Everyone really wanted this deal. Ward can’t handle more setbacks right now, even if he’s the only one who seems to be keeping it together.
I doubt Nick can either, judging by the way I catch him brooding in front of his soaring windowpanes overlooking Chicago in its summer majesty. He always lightens up as soon as he notices my presence, but I’m able to see a different kind of family resemblance between him and Ward when he slips into grump-mode.
Both brothers are closed books in their own ways.
Human vaults with something very dark and painful tucked away inside.
Why?
The hardest thing is imagining how the Winthrope deal falling through could affect poor Beatrice. The day before she collapsed in her office, she told me she could finally taste what she and Godfrey set out to do when they were young.
They wanted to build a castle, a palace, right along Lake Michigan. It was a silly pie-in-the-sky dream of two young artists madly in love then—except for the fact that Ross Winthrope’s outrageous luxury hotel can actually make their fever dream a stunning reality.
Without the contract, she’ll be crushed.
I worry. With a bad heart, can she handle it?
“...start acting thirty, nimrod.” Ward’s booming voice draws my focus back to the room.
Nick stops his pacing, running a hand over his face. “Whatever. There must be something we can do.”
“I said we’ll figure it out.” Ward’s voice is iron, and strangely soothing.
My eyes connect with Nick’s in a hopeful glance, desperately wanting to believe him.
Nick moves to the cabinet Ward keeps his mini fridge in and reaches inside. “Where’s the damn water? My throat feels like cotton.”
“I’ll get it!” I bolt out of the room before either of them can stop me.
Thank God. You’d need a chainsaw to cut the tension in there. Grabbing the water gives me an excuse to breathe.
The air in the hall feels ten times cooler, but the atmosphere is just as morbid.
The building isn’t empty, but you’d never know it from the void that permeates Brandt Ideas these days.
I stop by my desk to change into the more professional house shoes he insisted I buy with his stupid lucky tie. They shuffle against the marble floor. I should have just worn flats, but wearing Ward’s slippers in the office makes him acknowledge what passed between us, even if he’ll never admit it.
I go to the supply room and grab an armful of water bottles.
On the way back to his office, Andrew watches me from the glass wall his marketing team’s office suite sits behind. A girl from accounting peers at me through the gap in a horizontal blind made bigger by her finger.
God.
We won’t be able to hide the crisis forever.
Everyone can feel something dreadfully wrong, and they act like I’ll be the bearer of news, good or bad.
If we lose this contract, there’ll be resignations. No one wants to go down with a sinking ship.
And when people don’t come to work, I get their workload if it’s anything I can do. I’m not sure I can handle more without ending up in the psych ward.
I may have panic-called Brina to vent the day I found out Ward was my Dark Knight from the museum, but this place wasn’t HeronComm bad with her badass boss-turned-husband ruling over his people with an iron fist.
Not until today.
My hands are too full of Fiji bottles to open the door, so I kick it. Nick opens the door for me and grabs a bottle from my mound, rips the cap off, and starts chugging it like a man dying of thirst.
I restock the rest in the cabinet fridge.
Wardhole taps his pen like a gavel on his desk. My eyes snap to those hands, so strong and strangely calloused for a man who grinds away behind an office desk all day. They’re more like a carpenter’s fingers, weathered and imposing, far too good at making me imagine what they’d feel like brushing my skin.
“It’s got to be the personal factor giving Winthrope cold feet,” he grumbles, mostly to himself. “What the hell can we do about it?”
I admire how calmly he asks the question. He hasn’t lost his temper the way he often does—or maybe he only loses his temper with me.
Ha-ha. That bitter laugh in my head must translate to my face.
“Why are you smirking now, Paige? What’s so funny?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Nothing.”
“It’s never nothing with you,” he says, dark whirls in his eyes ripping the truth out of me,