Page 68 of Perfect Composition

“Her stubbornness, irascibility, and willfulness.”

“Hey now,” Austyn protests.

My head whips around, and I narrow my eyes at my recalcitrant daughter. “Potty training, dressing for school, or missing curfew. Your pick.”

“How about none of the above and I offer to clear the table?” She shoots me a breathtaking smile.

A hand taps me on the shoulder. I whip around and find the identical version of that smile behind me on her father’s face. It’s overkill to my already overwhelmed senses. “How about you cut her some slack for the moment—” He jerks his head toward the security team still seated around the table. “—and I’ll address your curiosity if you get your cell phone.”

“My cell phone?” I’m confused, but I give in as I push back my chair.

Austyn quickly begins clearing the table of dirty plates and offering new ones to anyone who is still hungry. I snag my phone off the counter and shake my head over the amount of leftovers. “Beckett, I hope you have a large appetite.”

“Kane’s relief team will eat it.”

I whip my head around to the other man. “Your what?”

He shrugs. “We have to sleep sometime.”

I hold up my phone. “And this is supposed to explain?”

Beckett holds out his hand. “It will if you hand it over.”

I clutch my phone to my chest. “Are you crazy? There’s a thing called privacy.”

He rolls his eyes. “Fine. We’ll use mine since we have the same model.”

I don’t know why something so trivial sends a warmth through me when millions of people received the same phone after the last upgrade. I watch Beckett’s tattooed fingers quickly power down his phone. The long fingers I remember gliding over my skin are covered with ink, ink I’m sure carries memories. Memories I never shared with him.

Suddenly Murray’s doesn’t sit quite right with me, and I want just a few moments alone.

Then with a press of a button, he starts his phone back up. A familiar song—the company’s jingle in electronic format—plays when he does. He tosses his phone onto the table. “That’s why.”

“That’s why what?” I’ve been so absorbed in his hands, I’ve forgotten what we were even talking about.

He points at the phone. “That’s why I have a security team. I invested wisely after I made the money from that.”

I’m still confused. “So, you’re saying you bought some stock?”

“No. Paige, bird, I wrote the music.”

“The music,” I repeat. I follow the line of his arm where it rests on his phone. Then I fall a step back and gape at him. “You wrote the jingle for the computer company?”

He grins, this time with excitement, his mask completely dropped. “God, I wish you could see your face.”

“What? Why?” He cocks his head.

“You’re so giddy. You deserve to be,” I quickly add. “But it’s like this is a perfect score on a test or something and you’re racing home to share it.”

He traces the cover on his phone. “I don’t have a lot of friends.”

I scoff. “Whatever, Beckett. You’re a rock star and probably a billionaire or something.”

“Finding people to hang with isn’t the problem. Everyone wants a piece of you when you have money.” His voice is both sardonic and lonely. Before I can tell him that his money means less to me than my father’s did, he asks seriously, “Does my money change things?”

And I blurt out, “If it were up to me, I’d tell you to educate a thousand doctors. Then send them to the far corners of the globe where they can save a thousand lives. Then those lives can help raise fields of crops to feed a thousand villages. Money is worthless. True gold is found in the actions of what people do.”

His fingers reach out and tuck a piece of hair behind the arm of my glasses, trailing down my ear. “There she is.”