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Because what if he hadn’t? What if I’d just imagined the whole thing?
What if I was nothing more than a fleeting curiosity for him, someone he’d remember only as the woman who catered an event he’d barely wanted to attend?
By the time I reached my apartment, a three-story walk-up with peeling paint and a perpetually broken front light, I was ready to collapse.
My cat, Milo, greeted me with his usual indifference, flicking his tail before leaping onto the couch to curl up in his favorite spot.
“Nice to see you, too,” I muttered, setting my bag down and kicking off my shoes.
The relief was instant, but it did little to quell the restless energy still buzzing under my skin.
I poured myself a glass of wine—not the good kind, but it would do—and sank onto the couch next to Milo, who let out a disgruntled meow before shifting slightly.
I tried to focus on anything other than Christian. I thought about the gala, the food, the minor crisis with the oven that I’d managed to fix just in time.
But no matter where my mind wandered, it always circled back to him.
What was he doing right now?
Probably sipping whiskey in some penthouse suite, surrounded by luxury I couldn’t even fathom.
Maybe he was already moving on to the next thing, the next person, the next fleeting interest.
And yet…
I couldn’t shake the way he’d looked at me, like I was the only person in that crowded room. Like he was genuinely curious, genuinely intrigued.
I sighed, leaning my head back against the couch. This was ridiculous. I didn’t have time for distractions like this.
I had a restaurant to run, bills to pay, and a team that depended on me.
My life was a carefully balanced set of spinning plates, and if I stopped moving, even for a moment, everything could come crashing down.
There wasn’t much room for distractions—not even ones that wore tailored suits and smoldered like Christian Valen.
Besides, I’d been down the relationship road before, and it hadn’t exactly ended in fireworks.
The memory of my last relationship was like an old scar—faded but still there if I pressed on it too hard.
Aaron had been…well, at first, he’d been everything I thought I wanted.
Charming, supportive, someone who didn’t mind that I spent my days in a hot kitchen and my nights buried in invoices.
For a while, he’d seemed proud of me, even impressed by my ambition.
But then the cracks started to show.
It started small, with comments that felt like jokes but weren’t.
“You know, not everything has to revolve around Amélie,”he’d say with a lopsided grin, leaning against the doorway of our shared apartment.“You could take a night off, Scarlett. The restaurant won’t fall apart without you.”
At first, I brushed it off.
He didn’t understand what it took to build something from the ground up, the blood, sweat, and tears that went into creating a dream and keeping it alive.
And maybe that was my fault—I didn’t make enough time to explain it to him.
But over time, his jokes turned into something sharper.