The Boy with Her Eyes

Chapter 29

I wake up inside someone else's life. Edmund's arm is across my waist, heavy and warm, his breathing slow against the back of my neck.

The room smells like laundered sheets and rain and him—cedar and skin and something underneath that my body has memorised without permission. Grey light pushes through curtains that aren't mine, in a room that belongs to neither of us, and I don't move.

I let myself have it. The weight of him, the steady rhythm of his chest against my back, the impossible quiet of a morning with no emergency attached.

His thumb shifts against my hip—a lazy, half-conscious stroke that sends heat down my thighs and makes my breath catch in a way I'd deny under oath.

"You're awake." His voice is rough with sleep, low enough that I feel it vibrate through my spine before I hear it.

"Your observational skills remain unmatched." I press back against him without meaning to, and his arm tightens. "Truly the CEO the company deserves."

His laugh is warm air against my neck. He presses his mouth to my shoulder—not a kiss, exactly, more like a man confirming something is still where he left it.

"How long have you been lying here?" His mouth curves against my skin, and the shape of his smile is something I shouldn't be able to feel this precisely.

"Long enough to count the dust motes and draft my resignation letter." I roll onto my back and find his face inches from mine, sleep-creased and soft in a way that does something violent to my chest. "Twice. Both drafts were excellent."

"You're not resigning." His hand finds the curve of my waist under the sheet, thumb tracing the bone of my hip.

"Edmund." I catch his wrist, but my fingers don't do the useful thing and remove it. They stay, tracing his pulse point like traitors. "We need to talk about what this is."

"This is me in a terrible roadside hotel with the woman I'm in love with." He says it like he said it yesterday—plainly, without performance—and my ribs contract around something I can't return with the same ease. "What else does it need to be?"

"Complicated. It needs to be complicated, because it is." I sit up, pulling the sheet with me, and the air between us cools by exactly the degrees required to think.

"You're my boss. Oliver's father. Blythe's legal guardian." Each word lands like a card I'm laying on the table, and he watches every one.

"I'm aware of the logistics." He props himself on one elbow, watching me with an expression that's too steady, too certain for a man in a bed he didn't plan on being in. "I don't care about the rules."

"You can afford not to care." My voice comes out sharper than I planned, and I watch him register it—a flicker behind his eyes, his mouth losing its softness. "If this goes wrong, you lose an assistant. I lose my job, my housing, my access to my sister, my—"

I stop. The next word is son and it sits in my throat like a stone I've been swallowing for years.

"Cora." He sits up. His hand covers mine on the sheet, warm and deliberate. "You're not carrying it alone anymore."

"You keep saying that." I stare at our hands—his broad, steady, the pale band of skin where the ring used to sit catching the grey light.

"Because you keep not hearing it." He holds my gaze, and whatever's in his face isn't a promise—it's the settled certainty, like he’s already decided. "This isn't a favour or leverage. It's a fact."

The silence holds for three heartbeats. Something behind my sternum unclenches by a single, grudging degree.

"Fine." I pull my hand free and swing my legs off the bed. "But if you tell anyone in that office, I will ruin your life with the comprehensive knowledge I have of your calendar, your passwords, and your deeply embarrassing Spotify history."

"It's one playlist!" He's smiling now—I can hear it without turning around, and the warmth in it does something irritating to my pulse.

"Edmund, it's four hours of acoustic covers." I find his jumper on the chair and pull it over my head. The collar smells like him and my stomach flips in a way I choose not to examine.

We get dressed slowly. He buttons his shirt while I steal his jumper, and the look he gives me when the hem brushes my thighs—eyes tracking the fabric with a focus that has no business being that intense at eight in the morning—makes my skin prickle from collarbone to wrist.

The hotel restaurant is half-empty and aggressively beige. Edmund orders black coffee like a man with no imagination, and I order a latte and a full English.

"You're not seriously putting brown sauce on that." He stares at my plate with an expression usually reserved for contract violations.

"I'm seriously putting brown sauce on this." I take a bite and close my eyes, because the bacon is perfect and I refuse to be shamed. When I open them, he's watching me with his chin on his hand and something in his face that makes me study the salt shaker until I can breathe again.

"Stop that." I point my fork at him. "Stop looking at me like that in a public restaurant where people can see you."

"Like what?" He steals my coffee and takes a sip, and his mouth twitches at the sweetness.

"You know exactly like what." I take a triangle of his toast and he lets me, which is worse, because his mouth does the thing—the half-smile, the crease—and my stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with breakfast.

We check out. The drive is warm, windows down, music low enough to talk over, and my hand finds his knee somewhere past the M25.

At red lights his fingers lace through mine, his thumb drawing idle circles on my knuckle. I lean my head against the window and watch the countryside without seeing it, because the weight of his hand is louder than anything outside this car.

"I'm thinking shepherd's pie." I close my eyes against the glass. "Oliver likes the mashed potato and ignores the rest, but I can hide vegetables in the mince if I chop them small enough, and Blythe will pretend she didn't notice because—"

My phone buzzes in the cupholder. Blythe's name glows white on the screen.

"Hey." I pick up, tucking it between ear and shoulder. "We're about an hour out, do you need—"

Breathing. Fast, shallow, ragged—the kind that scrapes against the speaker, the kind I've heard in Kettleworth hallways and hospital corridors and every nightmare I've had since she was eight years old.

"Blythe." My hand leaves Edmund's knee. The warmth vanishes. "Blythe, talk to me."

"You need to come home right now." Her voice is thin and shaking and stripped of every year she's gained since I taught her to lock her bedroom door.

Edmund's eyes cut to me. His foot finds the accelerator and the car surges, the music suddenly obscene against whatever is happening on the other end of this phone.

"What happened?" My fingers grip the case so hard the edges cut into my palm. "Tell me what happened."

Two seconds of silence. The longest two seconds of my life, and I have lived through some very long seconds.

"Oliver's gone."