Chapter 7 — The Rain

The ambush happened on a Thursday, outside a downtown restaurant, and it was almost certainly staged.

They'd been photographed leaving a "romantic dinner" (it was, in fact, a business dinner with two empty seats for the cameras, both of which the internet filled with romance). The moment they stepped onto the sidewalk, the sky opened.

Not a drizzle. A flood.

The photographers, who had clearly checked the weather app before laying their ambush, closed in like a net. Flash, flash, flash. A wall of lenses and shouting: "Ms. Shaw! Mr. Valerius! Over here! Kiss her! Kiss her!"

Evelyn's heel caught a grate. She stumbled—

And Kaelen's arm was around her, pulling her sideways, off the curb, into the recessed doorway of a shuttered gallery. One second of chaos, and then they were pressed together in a pocket of dark, dry stone, while the storm hammered the street outside and the photographers screamed for blood.

His hand was at her back. Her hands were flat against his chest. Rain had plastered a strand of hair to her cheek, and she could feel his breath—cool, steady, impossibly calm—against her temple.

"Say the word," he said, his voice barely above the rain, "and I'll make this crowd regret their careers."

Evelyn laughed, a little breathless. "That's not very romance-coded."

"It's very me-coded." Kaelen said. "They cornered you. I don't like my business partners cornered."

"Your business partner," Evelyn said, and heard herself sound less steady than she wanted, "is currently being held at an intimate distance by her client, in a doorway, in the rain, with forty photographers outside. This is the most on-brand moment of my week."

"Your week has been eventful." Kaelen said.

"Your doing."

"Also true." He looked at her, his eyes close enough that she could see the storm reflected in them. "Evelyn. I need to tell you something."

Her heart seized. This was it—the confession, the truth, the thing she'd been digging toward in the dark for a week. She braced.

"I'm going to kiss you," Kaelen said, "because they're watching, and it needs to look real. But I want you to know it won't be fake. So if you need to stop me, say it now."

Evelyn's brain went blank. The rain hammered. The photographers screamed. Somewhere behind them, a fan account was livestreaming.

"…Prohibition One," she heard herself say. "Do not fall in love."

"I know." His voice was low, close, inevitable. "I've been breaking it for five years."

He leaned down. She didn't move. His mouth brushed hers—cool, light, barely a pressure—and the world outside the doorway stopped existing. The flashes fired through her closed eyelids like fireworks. His hand came up, thumb along her jaw, steady, careful, reverent.

It was the shortest kiss in the history of scandal. Three seconds, maybe four.

When he pulled back, the rain was still falling, the photographers were still screaming, and Evelyn's knees had filed a formal complaint with the rest of her body.

"…That was in the choreography manual?" she asked, breathless.

"Clause forty-three." Kaelen said, and his voice was not entirely steady. "Emergency intimacy protocol."

"There isn't a clause forty-three." Evelyn said.

"No." He agreed. "There isn't."

The car pulled up. He handed her into it like she was made of glass, and the whole ride home neither of them said a word. Evelyn sat in the back seat with her hand pressed to her mouth, feeling the place where his lips had been, and thinking, with horrible clarity:

He kissed me like he meant it. And I kissed him back like I've been waiting for it.

At the studio, Leah was waiting with a knowing look and two coffees. "So. The kiss. Was it—"

"Choreographed." Evelyn said, too fast.

"The internet says he looked at you like you're the only person in the room. For, like, eleven seconds."

"The internet is a quarterly report," Evelyn said. "I don't trust it."

"You're quoting his jokes now." Leah said, delighted. "Sis. You're in trouble."

Evelyn sat down at her desk, and for the first time in her professional life, she couldn't concentrate on work. She kept feeling his hand at her back, his mouth at hers, the impossible calm of his pulse.

She pulled out the VH Media file. She looked at the signature.

And she made a decision.

If Kaelen Valerius was going to play a game that had started five years before she knew his name, then she was going to learn the rules—every single one of them—before he made his next move.

She picked up her phone and called Jesse Moreau.

"Mr. Moreau. Evelyn Shaw." A pause. "I want to know the real reason your boss has been funding my career for five years. And before you make something up, I have the ledger. So you can either tell me the truth, or I go public with what I found."

A long silence on the line. Then Jesse, with the exhausted dignity of a man whose ship has just hit the iceberg he'd been pointing at for years:

"…Ms. Shaw. Can I call you back in five minutes? I need to tell my boss his five-year secret just became a three-way."

(End of Chapter 7)