I’d be damned if she made a fool of me.
We marched past the lawyer’s receptionist and into the boardroom where we’d been directed. Hellfire licked my heels and roared thunder at my back, though I knew I looked calm and unaffected. That impassive mask was always in place, the cool demeanor my armor. My family was reactionary, wearing every emotion not only on their sleeve, but on their faces and lips, and I was the steady one. The sensible one. The logic and reason to anchor their abundance of feeling. But that mask also kept everyone out, led them to assume I was dispassionate when I was just as excitable as the rest of them.
Let Evelyn Bower think I was unmoved. Let her think me passionless. Because my control and restraint would be her undoing.
The door handle was cool in my hand, the battle before me plain and clear, my focus singular, my resolve unwavering.
Until I opened that door.
Because sitting next to a snidely smiling Evelyn Bower was Maisie.
My thoughts slid and clicked like pins in a lock as Maisie and I stared, dumbfounded, across the room. I heard the words from Evelyn’s mouth as if from some great distance, one sticking, then repeating on a loop as it dawned on me exactly who the girl at her elbow was.
Maisie, the human pinball. Maisie, the sheep whisperer. Maisie, the thunderbolt.
My Maisie was Margaret Bower.
The daughter of my enemy.
2
Knock On Wood
MAISIE
Everything went on around us, but Marcus and I were caught in a moment, just like we had been in each other’s arms in the rain. Only this time, there was no magic. No shimmering possibility, no blossom of warmth. Just cold, hard realization.
The man I’d just stumbled into in the rain was Marcus Bennet. The son of my mother’s sworn enemy.
The reason for the feud was a mystery to us all. Beyond some long-standing dispute between our grandmothers, there was no reason for my mother’s dogged tenacity to ruin Longbourne and the Bennets. It wasn’t as if they were competition—their shop had been in decline for a decade or more, run aground by a drought orchestrated by my mother. On her way to build an empire, she had set out to raze the Bennets to the roots.
And she’d succeeded. Stealing accounts. Tarnishing their name. She’d sink to any depths to make the Bennets feel small.
Of course, this lawsuit business was low, even for her. That she’d taken out a contract to buy flowers from Longbourne was its own curiosity. But recently, the Bennets’ shop had started making money again, and Mother tugged on the chain she’d used to bind Longbourne, with the intent to heel them.
Heel and geld, if she could manage it.
My stomach turned over as Marcus and I stared at each other across the chasm that was the boardroom table between us. Of all the men in all the world, the sliver of hope I’d found in the drudgery of my life was a Bennet.
“Your hair is a mess,” Mother said under her breath as everyone sat down. “You could have put in a little effort, Margaret.”
“I can’t control the weather, Mother,” I answered, barely able to think with Marcus sitting across from me, his face cold and closed, flat but for the slightest crease between his brows.
It was then that I realized the door to him—the one I’d only just opened—was firmly shut. And locked. And that he’d thrown the key into the Hudson.
Our lawyer began to talk, but I didn’t hear a word he said over the thundering of my heart. This room was hell on a good day, but today, it was so deeply unbearable, I fought the urge to get up and walk out just to put a block between my mother and me.
If Bower Bouquets was our religion, my mother sat on a throne in the clouds, frowning down at all of us, with her blonde hair coiffed into a flawless French twist and cool eyes unforgiving as she cast her judgments and delivered the consequences.
And I was her favorite subject to exact her power on.
I had been a disappointment to her for all of my living memory. As a child, I was too messy and loud. As an adult, I was naive and unambitious. My hair was too short, my appearance never to scratch. A little lipstick wouldn’t hurt, I’d been told. Heels would make me taller, more elegant, I’d heard.
I was under no illusions—I would never please her, and I’d stopped trying. I would have wondered why I was here if I hadn’t known it had nothing to do with support and everything to do with control. The thing my mother wanted most in the world was to fashion me after herself. Once upon a time, I’d done as I was told. But thanks to my father, I was nothing like her, which served only to intensify her determination to restrain me. To force me into the box she’d built for me before I was even born.
And she’d use every tool in her arsenal to make her dream a reality.
The failure of her life was that I’d rather work in the charity division of Bower than the executive suites, a point that had prompted her to send me to England and subsequently lure me back to New York, where all the things I didn’t want awaited me.
Little had I known there would be someone else waiting too. One I wanted badly and without question couldn’t have.
Marcus sat silently across the long table, his eyes locked on Mother’s lawyer and mine locked on his.
I should have known who he was when I saw him. I’d thought the familiarity I felt was magic, a chance meeting, a fated beginning. It had been too perfect for words. After a solitary, lonely life, something had flipped on, illuminating me. It was a glimpse of another world, one brighter and happier than the one I inhabited.
And I’d floated away from him with the hope that maybe New York wouldn’t kill me after all.
And then he’d walked into this room and shut off all the lights in my heart.
Fate had intervened all right. Just not in the way I’d hoped.
I tucked my hair behind my ear, the locks wavy from the rain. Mother wasn’t wrong—I looked a mess. The second I’d walked in, her jaw had come unhinged, but there hadn’t been enough time for a true dressing down. I’d get one—of that, I had no doubt—but I didn’t care. I didn’t care what she thought or about this stupid meeting. I didn’t care about the frivolous lawsuit or her absurd vendetta with Longbourne. All I really cared about in that moment was what the man across the table thought of me.
Half an hour ago, he’d held me in his arms in the rain, the topography of his lean, rugged body leaving an impression against mine that I could still feel. I’d lost myself in the blue of his eyes, in the damp locks of his hair, black as a raven. He was majestic, his features touched with aristocratic grace. But those elegant lines were strong and square, proud and striking, the only incongruence his nose—the bridge flat near the top and shaped like that of a Spartan general, a Greek archer, a lean, battle-worn ancient. And he was just as mysterious, carrying a quiet air of command, of certainty and confidence that hadn’t only struck me then, but clung to me like the ghost of a scent.
There in those arms, I’d felt inexplicably safe. Sheltered by his body as we ran for cover in the rain, I’d somehow known he wouldn’t let anything hurt me. It was such a rare thing, to feel protected. Perhaps nothing more than a testament to the power he emitted even now as he sat both feet away and a world apart.