He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 13

chapter 13

Mason’s POV

The rings were on the coffee table.

I’d taken them out of the bedside drawer sometime around eleven, telling myself it was because I needed to have them assessed for return to the jeweler. Telling myself I wasn’t sitting in my own penthouse at midnight with two fingers of Macallan and my ex–wife’s wedding rings arranged on the glass surface in front of me like evidence at a hearing.

The city glittered thirty–four floors below. It always did. I’d paid enough for the view.

I took a slow drink and told myself I was celebrating.

The merger documentation was clean. Reeves had confirmed it twice. The divorce was legally airtight or near enough, with the trust question still to be resolved, but Reeves had been unable to reach Maya through any channel in four days, which meant she was either regrouping or unaware, and both scenarios were manageable. The New York coastal expansion was proceeding. Selina’s pregnancy was healthy. The press narrative was being drafted.

Everything was proceeding exactly as planned…

I looked at the rings.

The bedroom door opened and Selina appeared in the low light, silk robe, hair loose, the particular softness she wore after sleep that I’d always understood was its own kind of performance, and had never minded because it was a comfortable one.

She crossed to the sofa and folded herself against my side, her cheek finding the place between my shoulder and chest, her fingers moving to the lapel of my robe with the easy familiarity of a woman who had just rearranged a room and expected the furniture to cooperate….

“Come to bed,” she murmured. “It’s late.”

“In a while.”

She tilted her head back, looking up at me. Her eyes moved to the rings on the table, stayed there a moment, then moved back to me. She said nothing about them. She was too smart for that.

“I was thinking ivory for the nursery,” she said instead. “Or that sage green that’s everywhere now. Something soft.” Her fingers moved against my chest. “We should think about an announcement. The board will need to hear it from you before it leaks”

“I know.”

“A proper one. Something that tells the story correctly, that this has been a long time coming, that the marriage had run its course by mutual agreement, that you and I represent the company’s next chapter.” She said it the way she said most things with the clean efficiency of someone who had been thinking about it longer than the conversation suggested. “It frames Selina as a business partner and a life partner simultaneously. It’s a stronger position than you might think”

“You’ve been drafting talking points in your sleep”

“I’ve been drafting talking points since the day I understood how the world worked.” She lifted her face to mine. “Which was considerably earlier than most people.”

I set the whisky down.

She kissed me first, which she usually did, not from impatience but from the preference for initiation, the same quality that made her effective in boardrooms and exhausting at dinner parties. I kissed her back. She tasted of the mint she always had before bed, familiar, clean, precisely maintained.

She pulled at my robe.

I let her.

She was beautiful. That had never been in question, Selina had always known exactly what she was and exactly how to deploy it, and there was a particular kind of confidence in that which I had always found compelling. Her skin was warm and her body was soft and when she pulled me over her she arched in a way that was genuine and performed in exactly equal measure, which I understood, because I was doing the

same…

I took my time. I knew how to do this, I’d always known how to do this, the same way I knew how to close a difficult negotiation, by reading the room and adjusting and delivering what the moment required with technical precision and minimal waste. Her breath caught. Her fingers tightened. She said my name.

Then she went still and turned her face slightly.

“I’m tired,” she said. Her voice was soft, apologetic. “The baby. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m just tired.”

“It’s fine.” I moved away from her. “Go to sleep.”

She touched my arm. “Mason…”

“I said it’s fine, Selina.”

She looked at me for a moment. Then she pulled the duvet up and settled against the pillow, and within ten minutes her breathing had slowed and steadied in the way that meant she was genuinely asleep.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.

The penthouse was very quiet.

I’d blamed Maya for this.

Not consciously, not in terms I’d ever said aloud. But the thought had been there, underneath everything. for years…. a convenient architecture of reasoning. The deadness in our bed. The going through motions. The particular emptiness of lying beside someone in the dark and feeling further from them than if you’d been on separate continents.

I had filed it under incompatibility. Under convenience marriage. Under I chose the wrong woman and now I’m paying the cost.

I thought about whether he would answer.

My phone buzzed on the cushion beside me.

I looked at the screen.

Reeves. A message sent at 1:47 a.m., which meant he’d either been up late or had been woken up, and Reeves never sent late messages without reason…..

We have a problem with the Hargrove Trust. Call me first thing.

I read it twice.

The Hargrove Trust.

Maya’s father’s shares.

I set the phone face down on the cushion and looked at the rings in the dish on the side table.

Forty–nine percent.

She doesn’t know, I had told Reeves.

I had said it with confidence.

I looked at the laptop screen. Maya’s personnel file. Eight years of work I had never fully read. A woman who had been running towards the end of our marriage for longer than I’d understood, and who had disabled her personal tracker four minutes after walking out of my building.

I picked up the phone and stared at Reeves’s message.

She doesn’t know.

I had said it four days ago and believed it.

I wasn’t certain I believed it now.