Chapter 3

Finnegan's POV

“Ophelia?”

I said her name before I was fully awake.

For a second, I waited for the dream to end. I'd had enough of them to know how this went: her beside me, close enough to touch, then an empty bed when I opened my eyes.

But a hand had brushed mine. The mattress dipped under someone's weight.

I opened my eyes.

Light from the city came through the windows. It caught her hair on my pillow, her face turned toward me, the bare skin of her shoulders.

Ophelia Clarke.

Six years, and she was in my bed.

I stared at her, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with where I was.

This wasn't my apartment. It was the hotel suite I kept year-round, the one I came to when I didn't feel like going home. Some weeks I never used it. Others, I slept here more often than at my own place.

The staff knew to leave a spare razor in the bathroom and keep the coffee I preferred in the kitchen. There were shirts in the closet, a charger beside the bed, books I'd been meaning to finish for months. I could arrive at any hour without packing a bag or speaking to anyone beyond the elevator attendant.

It was private. Familiar. Usually quiet.

Tonight, I'd come up, taken off my suit, and gone to bed. There hadn't been a guest expected, much less one I hadn't seen since medical school.

Yet there she was.

Her dress lay on the floor. She was wearing nothing but her underwear, and I could smell alcohol on her breath. Beneath it was the perfume I remembered.

She gasped.

I moved before I'd thought it through, turning over her and planting my forearm on the mattress above her shoulders. She sank back against the pillow.

“Finnegan?”

Hearing my name in her voice was worse than seeing her.

I had spent years forgetting how she said it. Or telling myself I'd forgotten. One word, and I remembered her calling to me from the kitchen, asking where I'd put her notes, complaining that I drank the last of the coffee.

I looked down at her.

Her face had changed. A little less softness in her cheeks, a little more definition. She'd been a medical student the last time I'd seen her, still carrying half her life around in a bag with a broken zipper. Now there was something guarded in the way she watched me, though the alcohol made it hard to tell how much she was taking in.

Her eyes moved over my face. She looked as startled as I felt.

She was beautiful. I resented noticing.

“Ophelia.” I took my time saying it. “Six years without a word, and you let yourself into my bed?”

Her gaze flicked past me, searching the room. Her breathing quickened.

“I—I've obviously got the wrong room.”

She pronounced each word carefully. I remembered that too. The more she'd had to drink, the more determined she became to sound perfectly sober.

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“My door happened to be open, so you came in and took off your clothes.”

The door bothered me. I'd heard the latch catch when I came in—or thought I had. It was something I would need to ask the hotel about. Right now, though, I could barely look past the woman in my bed.

I glanced toward the bedroom doorway. Beyond it, the living room was dark. She had walked past my jacket, past the things I left lying around because this suite was always mine, and somehow decided she belonged here.

She pressed a hand against my chest.

“I thought this was my room. Fifty-five eighty-eight.”

“It's fifty-eight eighty-eight.”

She blinked. Her lips moved faintly, as though she were trying the numbers again. Then she looked toward the door.

The sheets rustled as she shifted beneath me.

“I was at Lisa's birthday party. Downstairs.” Her voice had lost some of its careful steadiness. “I drank too much. It was a mistake.”

That explained the party. I'd heard the music briefly when I arrived, before the elevator doors closed. I hadn't paid attention. There was always a wedding, a reception, someone spending too much money on a reason to celebrate.

Apparently, tonight it had been her friend's birthday.

I tried to imagine her downstairs, drinking with people who knew what her life looked like now. People who could call her tomorrow without wondering whether she'd answer.

I knew almost nothing about the woman lying beneath me. The realization made me look at her more closely.

I watched her mouth, waiting for the small twitch that used to give her away. Or the lift of one eyebrow when she was trying to keep something from me.

She looked drunk. Startled. Uncomfortable.

Once, I would have trusted what I saw.

“A mistake,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And I'm supposed to believe that?”

Her expression tightened.

“I didn't know you were here.” She pushed at my chest again. “I have to work. Please just let me get up.”

Work. She had finished school, then. Of course she had. Six years was enough time to finish a great many things.

I wondered where she worked. Whether she still stayed up too late reading and forgot to eat until her hands shook. Whether someone else reminded her now.

I didn't ask.

Six years ago, she'd been in my bed telling me she didn't love me. Then she'd dressed, picked up her bag, and walked out while I was still trying to understand what she'd said.

I remembered the rain that night. The sound of her buttoning her blouse. How certain she'd sounded by the time she reached the door.

For weeks afterward, I'd gone over the conversation, finding things I should have asked and answers I shouldn't have accepted. None of it had changed the fact that she was gone.

Now she was back, and her explanation was a room number she couldn't keep straight.

“You came into my room,” I said. “You got into my bed. What did you think was going to happen?”

“I thought I was going to sleep.”

She pushed harder this time.

“This is sexual harassment, Finnegan. Let me go.”

I caught her wrist.

She went still, her eyes fixed on my hand. I could feel her pulse beneath my fingers.

“Harassment?” I looked back at her. “You walked into my suite uninvited and undressed.”

“I told you why.”

Her voice was sharper now. She shifted away from me, drawing her legs toward the edge of the mattress.

I eased back enough for her to sit up. She pulled her wrist free, and I let her.

She glanced around for her dress. I followed her gaze to where it lay near the door, then looked back at her.

I could ask where she'd been. Why she'd never called. Whether she had ever thought about doing it, even once.

Instead, I sat there, saying nothing. I wasn't sure which question I could bear to hear her answer.

“I shouldn't be here,” she muttered.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. For a moment she sat with her back to me, waiting, apparently, for the room to stop moving.

Then she tried to stand.

“No.”

I caught her wrist again.

She turned, pulling against my hand.

“Finnegan, let me go.”

There was fear in her face now, mixed with confusion. I saw it. Still, I couldn't make myself release her.

I'd been asleep minutes ago. Now she was here, wearing the same perfume, looking at me with eyes I used to wake up beside. And she was leaving again before I'd had a single answer.

I pulled her back. Unsteady on her feet, she stumbled against me and braced her hands on my chest.

“Stay.”

She tried to push away. I put an arm around her waist, holding her in place, and brought my other hand to the back of her neck.

Her body stiffened.

“I didn't say you could leave.”