Chapter 2:One night club

The car ride to his place passed in a blur of city lights and his hand resting, deliberately unhurried, on her knee. Neither of them spoke much. There didn’t seem to be a need to.

“Alexander,” Mila had repeated back at the club, testing the name like she couldn’t quite believe her luck by association, before Thalia had lost track of her somewhere near the dance floor. “As in Alexander Blackwood? The one who buys companies before breakfast?”

He hadn’t confirmed or denied it then. He didn’t seem inclined to now either, and Thalia found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she didn’t especially care who he was tonight. Tonight he was just a man who looked at her like she was the only interesting thing he’d found all year, and after four years of making herself small and careful, that was its own kind of intoxicating — more than the champagne, if she was honest.

“Tell me your name again,” he said, though he’d already heard it twice.

“Thalia.”

“Thalia.” He said it like he was deciding to keep it.

The private elevator to his penthouse was mirrored on every side, which meant she couldn’t look anywhere without seeing the two of them reflected back — his hand at her waist, her own flushed, unfamiliar expression. She’d never once, in twenty-five years, looked at herself and seen someone reckless.

She wasn’t sure she minded.

“Second thoughts?” he asked, watching her study her own reflection.

“None,” she said, and meant it.

The doors opened onto a hallway she barely registered — dark wood, low light, the quiet of a life with no one else in it. He didn’t rush her through it. If anything he slowed down, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every minute of it, which should have felt strange from a man who ran a company by acquiring things fast and asking questions later.

“You don’t have to be careful with me,” she said, not entirely sure where the words came from.

“I know,” he said. “I’m choosing to be anyway.”

She would spend the next several weeks trying to reconstruct the exact moment she’d stopped being the woman who said no to things. She never could find it precisely. It hadn’t been one moment — it had been the whole night, building slowly instead of all at once: the champagne, his hand at her waist, the particular quality of his attention, like she was the only thing in a room he usually found disappointing.