Page 2 of Deal Breaker
“Meeting’s already started,” I say without looking up from the table.
Silence. The kind that shifts the air in a room. The kind that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
I glance towards the sound.
And everything stops. My entire body fucking locks up. My chest clamps down so tight I swear it might crack. It hits before my brain catches up—an electric full-body jolt, like taking a punch straight to the gut.
Everything else vanishes. The low hum of voices, the phones ringing, the shuffle of feet across the floor—it all disappears.
Fuck.
She’s standing next to Chloe at reception. Her hair is swept up in that soft, effortless way she always wore it. A loose blouse tucked into a pair of dress pants. Heels that give her petite frame three extra inches. She looks like the first day of June. Like the kind of memory that hits you out of nowhere and wrecks your whole damn day.
Landyn.
I tighten my grip on the edge of the table. Christ.
She hasn’t changed. Not really. Still the same coffee-brown eyes and long dark-blonde hair, still that mouth that used to smile against mine at midnight, still the only woman who ever made me feel like I could have something more than the chaos I came from. Somehow, she still feels like the beginning of everything. And the end of it, too.
“Ford,” she says softly as she approaches us. My name on her lips after seven years.
The walls press in on me, this whole damn building suddenly feels too small.
“We’re done here,” I say, eyes still on her. “Everyone can go.”
Chairs scrape back. Pages shuffle. The team disperses fast, no one daring to question my tone. Jesse is the last toleave, his eyes flicking between us like he’s catching on, but he knows better than to ask. I barely register him.
His footsteps fade to nothing, and then it’s just her and me.
And seven years of silence bearing down on us in like a goddamn freight train.
She’s fidgeting. Shifting from foot to foot like she’s waiting for someone to tell her where she belongs. Her gaze flicks around the lobby, never landing anywhere for long, like she already regrets stepping inside.
And I see it all over her face—that pinched, uncomfortable look that says she’s bracing herself for impact.
It shouldn’t matter. But fuck, it does.
Heat spikes in my chest, sharp and bitter. Why the hell is she here? Why now?
The ghost standing a few yards away is the same one who gutted me once, ripped my heart straight out and walked away with it like it was nothing. And yet here she is, looking like heaven and hell in the same breath, as if showing up in my world again won’t split me wide open.
“You’ve got 10 seconds,” I say, my voice low and cold, “to explain what the hell you’re doing here.”
“I didn’t know this was your company,” she says. Her voice is calm, even. “I didn’t even know you were still in Deep Cove.”
I laugh once, dry and sharp. She flinches—just barely—but I see it.
“I took the job through a consulting agency,” she continues. “I didn’t know I’d be walking into this.”
“This?” I echo. “You mean my company? My life?”
“Ford, I didn’t come here to?—”
“To what? To wreck my life again?” I take a step toward her. “Did you figure it’s been long enough, that maybe I’veforgotten about how you left? Or vanished, to be specific. No warning, no goodbye. Just gone. Maybe you thought after all this time I’d let it slide?”
Her jaw tightens. “I didn’t come to dredge up the past. I came to do my job.”
“And what is that, exactly?” I snap.
