Chapter two

 Aria

I stared at that message for a solid four minutes.

Then I typed back: Who is this?

Three dots appeared immediately. Like he’d been waiting.

You know who this is.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand and pressed both hands over my face and just laid there in the dark doing absolutely nothing useful. My heart was going insane. My brain was going insane. Every functioning part of me was screaming that this was wrong, that I needed to delete the message and go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and pretend it never happened.

I picked the phone back up.

How did you get my number?

Your mother’s contacts. Goodnight, Aria.

And then nothing. 

Just silence and the glow of my screen and me, lying in a mansion in Minnesota at midnight, officially losing my mind over a man I had no business thinking about.

I didn’t sleep until three.

Morning came too fast and too bright and I laid in bed for a full ten minutes arguing with myself about breakfast.

I could stay upstairs. Claim a headache. Send my mother a text and spend the morning hiding in this room like a coward with good survival instincts.

Or I could go down there and act like a normal person who had not received a cryptic, borderline unhinged text from her stepfather at midnight.

I went downstairs

.

I wore an oversized cream sweater and jeans because I refused absolutely refused to let that message make decisions for me. My hair was down, no makeup, just me being completely unbothered and totally fine.

I was not fine.

The kitchen smelled like coffee and something warm from the oven and my mother was already at the island in her silk robe, scrolling her phone, toast half eaten beside her. She looked up and smiled and said good morning and asked how I slept.

“Great,” I said. Liar.

I poured myself coffee and kept my back to the room and told myself he probably wasn’t even down yet. It was barely eight. Maybe he was still upstairs. Maybe he’d already left for the office. Maybe I could get through this breakfast without combusting.

“Good morning.”

Low. Calm. Right behind me.

I gripped my mug.

He walked past me to the coffee machine like I was furniture, poured himself a cup, and leaned back against the counter in a navy suit that fit him like it had been assembled directly onto his body by someone with an agenda. Hair neat. Jaw freshly shaved. Completely, infuriatingly composed.

His eyes moved to mine over the rim of his cup.

Down. Just briefly. Taking in the sweater, the jeans.

Something in his expression shifted barely, just a flicker and then he looked away.

I wanted to throw my coffee at him.

My mother left at nine for a client meeting in Eden Prairie, kissed us both on the cheek, told us not to let the housekeeper leave before she finished the east corridor and then she was gone in a cloud of perfume and car keys.

And then it was just us.

In this enormous, silent house.

I took my coffee to the living room and sat on the couch and pulled out my laptop like a person with things to do and absolutely zero awareness of the man now moving around the kitchen behind me. I could hear him. The quiet sounds of him a cabinet closing, the newspaper folding, the particular quality of silence that a room has when Caden Voss is in it.

I opened my laptop.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

“You’re going to break that hinge.”

I looked up. He was standing in the living room doorway, cup in hand, watching me with that expression that gave nothing away and somehow said everything.

“I’m working,” I said.

“On what?”

“Things.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost. “Things.”

He walked into the room not to the chair across from me, not to the window. To the couch. He sat down at the other end, crossed an ankle over his knee, opened his newspaper like we did this every morning, like this was completely normal, like I wasn’t currently having a quiet breakdown three feet away from him.

I stared at my laptop screen seeing nothing.

“About last night,” I said, because apparently I was doing this.

“What about it.”

Not a question. A wall.

I turned to look at him. He didn’t look up from his newspaper. Jaw set, eyes moving across the page, one hand loose around his coffee cup.

“The message,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

Now he looked up. Slow, steady, completely unbothered. “I didn’t send you anything last night.”

The audacity. The absolute, breathtaking audacity of this man.

“Caden”

“Aria.” My name in his mouth, quiet and final, like a door being shut. “Drop it.”

I stared at him. He held my gaze without blinking, without shifting, without giving me a single thing to grab onto, and I felt something hot and frustrated crawl up my chest because he was doing it again that thing where he made me feel like I was the unreasonable one just by being completely, inhumanly still.

I turned back to my laptop.

Fine.

Fine.

We sat in silence for twenty minutes and it was the most stressful twenty minutes of my life. I was aware of him the way you’re aware of a storm not looking directly at it but feeling the pressure of it constantly, that low electric charge in the air that meant something was coming whether you were ready or not.

His phone rang.

He answered it, said four words, hung up. Stood.

“I have a meeting downtown.” He picked up his jacket from the armchair where he’d draped it. “Don’t open the door for anyone.”

I looked up. “I’m twenty-one, not twelve.”

“I know exactly how old you are.” Said quietly. Said like it meant something else entirely.

He shrugged on his jacket, straightened his cuffs, picked up his keys from the side table. Walked toward the door.

“Caden.”

He stopped. Didn’t turn around.

“Why did you tell me to wear something decent?”

Silence. Just a beat of it, short and loaded.

He turned his head just slightly, just enough that I could see the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth.

“Because the things that go through my head when you don’t,” he said quietly, “are not things a man should be thinking about his wife’s daughter.”

He walked out.

The front door clicked shut behind him.

I sat on that couch completely unable to move, coffee going cold in my hand, heart slamming, thighs pressed together, staring at the space where he’d just been standing.

Omg.

Oh my God.

I was so unbelievably screwed.

My phone buzzed on the cushion beside me. I looked down.

Unknown number. Again. One picture this time a screenshot of my univer

sity student ID photo, the one taken at eighteen, all wide eyes and nervous smile.

And beneath it, four words.

You haven’t changed much.