Page 2 of Angels Are Falling

“Why would he care if you gave someone money?”

“He was hoping to bankrupt this person and had specifically asked me not to get involved.”

Fucking asshole. Every dollar Maxwell had given Amelie closed the wound I’d been trying to open. My timeline had slipped by months as a result, which meant more months of watching her from across the room.

It was getting more difficult to survive the time.

I aggressively grabbed a champagne flute from one of the servers and took a deliberate sip, my attention drifting back to the girl in blue. She was fucking gorgeous. I watched her over the rim of the glass and cataloged her—the gold of her skin, the little crease she got between her brows when she was trying to explain something. Her lips… I had never touched that mouth, yet I knew it better than my own.

Marcus finally announced the tradition of a first dance, and Maxwell pulled his girl to the dance floor. Like everyone else in the room, Amelie turned from the bar to watch them. She watched them while I watched her. I wasn’t the only one looking at her. Other men looked at her and saw a beautiful woman. I looked at her and saw the only thing I’d never been able to buy.

When the song ended, Marcus rushed back to the dance floor. “Give it up one more time for tonight’s hosts, Dr. Caden Maxwell and his lovely fiancée, Rose.”

I rolled my eyes as the crowd cheered. The noise of well-wishers had barely subsided when Rose peeled off toward the bar, toward Amelie, until the two women spoke with their heads bent together while I stood alone with my drink. Watching her.

Which was when Caden found his way back to me.

“Stay away from Rose.” His voice was silk laid over a blade. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at Rose, the way I’d been looking at Amelie all night, and for one ugly second, I understood the man completely. “Whatever you’re trying to do, find another lever.”

“I had a perfectly good plan,” I said pleasantly. “Before a former friend of mine got sentimental and started writing checks.” I turned my glass in the light.

“I helped a family in need.”

“You don’t give a shit about that. You wanted to impress your woman by helping her best friend.”

“The girl you want is married. What do you not understand about the situation?” he spoke through gritted teeth. “She’s happy with someone else.”

I didn’t care if she was happy, only that she was mine. The two had stopped being the same thing a long time ago.

“Move on, Cavendish,” he added. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

I tilted my head at Rose. “Is that what you would have done if she were married?”

He said nothing.

“You fucked up my plans.” I let the pleasantness fall away, just enough. “So here’s how it goes now. Every time you interfere with my life, I’ll reach into yours. I’ll circle your girl. I’ll charm her. I’m sure you remember from our boarding school days that women tend to lose their minds around me. I’ll make your girl wonder why. And women who start wondering about me don’t tend to stop.”

Maxwell ground his jaw.

I smiled. “If you want my hands kept off your girl, don’t put your filthy money near mine. Don’t fund Amelie again. Not one more dollar. Forget she exists.”

He was quiet for a long moment. He sounded subdued when he spoke again. “The girl loves her husband. Leave it alone, Cavendish. If you pursue her, you’ll regret breaking up her family.”

It was my turn to clench my jaw. “I regret a great many things,” I said. “She won’t make the list.”

He looked at me with a touch of pity, which I pointedly ignored. Then he was swarmed by guests congratulating him on his engagement, and I went back to the only thing I had ever wanted.

Amelie was speaking to Rose. She’d worked one heel half out of her shoe beneath the hem of the dress, a small private thing, and I saw it, because I see all of her, always, and it undid me in a way the grand gestures never could. Look up, I thought. Just once. Just at me. She didn’t. She never did. Years ago, I’d stood at the back of a hall while she ignored my whole existence to text an insignificant boy, and all this time later, she was still looking everywhere in the world but at the man who’d have burned it down for her. My princess, who didn’t know my name.

I was tired of the glass between us. So I took some away. I set my flute on the rail, closed my hand around it, and squeezed until it gave. It was the only way to make her talk to me, to make her see me. The pain came a half second behind the sound, bright, clean, honest, the first true thing I’d felt all night. Blood welled dark into the linen that a horrified server ran over to press to my palm.

I barely noticed it. Someone said the word nurse. Someone went to fetch her. I wrapped my ruined right hand in the linen and waited, my pulse loud and even, and watched her cross the room toward me at last—summoned, finally, by the call she couldn’t ignore.

There she is.

Her hands were about to be on me. It had cost a fistful of glass, and I’d have paid it a hundred times over.

She led me away from the ballroom and to the medical room. She knelt in front of me and took my ruined hand in both of hers, gentle, professional, a stranger doing her job. She didn’t know she’d just walked into the rest of her life. I let her work, and I memorized the top of her bent head, and I thought: soon.