Chapter 42: The Attorney
I woke up on the wrong side of the apartment.
Not the guest suite. Not behind the deadbolt with the key on the nightstand. The other side. His side. The sheets smelled like cedar because the sheets had always smelled like cedar and now I knew it wasn’t cologne or memory or the ghost of a ranch outside Limon. It was him. The scent lived in his skin the way the altitude lived in mine — something carried from the place that made you, embedded so deep that no amount of city or concrete or forty-two stories could wash it out.
He was asleep.
I’d never seen Cole Ashford sleep. I’d seen him at the corner table and the dinner table and the boardroom table. I’d seen him in the VIP lounge and the Audi and the Aspen doorframe. I’d seen him carry me and punch a stranger and read Neruda on a floor while the city was buried. I’d seen his composure crack and his voice break and his hands shake on a desk and his knuckles split and bleed. But I’d never seen him unconscious. The man who controlled everything — his voice, his face, his architecture, the temperature of every room he entered — had no control over what he looked like while he slept.
He looked younger. The jaw was the same — sharp, set, the jaw that tightened when the architecture was failing. But the lines around his eyes were softer. The mouth that had said eleven words and silenced a room was slightly open. One arm was above his head and the other was where it had been when I’d fallen asleep — across my waist, heavy, the weight of a man who’d reached for a woman in the dark and held on.
I didn’t move. Not because of don’t move — because the moment was rare and I was the kind of woman who cataloged rare things. This was the man without the building. Without the sweater or the suit or the boardroom or the empire. Just a body in a bed in the early morning with his arm across a woman who’d crossed a threshold the night before and was lying in the aftermath of the crossing feeling everything she’d expected to feel and several things she hadn’t.
What I’d expected: the physical. The heat. The specific, devastating discovery of a body I’d been imagining since a chairlift in January. The cedar on skin instead of sweater. The hands that had been tracing circles on my shoulder finally tracing them everywhere. The sound he made — the same sound from the first kiss, the broken one, the one that came from somewhere deeper than his chest — repeated against my throat, my collarbone, the places I’d been keeping from him since Vail.
What I hadn’t expected: the afterward. The way he’d pulled me against him when the heat subsided and the quiet arrived and the quiet was different from every other quiet we’d shared. Not charged. Not negotiated. Full. The quiet of two people who’d been circling for forty-one Chapters and had stopped circling and the stopping was not an ending but a different kind of beginning. He’d held me against his chest and his heartbeat had been fast and then slow and then the slow of a man falling asleep with a woman in his bed for the first time in years — maybe ever — and the falling asleep was the most vulnerable thing his body had done all night.
I slipped out from under his arm. Carefully. The way you move when you don’t want to wake something precious. I found his t-shirt on the floor — the gray one, the 3 AM kitchen one — and pulled it on and it smelled like him and it was too long and I was standing in a bedroom at forty-two stories in a man’s shirt for the first time since I’d started a coffee shop from dead wood and told myself I didn’t need anyone’s shirt on my body or anyone’s arm across my waist.
The kitchen. The stove light. The coffee.
I made the Amaro Gayo. My pour-over. His kitchen. The ritual that had been ours since the first 3 AM and was now something else — the same motions performed by a woman wearing a different man’s shirt in a kitchen she’d entered from a door she’d crossed. The coffee smelled the same. The pour felt the same. The bloom was forty-five seconds and the water was two hundred degrees and the grind was correct because I’d done it and the correctness was the one thing in my life that hadn’t changed overnight.
Everything else had changed. The guest suite was behind me. The deadbolt was irrelevant. The key was on a nightstand I might never sleep next to again. And the woman making coffee in this kitchen was the same woman who’d built Treeline from dead wood and she was wearing a gray t-shirt that belonged to the Mountain King and the t-shirt was the most comfortable thing she’d ever worn and the comfort was terrifying.
My phone buzzed. Marcos.
The partnership restructuring documents are ready for review. You’ll need independent counsel. I can recommend—
I stopped reading. Independent counsel. Of course. Marcos was Cole’s attorney. The restructuring made me Cole’s partner. A partner can’t be represented by the other partner’s lawyer — the conflict of interest was structural. I needed my own attorney. My own legal architecture. The same way I’d needed my own lease and my own market rate and my own name on the window.
"You’re up."
Cole’s voice from the hallway. I turned. He was in the doorway — sweatpants, bare chest, the scar from Aurora visible in the kitchen light. The scar I’d touched with my fingertip when he was injured and had now touched with my mouth. The difference between the two touchings was the difference between care and intimacy and the difference had happened on the other side of a door I’d crossed six hours ago.
"I made coffee," I said.
"In my shirt."
"In your shirt."
"You could have put on your own clothes."
"I could have. I chose not to."
"Why?"
"Because your shirt smells like you and my clothes smell like espresso and I wanted to be in you instead of in work for ten minutes before the day starts."
His eyes did something I’d only seen once — the full-body startlement from the 3 AM kitchen when I’d appeared in the doorway for the first time. Except this time the startlement was followed by something that wasn’t surprise. Possession. Not the kind that takes — the kind that receives. The face of a man seeing a woman in his kitchen in his shirt making coffee from beans he’d bought because she’d mentioned them once and the seeing was ownership in reverse. She owned the moment. He was living in it.
"Marcos says I need an attorney," I said.
"For the partnership."
"Independent counsel. Someone who isn’t him. Someone who represents me, not the 303."
"He’s right."
"I know he’s right. I also know that finding an attorney who can navigate a partnership with the 303’s restructured architecture isn’t the same as finding someone to review a lease. This is — complicated."
"I know someone."
"I’m not using your referral."
"You don’t know what I was going to say."
"You were going to recommend someone from your network. Someone who understands the 303’s structure. Someone Marcos has worked with. Someone who is technically independent but functionally connected to your architecture."
"I was going to recommend someone who hates me."
I looked at him. Sweatpants. Bare chest. Scar. The man who’d been inside my body six hours ago standing in a doorway suggesting I hire an attorney who hated him.
"Why would I hire someone who hates you?"
"Because an attorney who hates me will protect your interests with the ferocity of a person who has a personal stake in making sure Cole Ashford doesn’t get everything he wants. The best defense against a partner who builds too much is a lawyer who’s been trying to tear down what he builds for years."
"Who?"
"Her name is Dana Reeves. She represented the opposing side in three Palisade acquisitions. She’s aggressive, expensive, and she once told Marcos his nesting-doll corporate structure was — and I’m quoting — ’the legal equivalent of a man compensating for something.’"
"I like her already."
"She’ll like you too. She has a weakness for women who build things with their hands."
I poured his coffee. Set it on the island. The same island. Except this morning the island held something it hadn’t held before — the aftermath of a night and the beginning of a structure and two cups of Ethiopian and a woman in a man’s shirt making plans to hire an attorney who hated the man whose shirt she was wearing.
"You’d really recommend someone who opposes you."
"I’d recommend someone who makes sure this partnership is real. Not a version of ownership dressed up as equality. You’ve spent months making sure I understand the difference. The least I can do is hire the person who’ll hold me to it."
"Did you just call it considerable?"
"I referenced our entire history. It’s been considerable."
"It’s been everything."
He crossed the kitchen. Not the hallway waiting. Not the distance negotiation. He crossed the kitchen the way I crossed counters — deliberately, fully, the crossing of a person who’d decided and the deciding was done.
He kissed me. Standing. In the kitchen. In the morning light. The cedar and the Ethiopian and his hands on my waist — his waist, his shirt, but my body underneath it — and the kiss was different from Treeline and different from the dining table and different from the blizzard. The kiss was domestic. Ordinary. The kiss of a man kissing a woman in a kitchen because she was there and the coffee was good and the morning was real.
"I’ll call Dana today," I said. Against his mouth.
"She’ll make me miserable."
"Good. You’ve earned some misery."
"I’ve earned everything that’s happened in this kitchen."
"The coffee or the kiss?"
"Both."
I pulled back. Took my cup. Took a sip. The Ethiopian was perfect. The morning was perfect. The man in front of me was imperfect in every way that mattered — scarred and compromised and built on ground he was only now learning to rebuild — and the imperfection was the thing I loved most because perfect men don’t stand in hallways for three nights and imperfect men do.
"Get dressed," I said. "I have a shop to open."
"In my shirt?"
"I’ll change at Treeline. Wen has spare clothes in the back."
"Wen is going to read you in two seconds."
"Wen is going to read me in one second and I’m going to let her because Wen has earned that read and also I’m incapable of lying to a woman who counts how many times I look at the corner table."
I kissed him once more. Quick. Domestic. The kind of kiss that happens between people who live together and are late for work and haven’t figured out how to stop kissing each other long enough to put on shoes.
Then I left. His shirt. The elevator. The city. The morning of a woman who’d crossed a threshold and was driving to a coffee shop in a gray t-shirt that smelled like cedar with a partnership to build and an attorney to hire and a counter to wipe down and a life that was — for the first time since a man sat at her corner table and changed everything — entirely, structurally, permanently hers.
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