Chapter 3
Denny caught her by the lockers before she’d even wiped her makeup off, a small white card pinched between two fingers like it might bite him.
“Your VIP left this.” He held it out. “Said only Silk gets the number.”
Isla took it without hurrying. A name, a phone number, nothing else. No logo, no title, no company. Rich men usually wanted their names to mean something the second they left the room. This one hadn’t bothered.
She turned the card over. Blank on the back.
“Cute,” she said, and slid it into her bag before Denny could ask any of the questions building behind his eyes.
She didn’t call that night. Didn’t call the next day either. She let it sit in her bag for three full days, because a man like that expected to be chased, and Isla had learned a long time ago that the fastest way to lose leverage was to hand it over for free.
On the fourth night, she sat cross-legged on her bed in the apartment she could barely afford, phone lit up in the dark, and typed the message slow enough to get it right.
*Silk. You left something for me to find.*
She stared at it a long moment before she sent it, because once it was sent, this stopped being a thing that had happened to her and started being a thing she was doing on purpose. She sent it anyway.
The reply came back in under a minute.
*Took you long enough.*
*I don’t do rushed*, she typed.
*I noticed. Dinner. Tomorrow night.*
*I told you. I don’t do outside.*
*Outside. Tomorrow.*
*You already crossed that line.*
She looked at that for a while, the cursor blinking, and felt something in her chest tighten in a way that wasn’t fear and wasn’t quite excitement either. Something closer to recognition. He wasn’t playing the game the way the others played it, all flattery and easy money. He played it like someone who’d never once lost.
Good, Isla thought. Neither had she, not really. She’d just never had anything worth winning before.
*My place*, he wrote. *Not yours.*
*Careful. That’s a lot of trust for a stranger.*
*I’ve had worse strangers in my house.*
An address followed, dropped into the thread without ceremony, and Isla recognized it before she’d even finished reading the street name. A building downtown, glass and steel, the kind that had its own name instead of a number. She’d seen it in the background of one of Beatrice’s photos once, months ago, some skyline shot with a caption about how proud she was of him.
Of course. Of course it was his building.
Isla set the phone face down on the mattress and lay back, staring at the water stain on her ceiling that had been there since she moved in. Somewhere across town, in a house with better ceilings, Beatrice was probably asleep, probably dreaming about seating charts and venue deposits for a wedding to a man who currently had another woman’s number saved in his phone under a name that wasn’t real.
She looked at the address one last time.
Beatrice would hate this.
Isla smiled.
Good.
She got up, opened her closet, and started deciding what a woman wore to walk into a billionaire’s apartment like she belonged there.
-----
The next evening, Isla stood outside the building longer than she meant to, tipping her head back to find the top of it, glass catching the last orange light of the day like it was showing off on purpose.
Doorman didn’t ask her name. Just her floor. Which meant Rhys had already told them to expect her, which meant he’d been thinking about tonight longer than the twelve hours since he’d texted her the address.
That detail landed somewhere warm and satisfied in her chest, and she tucked it away without examining it too closely.
The elevator opened directly into his apartment, no hallway, no doors, just floor-to-ceiling windows and a skyline that made her mother’s dining room look like a shoebox.
There wasn’t a single photograph anywhere. Not of family. Not of vacations.
Certainly not of Beatrice.
Funny.
Rhys stood by the bar with his sleeves pushed up, no tie, none of the polish from the club.
His eyes moved over her once. Not slowly. Not hungrily. Like he was confirming she’d actually walked through the door.
“You changed your hair.”
Isla blinked. “You noticed?”
“You weren’t wearing it down at the club.”
“You came,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
“You told me you don’t do outside.”
“I lied.” She let her bag slide off her shoulder onto the nearest chair, claiming the space like she’d already decided it was hers. “I do plenty of things I say I won’t.”
Somewhere in that bag, her phone lit up once, a text she didn’t look at.
“Drink?” he asked.
“Depends what you’re offering.”
“Whatever you want.”
He turned to the bar without waiting for an answer, pulling two glasses down, ice cracking into each one. Isla followed, close enough that when he straightened, there was barely a hand’s width between them.
He reached past her to set her glass down on the counter at her back, his arm brushing hers, close enough that she caught the clean, warm scent of him under the whiskey.
Neither of them stepped back.
Neither of them kissed.
Isla smiled.
Beatrice had always believed some things could never be taken from her.
Tomorrow she’d still believe that.
Isla intended to let her keep believing it, right until she couldn’t.