“Dex Stevens. I’d shake your hand, but—” He laughs. “Come on in.”
Then Jax is stepping into the living room, his arms filled with two bouquets of flowers.
“Hi,” he says to me.
I can hardly make my mouth work. “Hi.” The sight of him, God, it’s like the fucking sunrise, the most gorgeous sight I’ve ever seen and ever will see again. “What are you doing here?”
He gives me a half-smile but his eyes stay locked on my face as if he’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking. Nothing. I’m thinking nothing. My brain is a cascade of images—touching him, kissing him, getting fucked by him—and there are no words.
“I came to bring some flowers and congratulate your sister.”
“Thank you so much,” Bee says, a bright smile on her face. “Those are beautiful. Is one for Cate?” Leave it to her to say just the right thing.
“You guessed it. Is there somewhere I can put them?”
“Absolutely. You must be Jax, then. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“And you’re Bee. Cate talks about you all the time.”
Jax follows her into the dining room, and Dex leaps to my side, carefully taking Gabi from my arms. “Your billionaire dude is here,” he says.
“Very helpful, Dex.”
“Are you two going to make up?”
I groan. “Does Bee tell you everything?”
“Yeah. Can you blame her?”
“No.”
Then Jax is coming back into the room, followed close behind by Bee. He has his hands in his pockets. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look nervous.
“Cate, I have something to show you. Would you come out with me for just a while?”
The heat in my cheeks, the heat in my chest. All the anger I felt when I walked into work on my last day at Basiqué is gone. My heart does a slow turn. “Yes,” I whisper, and when he takes my hand to lead me out, I follow him.
Chapter Forty-Four
Jax
Cate doesn’t say much as she slides into the passenger seat of my rental car. It’s an Audi—the best they could do on short notice at the airport I flew into a couple of hours away from here—but she doesn’t seem to care. She doesn’t say much as I steer the car away from her sister’s house, or when I navigate straight to the main street of the town, which is of course called Main Street.
She doesn’t say much, but she never lets go of my hand.
If she feels anything like what I’m feeling, she’s searching for what she wants to say to me, but there aren’t enough words in the whole goddamn world to describe it.
I park the car in front of a storefront between a book shop and a café. Cate turns to me, one eyebrow raised. “You didn’t come all this way to take me out for coffee, did you?”
I laugh, and some of the tension in my gut eases away. “If you want coffee, we can get some right now. But no, I didn’t come here for that.”
“What are we doing here?”
“You’ll see.”
The storefront has paper over both the huge front windows, blocking the inside from view. Cate follows me tentatively, and when we reach the door and I pull a key from my pocket, her mouth falls open.
“Jax—why do you have a key to this building?”
I lead her inside. I had a crew come in overnight to freshen the space, which is an empty canvas for just about any kind of business you can imagine. Everything is newly white and smells like possibility.
“What’s that?”
She’s spotted it.
At the back of the room, smack in the middle of the wall, is a single desk. It’s an antique—one of the ones they used to use at the old New York Times offices during the newspaper heyday. I purposefully chose it to be the opposite of the sleek furniture that crowds every inch of the Basiqué offices.
This is a space for Cate.
Dropping my hand, she moves toward the desk, and as she gets closer I hear the tiny gasp that escapes her.
“What is this, Jax?”
She turns to face me, her eyes shining with so much delight I think the room actually gets brighter. On the desk is a nameplate. I woke up one of my business vendors in the middle of the night to get it made before I flew out of LaGuardia, so it’s been tucked in one of my bags since yesterday.
After I left my mother’s hospital room, I flew to the largest available airport in Cate’s home state and got in after midnight. I debated driving to her hometown in Winthrop Harbor right away, but decided that would look a little insane, so I booked a room at the best hotel in town.
This morning I drove to Cate’s old address in Winthrop Harbor. Sandra Sarzó gave it to me after I dressed her down for the way she handled my request about transferring Cate’s duties over the following months. Lucky for me, Cate’s emergency contact is still her mother, so I didn’t have to have one of my people track her down. When I showed up at their home this morning, Cate’s father shook my hand and, after several minutes of pleasant conversation that nearly killed me, he let me know where Cate’s sister lives in Beechford.