Chapter 51 Built For This World
The noise outside the house was getting louder every hour, and Alex stood by the window watching the reporters trip over each other just to get a blurry shot of the front door.
He felt a cold knot of guilt in his stomach because Sarah was sitting on the stairs with her head in her hands, her phone buzzing constantly with messages from people who were leaving her business in droves, and he knew that his father had won the first round by making their private lives a public circus that was burning everything Sarah had built to the ground.
He couldn't stay in that room anymore, so he drove out to the Vane estate where the silence was thick and heavy, and he walked through the library looking at the portraits of his mother’s family and the ledgers that showed just how much money was sitting in accounts that his father could not touch, and he realized that he had all this wealth and all this power but he was still letting Sarah drown because he was too afraid to step into the light and fight on his father’s level.
He stood there for a long time staring at a photo of his grandfather until he knew that the only way to save the woman he loved was to become the man he had been hiding from for seven years.
He went back to Sarah’s house and found her in the kitchen staring at a pile of cancellation notices, and he walked up to her and pulled her into his arms, holding her so tight that he could feel the frantic beat of her heart against his chest, and he waited until she looked up at him before he said the words that he knew would change their lives forever.
"I called him, Sarah, I told him I would take the job as a consultant for the Harrington Group starting tomorrow morning," Alex said, his voice sounding flat and steady even though he felt like he was jumping off a cliff, and Sarah just blinked at him for a few seconds like she didn't understand what he was saying, her face looking pale and tired under the bright kitchen lights.
"You can't do that just because of me, Alex. You hate that building and you hate what it does to people, you told me you would never go back there," she whispered, her hands clutching the front of his shirt like she was afraid he was going to disappear right then and there.
"It’s the only way to kill the story, Sarah, because once I’m inside the firm I can control the PR team and I can force the lawyers to drop the audit on your business, and I can make sure the press leaves Mark alone because my father won't let them attack his son's best friend if that son is sitting in the executive suite," Alex explained, and he reached out to cup her face in his hands, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones as he looked at her with a desperate kind of love.
"It’s the right thing to do, I know it is, and it will save the firm and it will give Mark some peace, but I’m so scared, Alex, I’m scared that once you put on that suit and sit in that chair you won't be the boy I fell in love with anymore," Sarah said, and she leaned her head against his shoulder and started to cry quietly, and even though she was saying he should do it she looked like her heart was breaking into a thousand pieces.
And she had just admitted to being in love with him.
"I'm not going to change, I’m doing this for us and I’m doing this to protect you, so don't you ever think that I’m becoming him," Alex told her, but his voice sounded a little bit uncertain even to his own ears because he knew how seductive the power could be and how much his father was going to try to mold him into a new version of a Harrington heir.
They didn't talk much for the rest of the evening, they just stayed close to each other, moving through the house like they were trying to memorize every corner of their life before it got complicated by boardrooms and news cycles, and when night finally fell they went to the bedroom and held onto each other with a frantic kind of passion that felt like they were trying to outrun the morning sun.
Alex was dominant and urgent in a way that made Sarah forget the reporters outside and the scandal and the debt, she just let herself melt into him and feel the strength of his body against hers.
They made love for hours and it felt different than before, it was fueled by a fear that this might be the last time they were just Alex and Sarah without the eyes of the world watching them, and every time he kissed her he felt like he was trying to leave a mark that would stay on her skin even after he walked into his father's office, and Sarah clung to him and let him do whatever he wanted because she wanted to feel him as deeply as she could before the heir took the place of the boy.
When the sun finally started to come up Sarah stayed in bed and watched him get dressed in the dark, and she saw him put on a crisp white shirt and tie his tie with hands that didn't shake, and he looked so different in the suit that it made her heart ache with a physical pain, he looked older and harder and he looked like he belonged in a mansion on a hill, and she realized that his father was right about one thing, Alex was built for this world whether he liked it or not.
He leaned over the bed and kissed her one last time, a long and possessive kiss that tasted like a goodbye even though he promised he would be back for dinner, and then he turned and walked out of the room without looking back because he knew if he did he might stay and let the world burn just to be near her for one more hour.
Sarah stayed under the covers for a long time listening to the sound of his truck pulling out of the driveway and the shouting of the reporters as they followed him down the street, and when she finally got up to get some coffee she walked into the kitchen and saw something sitting on the marble counter that wasn't there before.
It was a heavy brass key on a leather strap, and next to it was a small piece of paper with Alex’s handwriting on it, and she picked it up and read the words over and over until they blurred in front of her eyes.
"This is the key to the Vane estate, it’s legally yours now if you need it, so go there and stay safe if everything goes wrong at the office today, because no matter what happens in that building I have made sure you are taken care of."
Sarah held the key tight in her hand and looked out at the empty driveway, feeling a sudden chill because she realized that Alex hadn't just gone to work, he had gone to war, and she didn't know if the man who came back tonight would be the same one who had left her bed.