Chapter 7

Jealousy and Lines They Shouldn’t Cross:

I used to think I understood jealousy as a concept. Read about it in negotiation books, watched it torch perfectly good deals when somebody got possessive over a partnership that wasn’t even romantic. Had it filed away as somebody else’s weakness. Then I watched some guy put his hand on Ivy’s lower back at a fundraiser and felt something go off in my chest like a switch flipping, and had to stand there pretending I was fine while every instinct I had wanted to physically peel his hand off her.

Name was Desmond Rourke. Real estate money, the kind of guy who thinks charm and interest are the same thing, and he’d cornered Ivy by the dessert table at the Hendricks Charity Auction like he had all night to burn.

“So,” he was saying as I walked up, “how does someone go from event planning to engage to Roman Ashford. Feels like a leap.”

“Feels like a story you’d have to buy me dinner to hear.” Easy, deflecting, the way she’d gotten so good at doing these last two months. Didn’t need me there at all. I want that on record. Had it handled before I even reached the table.

Put my arm around her anyway.

“Desmond.” Keep my voice level. Pleasant, even. The tone I use in board meetings right before I say something that ends somebody’s quarter. “Enjoying the auction?”

“Just getting to know your fiancée. Sharper than the profiles let on.”

“She is.” Didn’t move my arm. “Excuse us, though. Someone she needs to meet.”

There was no one. Made it up on the spot, steered her toward the bar with a hand maybe a little firmer against her waist than the situation strictly called for, felt her stiffen under my palm before she pulled slightly away once we cleared Desmond’s sightline.

“What was that?”

“Didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”

“He was flirting, Roman. Badly. But flirting. Not a crime.” Turned to face me, arms crossed, that look I’d started recognizing as the one right before she called me out on something I don’t want called out. “You did the exact same thing at Whitmore. You go like this every single time a man says my name with interest in it.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s completely true. Want a list? I can make you one.”

“Fine. Make the list.”

“Desmond, right now. Grant Wellesley, three weeks back. That intern from the press office who complimented my dress at the shareholder dinner, who was, for the record, nineteen and terrified of you.” Ticked them off on her fingers like she’d genuinely been keeping count this whole time. Apparently she had. “You act like this arrangement gives you ownership over who talks to me.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Then stop acting like it does.”

Didn’t have a good answer, because she was right, and I hate being wrong about something I’ve apparently been doing consistently enough that somebody else could compile a list of it. Looked at her across that small gap of space, the party noise going on around us like none of this mattered to anyone but the two of us, and something in me just gave up on having a professional explanation ready.

“I don’t want him talking to you because I don’t want anyone talking to you.” Truth. “I don’t want to share the version of you that exists at these events. Know that’s not what we agreed to. I know it’s not rational. True anyway.”

Ivy went quiet. Party kept going around us, laughter somewhere off to the side, quartet doing its job, and neither of us moved for a second that felt a lot longer than a second actually is.

“That’s not protecting the arrangement,” she said, quiet too now. “That’s something else.”

“I know.”

“You said that before. Whitmore. Same thing, and you never finished the sentence.”

“Finishing it now.” The voice came out rougher than I meant. “I want you. Not the fiancée version. Not the version that photographs well next to me. You. Don’t know what to do about that, because I built this whole arrangement specifically so neither of us would have to deal with exactly this problem, and now I’m standing here dealing with it anyway.”

She didn’t say anything for a beat. Just looked at me with an expression I couldn’t fully read, something caught between fear and something warmer, then closed the gap herself, which I hadn’t expected, and kissed me.

Not the practiced, camera ready kind we’d done a dozen times for a dozen different lenses. This one had teeth in it. Months of pretending cracking open all at once, her hand fisting in my jacket like she was equal parts pulling me closer and holding herself back. Kissed her back the same way. Hard. Unguarded. Forgot for one whole minute we were standing in the middle of a charity gala with three hundred people who could’ve seen if they looked hard enough.

We both pulled back at the same moment. Don’t know which of us stopped it first.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Breathing harder than the moment should’ve called for.

“No.”

“That breaks about six of your own rules.”

“Aware.”

“You wrote the rules, Roman.”

“I know I wrote the rules.” Reached up, without fully deciding to, tucked a piece of hair back from her face. She let me. Felt like its own kind of answer. “Starting to think I wrote them for someone who wasn’t going to make me feel like this. Didn’t plan for you.”

She laughed, short, a little wrecked around the edges. “Makes two of us.”

Didn’t say anything else about it after that. Went back into the party, picked the performance back up, smiled for cameras that hadn’t caught any of what actually happened near the bar, but something had shifted for good between us and we both knew it, and neither of us bothered pretending otherwise for the rest of the night.

My aunt Celeste cornered me the next afternoon in my own office, which she does maybe twice a year, always over something she’s decided is urgent enough to justify the ambush.

“You need to end this.” No greeting. Shut the door behind her like she didn’t trust the assistants not to listen in.

“End what.”

“The engagement. This Calder situation.” Sat down across from my desk uninvited, arms crossed, same sharp cheekbones and sour expression she’d worn through the entire dinner at the estate. “I’ve heard things, Roman. About the investigation. About what your grandmother’s lawyers found twenty six years ago.”

My stomach went tight. “What do you know?”

“Enough to tell you this is a mistake you cannot afford to make.” Leaned forward. “That girl’s mother nearly destroyed this family once. If the connection’s what I think it is, marrying her, fake or not, hands your cousin exactly what he’s been waiting for. You’d be handing him the scandal himself, gift wrapped.”

“I’m not ending it.”

“Roman”

“I’m not ending it, Celeste.” Stood, because sitting through the rest of this felt like conceding ground I had no plan to concede. “Whatever happened twenty six years ago, Ivy had nothing to do with it. She was a baby. If my family did something to her mother, that’s our shame to answer for. Not a reason to punish her twice for it.”

Celeste studied me for a long moment, something calculating behind her eyes that reminded me uncomfortably of Nolan.

“You’re in love with her,” she said. Not a question.

Didn’t answer. She took that as an answer enough.

“Then you should know,” she said, standing, smoothing her skirt with a precision that felt deliberate, “loving her might be the single most dangerous thing you’ve ever done to this family. And I don’t think you understand yet how far some people are willing to go to keep the truth buried.”

Left before I could ask what exactly that meant. Sat there a long time after the door closed, turning her words over, and none of it added up to anything I could actually act on. Not yet.

It wasn’t until that evening, going through a box of old files Julian pulled from deep storage at my request, that I understood exactly how right she’d been to be scared.

Buried near the bottom of a folder marked with a case number I recognized from the redacted document Ivy had described to me, half ruined by water damage but still partly legible, was a photograph. Two women standing together outside the estate. One clearly a younger Eleanor. The other was a young woman with dark hair and a jaw I’d started to know by heart.

Under the photograph, one typed line that ran cold straight through me.

M. Hart-Calder, accused of theft and blackmail against the Ashford family trust, June 12th, twenty six years prior. Evidence submitted by E. Ashford. Case sealed pending relocation agreement.

My grandmother had accused Ivy’s mother of blackmail.

And I was starting to suspect, with a dread I couldn’t yet put a shape to, that the accusation had never been true at all.