Page 22 of The Final Contract
I can feel Killian vibrating behind me, his fury restrained but barely. If I don’t end this now, he might.
I ease out of his arms, smooth down my dress, and extend my hand. “Thank you for the lovely evening, Mr. Carter.”
His mouth tightens, and I can see it in his stare—the offense, the realization that the night is over and nothing else is coming. But with Killian standing a few feet away, looking like a caged beast waiting for someone to unlatch the door, Elijah swallows it down.
“Likewise,” he says stiffly.
I try to walk normally to the waiting limo, my heels clicking across the pavement, Felix sitting tall and steady behind the wheel. Killian keeps pace at my side, a silent shadow, his presence heavier than the night air.
He reaches for the door handle, opening it in one smooth motion, then extends his hand.
Instinct takes over. Muscle memory. My fingers slip into his before I think better of it.
His hand feels warmer than usual—not the kind of heat from an overheated body, but something else. A steady, grounding warmth that sinks through my skin and steadies the tremor Elijah left behind.
Maybe it’s just the shit show of the evening. Maybe his familiar touch feels like a tether because I’ve spent the last two hours enduring Elijah Carter’s endless bragging. Or maybe it’s because when we arrived, Killian didn’t offer me his hand at all. He always does.
And I’d bitten back the sting of it. Because I can’t let myself forget why I’m here. I’m here to find a husband. A future. When I do, Killian will be reassigned. I won’t need him anymore.
But for now, I cling to that moment of contact.
His hand is firm, his palm calloused, so much larger than mine that it swallows my fingers whole.
I can feel the tension in him, like he’s on the cusp of saying something—about Elijah, about my ridiculous date, about the way I tripped on a chair leg like a nervous schoolgirl.
So I slide into the limo without looking at him and cut him off at the pass. “Don’t even say it.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
But the faint curve of his mouth, the ghost of a smirk, betrays him completely.
Killian shrugs out of his suit jacket before sliding into the back seat with me. Another deviation. On the way here, he’d sat in the front with Felix, a deliberate wall between us. Now he’s back in his usual spot, close enough that I can feel the air shift with him.
And I hate to admit it, but I feel better for it. If something happened, at least I’d see him, know he’d face it with me.
The car eases forward, headlights cutting through Manhattan’s night. Killian’s fingers tap against his knee in a steady rhythm before he stops, tugging at his cuffs, rolling one sleeve with deliberate precision.
By the time he starts on the second, I catch myself watching—the flex of his forearms, the hard line of muscle that no fabric could disguise, the curve of his biceps shifting under his shirt.
“You want to tell me what that was about back there?” His voice is quiet, but it cuts.
My brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
“When you tripped over the chair. You weren’t clumsy. You were startled. Like you were about to bolt straight through the wall.”
I glance out the window. “It was silly, really.”
“Nothing is silly when it could help us figure out who’s harassing you.”
The intensity in his gray eyes catches me when I finally look back at him. It holds me there until I let out a breath.
“I thought…” My voice lowers, almost embarrassed. “What if he’s wearing colored contacts? What if Elijah’s the stalker? It was just the thought, and then I—reacted. It was dumb.”
Killian doesn’t blink. “That’s not dumb. You’ve been pretending this doesn’t exist because that’s how you survive it. But tonight made it real. And now it can’t be ignored.”
His words settle heavy in my chest.
“Why him?” he presses. “Why’d you think he could be the stalker?”
