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“I’d hold you down,” Nick tells me. “Kiss you slow. Make you come again and again until you were shaking, begging …”

It’s happening before I can stop it. A strangled sound escapes me, pleasure slicing through my center like lightning. My fingers tense, my body clenches, and then I’m falling, unraveling, the release so intense I nearly sob.

Nick curses sharply. “Fuck, I?—”

The rest of his sentence is lost to the sound of him breaking apart, following me over the edge. His deep, shuddering moan makes me tremble. My pussy quivers under my hand. My eyes are wet.

Moments later, we come back to earth. Neither of us speak. I lay bonelessly against my pillows, turning my head to look at the window. The rain has let up, leaving me in silence, in moonlight, the hollow feeling of my phone in my hand.

Then Nick murmurs, “Sienna.”

“Yeah?”

“I overheard what you said to your mom. That last night in Fiji.”

Oh.He knows.

I’m quiet for a moment, waiting for the embarrassment, the shock to the system, the humiliation. It doesn’t come. Instead, I feel relief. I don’t have a secret anymore.

“I wanted to tell you,” I say, “but I didn’t know how you felt, and the contract?—”

“I know,” he says. “Say it now.”

I smile softly into the darkness. “You know I can’t.” I scrub my hand over my cheeks—why am I crying? “Will you stay on the phone?”

“Of course I will.”

I drift off to the sound of Nick’s slow breathing, and when I wake up hours later, sunlight is shining through the curtains. I check my phone and see he’s sent me a good morning text. And beneath it, there’s another message—one that douses me in cold water.

Unknown, 6:09 AM

This is a message for Sienna Hayes from the office of Victor Harwood. Call this number at your earliest convenience. There is something we need to discuss.

Chapter 21

Nick

It’s a full-fledged spring day by the time John pulls the car up to my family home the next morning. Snow dots Victor’s lawn in tiny, shrinking islands, green creeping into the hedges and flower beds.

A new season. A new start.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m walking into a snake pit unprepared as I cross the threshold of my childhood home. I spent the night in bed, awake, staring at the glittering cityscape and figuring out what I want to say. To Victor, who won’t be happy to hear how colossally I fucked up my fake marriage. To Sienna, who was breathing softly on the other end of the phone until sunrise.

I don’t deserve her. I know I don’t—but she handed me her heart last night even so. She said my name like it belonged to her, whispering it into my ear. The tremble in her voice was thick with need and a kind of trust no one had ever afforded me before.

This determined, formidable, successful woman chose me. A man who was born into gold and diamonds and was required to be none of those things.

Under my covers with my hand wrapped where I’d imagined hers for weeks, something solidified inside me. A truth finally took form: it doesn’t matter if I’m Nick Harwood. It doesn’t matter if Sienna Hayes can’t love me.

She does anyway.

And I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure she gets what she needs.

Dad,I rehearse in my head as I walk through the door of my family home,there is no accepting the life we pictured after this, a life where Sienna and I never see each other again once we get divorced. I’m going to find another way.

I pull out my phone, nervously scrolling through news headlines while I walk up the stairs to Victor’s study. Still nothing about Sienna’s dad—whoever hired the PI seems to have given up, thank God. I flick through articles upon articles on how I seem completely changed. Photos of Sienna and I plastered across websites, smiling, laughing, caught in those unguarded moments that make us look real.

Wearereal.