Chapter 34: Truce
The drive back to the main house was a study in silence. Not the comfortable kind, but a thick, charged vacuum where every shift of fabric, every sigh, felt like a shout. Damien kept his eyes on the winding ranch road, his knuckles pale on the steering wheel. Beth stared straight ahead, her profile a cutout against the passenger window. The only sound was the crunch of gravel under tires.
She was the one who broke the quiet, her voice so calm it was worse than a scream. “That was impressively stupid.”
“Which part?” he asked, though he knew.
“The part where you turned a negotiation with a strategic rival into a pissing contest over a bone you threw away years ago.” She finally turned her head, and her eyes were glaciers. “He was probing, and you handed him a schematic of our biggest weakness. Me. Your ‘commitment,’ as he so delicately put it.”
Damien pulled the car to a violent stop in the circular drive, throwing gravel. “My commitment? He was looking at you like a menu item, Beth. He called you cariño. In front of me.”
“And I handled it!” She flung her door open and slammed it, the report echoing off the house’s façade. She was up the steps and through the front door before he could cut the engine. He followed, the heavy oak door thudding shut behind him, sealing them in the cool, scented silence of the grand living room.
She’d already shed her jacket, standing by the cold fireplace, her back rigid. “You think I didn’t see it? You think I’m some damsel who needs you to glower at the big, bad wolf? I had him exactly where I wanted him—off-balance, intrigued, unsure of the playing field. And then you—with one look—you painted a target on my back and wrote ‘Damien’s Property’ in fucking neon across my forehead.”
“That’s not what I was doing.”
“Then enlighten me!” She whirled, the controlled CEO utterly gone. This was the Beth from the divorce, the one who could flay him open with a syllable. “What exactly was the purpose of that performance? Because from where I was sitting, it looked like a toddler having a tantrum because someone else touched his toy.”
The word ‘toy’ snapped something in the air. He took a step forward, discarding his own jacket. “You are not a toy. You were my wife.”
“Were.” The word was a bullet. “Past tense. A fact you seem to have a pathological need to forget every time another man has the audacity to breathe in my direction. First Paolo at the gala, now Vega in the woods. Who’s next, Damien? The mailman?”
“This isn’t about jealousy.” The lie tasted ash in his mouth.
“It is entirely about jealousy! Your pathetic, possessive, inconvenient jealousy! It compromised us. He knows now. You think that information stays in the woods? He’ll use it. He’ll leverage it. He’ll come at you through me, because you made it blindingly obvious that’s the way in!” She threw her hands up, a rare loss of pure physical control. “God, you haven’t changed. It’s still all about what you want, what you feel, what you can’t stand to see. The world bends to Damien Rossi’s feelings. Everyone else be damned.”
He crossed the room in three strides, stopping just short of touching her. He could smell the faint, wild scent of the pines on her skin, see the furious pulse in her throat. “You think I wanted this? You think I enjoy feeling like I’m going to break every time some slick bastard looks at you for too long? I don’t. It’s a hell of my own making, and I live in it every damn day.”
“Good. You should.” She held her ground, chin lifted. “You built the hell. You get to live in it. Alone.”
“I am trying to grovel!” The words erupted, raw and stripped of all charm.
A beat of stunned silence.
“You’re bad at it,” she shot back, but her voice had lost a fraction of its edge.
“I know.” He ran a hand through his hair, the frustration turning inward, corrosive. “I’m bad at waiting, too. I’m terrible at sleeping in that empty penthouse, at seeing your name on a business ledger instead of on my pillow. I’m exhausted, Beth. I’m so goddamn tired of loving you from the other side of a canyon I blew open myself.”
Her breath hitched, just a tiny catch. The anger in her eyes was still there, but it was flickering, mixed with something else—something older and more dangerous.
He saw it, and he pressed, his voice dropping to a scrape. “You don’t have to forgive me today. Hell, don’t forgive me tomorrow. Stay angry if you need to. Yell at me. Scream at me. Break every damn glass I own.” His gaze swept the room, landing on the crystal decanter on the sidebar. “Starting with that one. Just do it from our house. From our bed.”
He took the final half-step, closing the distance. He didn’t touch her. He let the heat of his body, the rawness in his voice, be the only bridge. “Come home.”
For a long moment, she just stared at him. The fight drained from her posture, leaving something weary and utterly vulnerable. The socialite, the mogul, the fortress—gone. In their place was just a woman, looking at the man who had broken her heart, hearing a plea she’d never expected.
“Home,” she repeated, the word hollow. “You sold the brownstone.”
“I’ll buy it back. I’ll buy ten of them. I’ll build you a new one right here on this godforsaken rock. Just name it. Home is wherever you are when you stop making me sleep alone.”
A tear escaped, tracing a path through the flawless powder on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “It’s not that simple.”
“It could be.” He dared then to lift a hand, to brush the pad of his thumb across her cheekbone, catching the moisture. “Make it simple. For once in our complicated, messed-up lives, just… capitulate. Let me be the one thing in your world that isn’t a negotiation.”
She closed her eyes, a long, slow blink. When she opened them, the decision was there, luminous and terrifying. “I’m still furious with you.”
“I know.”
“Vega is a problem you created.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“I might never fully trust you again.”
“I’ll spend every day trying to earn it.”
She looked at him, really looked at him, seeing past the suit, the power, the carefully constructed charm, down to the raw, unfinished man beneath. The one who was begging.
Her shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but in surrender. A release of a weight held too long.
“Okay.”
The word was so soft he almost didn’t hear it.
“Okay?” he breathed, his whole world narrowing to the shape of her mouth.
“Okay.” Louder this time. A decree. “But you’re sleeping on the couch.”
A laugh, ragged and relieved, broke from him. “The couch is a palace.”
She nodded, a slow, final dip of her chin. Then she turned and walked away, toward the grand staircase, leaving him standing in the center of the silent, opulent room. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to.
He heard the distant click of her bedroom door upstairs. Not a lock. Just a click.
It was the most promising sound he’d heard in years. He walked to the sidebar, picked up the crystal decanter, and poured two fingers of her expensive whiskey. He didn’t drink it. He just held the glass, feeling the cold weight of it in his palm, staring into the amber depths as the last of the afternoon light bled out of the sky, and the first real hope he’d allowed himself in a decade began, tentatively, to burn.