Page 15 of Steal My Breath Away

“Senator Chapman.” A tall man in a dark suit shook my mother’s hand. “I’m Tony Davis. We spoke on the phone.” Tony was the founder and head of Stellar’s US operations. He introduced us to Jordan, who ran the Chicago office, and Maverick, one of their security personnel, before leading us down a long hallway with closed gray doors. Jordan was middle-aged and heavily muscled, his neck so thick he had to fully turn anytime my mom asked a question. Maverick, by contrast, was tall and lean with slightly mussed golden-brown hair and a cocky attitude that showed itself when he winked as he shook my hand. He didn’t look older than thirty, and I hoped he wasn’t the bodyguard they’d chosen for me, because he reminded me of a guy from high school who had taken me outside during the spring dance on the pretense of looking at the stars, only to make it clear when he got me alone that he was looking for something else.

Thankfully, Tony sent Maverick away to find the bodyguard they’d assigned to me, and I wandered over to the window to look at the view while everyone else took a seat at the boardroom table.

“Darling, could you pour me a cup of tea?” Mom said. “I’ve been up since 4:00A.M. and my caffeine buzz is wearing off.”

I made the tea at the small snack bar in the corner and turned just as someone walked into the room.

“Ace,” I whispered, my voice barely more than a breath as I stared at him in disbelief. A maelstrom of emotions swept through me at the sight of my brother’s best friend, my childhood crush, and the man who had broken my fragile teenage heart and then added insult to injury by serving up a heaping dose of humiliation by kissing me and then ghosting me for four years. My hands shook uncontrollably, the cup clattering against the saucer as hot liquid spilled down the front of my shirt.

“Damnit.” I plucked at the sodden material, my cheeks burning and not from the heat.

Ace handed me a stack of napkins. “Are you okay?”

God. That voice. That face. I didn’t know it would have been possible for Ace to become even more gorgeous, but he’d matured since I’d seen him at the funeral. He’d been lean before, but now his Stellar Security T-shirt nestled snugly against his thick, muscular chest. My eyes trailed down his trim torso to the jeans hugging his narrow hips, and then back to a jaw that seemed more chiseled than before, dark eyes that softened as I stared. Our hands touched when I took the napkins and I could almost feel the electric current between us, the connection that we’d never fully acknowledged, igniting a spark that had been dormant for years.

I was already struggling to keep myself in check, but this was too much. Too difficult to process. A tidal wave of emotion crashed over me, stealing my breath away, and all I could do was run.

“Restroom is on the left, three doors down,” Tony called after me. “I’ll send someone with a T-shirt for you.”

I made it to the restroom and locked the door.Breathe. Breathe. You’re fine. Lock it away.Hands trembling, I pulled out my phone and texted Paige, realizing belatedly that she was in a lab all morning and couldn’t check her messages.

After a few more breaths with my head between my legs, Icould think clearly again.Get it together, Haley.At least I had the excuse of almost burning myself with the tea for the hasty exit. I pushed myself up and turned on the tap, splashing water on my face and dabbing at my shirt with a wet paper towel.

“Haley?”

I knew his voice, even muffled by the thick metal door. My chest tightened as another wave of emotion surged again, but I pushed it back down. I was over him. He was nothing to me but a childhood acquaintance who happened to be my brother’s best friend, and who had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with me. And since I wanted nothing to do with him, there was no reason why I couldn’t act like a normal person instead of a bumbling idiot. I was older now. More mature. I was officially an adult, and I needed to act like one. Swallowing hard, I opened the door.

“I’m sorry for surprising you like that,” he said, holding out a blue T-shirt with a whiteStellar Securitylabel on the front. “I thought your mother told you she’d hired me.”

“If she had, I wouldn’t have come.”

I’d been played. Ace already knew about the assignment, which meant my mother had set the wheels in motion before she’d come to see me. That was the downside of having a mother in politics. She was an expert at manipulation—starting with the obviously unacceptable option of suggesting I move to DC, then the offer of a US Marshal, until the only palatable option was the private bodyguard that she’d already hired. Had Paige been in on it, too? Likely not. Paige was as loyal as they came.

“I told her you wouldn’t want me, but she insisted.” He shrugged. “You know what she’s like. It’s hard to say no to her.”

I didn’t want the reminder that he’d been a part of our family since I was ten years old, or that he’d always had a good relationship with my mom—a relationship I didn’t understand. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing,” I said stiffly.

“It’s not a problem.” His eyes softened, and he tipped his head to the side in a gesture so familiar it made my heart ache. “It wasgood to see you again. I think they’ll assign Maverick to you. He’s got more experience than me. You’ll be in good hands.”

“Maverick reminds me of Blake Forester,” I blurted out. I’d had a crush on Blake in freshman year and I’d been thrilled when he came over to talk to me at the high school dance. I honestly thought he shared my interest in stargazing when he asked me to show him the constellations. I wasn’t ready for what happened next. But Ace was. He appeared out of nowhere and beat Blake so badly the dude missed three weeks of football practice. I thought Ace would go to jail, but Blake told everyone he’d been mugged. He had a reputation to protect. Even then, people knew better than to mess with Ace.

Ace understood right away. “I’ll tell Tony to find someone else.”

“How did she find you?” I asked him. “Paige heard through some of our old high school friends that you’d moved to LA.”

“I was in Riverstone on vacation. She was in town for some political fundraiser, and Janice mentioned I was there taking a break from security work. Your mom thought it would be easier for you to be with someone who knows you.”

Lost in a maelstrom of emotions and memories, I knew I should end the conversation, but part of me didn’t want him to leave. “What exactly do you know about me? You hardly paid any attention to me after I started high school, and we haven’t spoken in four years.”

If my words hurt, he hid it well. “I know that you didn’t do mornings but could stay up all night,” he said, his voice soft. “I know that you couldn’t remember dates or deadlines but somehow you always managed to get your work done on time, that you studied with three screens and one was always streaming a show you’d seen ten times before, that you worked out your feelings through music, that you had a junk food addiction and you loved speed and taking risks that alarmed everyone who loved you. I know that you’re the kind of person who would give yoursandwich to a stranger, and skip school to be there for a friend who needed you.”

It shook me, the things he remembered, the details he knew about my life. Granted, he used to come to our house most days after school and on weekends, and I always studied downstairs at the kitchen table where there were people to talk to and multiple distractions. I’d given my sandwich to him the first time we met, and he was the one who had found me at the hospital with Paige the day her mother collapsed at work and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

“I’m also the person you can’t stand to be around or should I have read something else into the night you kissed me and then walked away?” It felt good to get those words off my chest. I’d wanted to say them at Matt’s funeral, but I was too wrapped up in grief to talk to anyone, especially Ace, who I wanted to talk to the most but couldn’t after how he’d hurt me.

“That was a mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking. I should never have—”

“I hate you for that.”

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