questions like this, this path we’re on feels beyond us.
At this point, Dad and I had gotten into a groove. We’d fought our insecurities and found a relationship reminiscent of the one we used to share. This 1001 Arabian Nights-style blackmail could end without either of us feeling like we no longer had a reason to meet.
I could have told Dad to give me a quick rundown, so Nash and I could finally be together again. I didn’t.
Oddly, I did it for Nash.
He wore a distant look every time he dropped me off, and I knew he left for the cemetery to visit his dad while he waited. I also knew he felt so strongly about maintaining my relationship with Dad because he no longer had a chance with Hank.
So, I drew the meetings out, even when it gutted me and I sometimes caught Nash staring at me as if he was trying to figure out if I felt the same way.
Over a month later, the moment I feared came.
The Nash talk.
I wanted to hear this from Nash. How he’d found the ledger and burned it for me. The company he’d built off of the Winthrop Scandal and Dad’s secret investment. About the way he’d mistakenly blamed himself for Hank’s death. How he’d helped so many people to pay penance.
I’d already suspected most of it, so it didn’t come as a surprise. But at the end of it all, I realized something.
I’d seen it on his desk. The burnt leather, pages preserved inside.
Nash still had the ledger.
The one thing that could prove my dad’s innocence.
And he’d kept it to himself.
