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“You okay?” Lila’s brows slanted.

“Sure,” I said. “Tired, that’s all. Yes, of course I’ll do the east wing with you next week. Happy to.”

“Great,” she said. She moved for the door, then paused. “Cassandra?”

“Yes?” Nerves shot through me.

“Can I ask you something?”

My stomach churned. She was going to ask me about Blake. What was I going to say?

But instead, she came around and sat in the chair in front of me. “You were close to your parents, right?”

It wasn’t anywhere near the question I’d expected. For a moment, I was too surprised to answer. Then I did. “Yes,” I said simply. “I was. Not so much anymore. I mean, my mom’s dead, obviously. And Dad is… away. But when we were younger, yes. We were very close.”

She looked like she wanted to hear more, so I continued.

“I was Dad’s little helper, with the other kids. I liked being the person he could count on when he was running around looking after us. And Mom, well, Mom was always busy with the hotel, but at night she’d come home and come to me for the rundown of how everything went. She treated me like… her source, if that makes sense. She knew Dad would gloss over the hard stuff, or the little details about what each of the kids had done that day. So we had a special relationship that way.”

Lila nodded. It seemed like she wanted to say something, but was holding back. Then she blurted out, “Did you ever have to hide anything from them? Something they’d be incredibly upset about?”

She was trying to play it cool, like this was a casual question, but I could see the way her lip did a quick quiver before she pinched it against the other.

My chest suddenly hurt. I knew what she was asking. I’d been so cavalier about the arrangement she and Blake had made, but I thought about what it would be like if I had a secret so big, and so devastating for my parents, that they’d have severed ties with me.

They wouldn’t have, I realized. I knew that in my bones. They would never have told me there was something about me that made me unlovable.

When I looked at Lila, I didn’t see the person standing between me and Blake. I saw a person trapped in her own pain, so damaged by a painful truth—the threat of losing the love of the people who were supposed to love her unconditionally. And I saw how her business with Blake was the one thing she could count on. Blake had promised he would stick with her. How could he possibly let her down?

I swallowed down the lump that was threatening to form in my throat.

He’s not yours to have.

“Can I tell you something about Blake?” I asked. “It’s related, I promise.”

Lila blinked, but recovered quickly. “Of course.”

“I’ve really appreciated getting to know him during our time together. He respects what my mom was trying to do here. I mean, at first he kept talking about high-end luxury; clean lines and marble porticos. But he’s adapted.”

“He suggested we propose a few iterations of how the hotel could look in our final report,” she said.

“Right. And you know what shifted his viewpoint?”

She twisted her hands in her lap. “We haven’t had a chance to discuss it.”

I suspected they weren’t talking about a lot of things right now. Because of me.

“It was after we had that staff lunch a couple of weeks ago.”

That meeting where our legs had met under the table and we’d both just kept still, in a tacit connection so ridiculous and so completely innocent compared to what we’d done earlier this week. But it had been special, and symbolic somehow. Like we decided to be close to each other because it felt better than moving away.

“Remember how I talked about how my parents found the hotel after that other family lost control of it?”

“I remember,” she said softly.

“I think the story really affected him. He pulled up photos of older hotels in the United Kingdom and on the east coast, and talked about how we could embrace our historical roots instead of cutting them off. I hadn’t thought I’d cared about whether the place was modern or classic; I’d just wanted the business not to fail. I’d wanted my mom to have been proud of me.”

Just like Blake had said he thought she would be at that same lunch.