“What are you working on?” Dahlia breezes in through the doorway to my office. She’s carrying a thin stack of folders in her hands that she drops unceremoniously on the desk.

“Coordination.”

“For?”

I type out the last few words of the email I’m writing and tear my eyes away from the computer screen. Dahlia is waggling her eyebrows at me. 

“For work.”

“Liar.”

“Fine. For my next trip.”

“Okay,” she says, cocking one hip to the side and crossing her arms over her chest. “Who is this woman? Is this the flowers and chocolates woman?”

I roll my eyes. “If I tell you, will you leave?”

“Probably not.” I give her a look, and she sighs. “I’ll leave as long as you tell me.’

“It’s the same woman. Now go.”

“No way. I want to know more about this—” Dahlia looks toward the ceiling. “Catherine? Kelly?”

“Kennedy.”

“Kennedy. I want to know more about Kennedy. I can’t remember the last woman who had you shirking your duties in the office to plan another vacation the day after you got back from the Virgin Islands.”

“Stop stalking my schedule.”

“It’s my job to know where you are, old friend. If I didn’t, this company would fall apart.”

“That’s probably true.”

“You took her to Virgin Gorda on your first date?”

I lean back in my seat, putting both hands behind my head. “What are you digging for, Dahlia?”

“Gossip, obviously.” This is the kind of joke only Dahlia could make, because nobody on earth is more tight-lipped than she is about my business, personal or otherwise. She presses her lips together, then looks at her watch. “You have time to give me at least some details before the executive meeting.”

I can tell she’s not going to leave unless I give her something, and I might be acting reticent about it, but it’s only because I have special arrangements to make for this vacation that I wouldn’t otherwise need to pay attention to. But Dahlia is arguably my best friend in the city, aside from people like Adam Zeller. I’ve gone to a few of the parties the Wilders—Dominic and his new wife, Vivienne—have put on, but I’m not usually around the city to take advantage of that kind of invitation. And Dahlia is so real with me, in a way that lots of other people can’t bring themselves to be, that it’s stupid to shut her out of the planning phase.

I nod toward the chairs across the desk from me, and she drops herself into one of them, folding her hands in her lap. “I’m ready.” I laugh. Dahlia could have gone to college with me instead of the community college she did go to. She’s that on top of shit. It’s a good thing that I met her—where was it? —somewhere in Asia on a backpacking trip. She was looking for a job in New York City. I was looking for an executive secretary who wouldn’t be a pushover. It was a match made in heaven.

“Ready for me to tell you…”

She narrows her eyes, leaning her elbows onto the surface of the desk. “I haven’t seen you this obsessed with planning a trip in years. You should see your face.” She presses her lips together and narrows her eyes even more, like she’s squinting at a computer screen with all of her might.

“It’s an important trip.”

Dahlia slaps her palms down on the desk, a playfully serious look in her eyes. “Don’t be cagey with me. Who is she? What’s got you all hot and bothered like this?”

I lean forward, resting my own elbows on the desk. Images from the weekend on Virgin Gorda flash into my mind one after the other. The determined look on Kennedy’s face. The way her body worked to get over those boulders, to get over a barrier in her mind that I’m only beginning to understand. The guilt that filled her expression when she told me about that accident with Abby. “You know, it was only a bet.”

Dahlia rolls her eyes harder. “Another Zeller creation?”

“Naturally.”

“But it didn’t turn out that way?”

“No. He picked the one girl in the bar with an actual life story. She wasn’t frigid. She…” I don’t want to reveal too much about Kennedy’s personal life, not even to Dahlia, because I know she’d hate that. I don’t have to ask her. “She has her reasons for being cautious.”

Dahlia gives me a sidelong look. “She got onto your private jet and flew off to Virgin Gorda on the first date. She can’t be that uptight.” It brings a smile to my face—an idiotic, huge, ridiculous smile—as soon as Dahlia’s words sink in. She can’t help but smile back at me. “Oh, my God, Hawke. Look at you.”

“She did get onto the plane with me and go. That’s true.” But suddenly, in this moment, it doesn’t seem like Kennedy did that because her curiosity got the better of her, because she was interested in money, because she wanted a free trip. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the weekend, it’s that curiosity almost never gets the best of Kennedy. Which means that everything she did, she did knowing that it was a risk. 

And taking risks—taking any risk at all—is a big deal for her. A huge deal. It’s all fitting into place with what she told me about Abby, that party, that car accident. 

That means that the heat between us, and the ravenous, insatiable woman Kennedy becomes when we’re behind closed doors, or even on the beach against an outcropping of rock, is because she genuinely trusts me. 

I grin so hard that it hurts my face.

“I never thought I’d see this,” Dahlia says, and then she lets out a low whistle. “Gideon Hawke is seriously in love. Not that goofy shit where you’re obsessed with a woman for a week and then asking me to send her a kiss-off box of chocolates.”

“It’s definitely not that.”

“I can tell.”

Dahlia stands up and taps her fingers against the pile of folders on the desk. “These need signatures.”

I straighten up, trying unsuccessfully to stop smiling like a fool while I’m sitting in my office at the company that I founded and still own. “Anything else on the agenda?”

Dahlia heads toward the doorway, turning back at the last moment. “Executive meeting in twenty. But iron out some of those trip details first, or they’re all going to ask you why you’re grinning like a kid who’s discovered candy.”

I open the first folder and sign the document without even reading it.

But by the time I move on to the second folder, the smile is fading from my face.

Dahlia didn’t bring up Andrea.

But here in my office, away from the beach and the waves and Kennedy, she’s the ghost in the back of my mind, reminding me that last time I felt this way, I got burned.

That’s not going to happen again, I tell myself firmly. Things are different this time.

I sign the rest of the papers with a messy scrawl and turn back to my computer. They’re different now, but one false move and I could send Kennedy running in the opposite direction. Back in the city, things with her don’t seem quite so certain.

I’ll get it right this time. I have no other choice.