KADENWaking up on a Friday morning without having to go to work was going to take some getting used to. The same went for any other day of the week, for that matter. While I took a day off here and there, it wasn’t something I was in the habit of doing.Life had always been busy for me. From high school, I went straight to college. After graduating from Harvard, I had all of three days to move before I started working.No gap years, no time off, no nothing.Hanging around the penthouse during the working week just wasn’t something I did. Staring down the barrel of taking an indefinite amount of time off work, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sure, I promised Ember I would keep helping her, which meant I technically had work to do. I just didn’t have to go into the office to do it.I had no interest in being there when my dad was such a dick about it. My home office was fully outfitted with state-of-the-art electronics, software that alerted me to any movement in the finance worl

EMBERMy mother always told us to respect other people by being on time. As flaky as I could be, I always tried to heed that advice. Glancing down at my rose-gold knockoff watch for the fifth time in as many minutes, I realized I was the only one of my mother’s children who had paid attention during that particular lesson.I was sitting at a small round table in the center of the bistro Ryan and I had agreed to meet at. It smelled like melted cheese and pastries, vegetable soup and a hundred other mouthwatering aromas I couldn’t quite put my finger on.My stomach growled, and I took another sip of my water, utterly dissatisfied with the taste given how delicious everything else in the room looked and smelled. When the server came by earlier, I told her I would wait before placing my order.She kept giving me sympathetic looks now, almost thirty minutes after I had told her I was waiting for someone to arrive. Obviously, she thought I had been stood up and that I was still holding out

KADEN“Run, fucker!” I yelled at my television screen, wishing I had some popcorn I could throw at it. The guy in the blue uniform carrying the ball on a field hundreds of miles away promptly ignored my advice, the briefest of pauses resulting in him taking a shoulder to the stomach.“Serves you right,” I muttered, swigging my beer. I was well into my Sunday afternoon ritual, the smell of a steak from the grill on my balcony drifting to my nostrils on a light breeze to where I sat on the couch and watched the game. “I told you to run, not to stop.”The player accepted the hand a teammate stretched out to help him up, not having been seriously injured. That was a good thing, since they played on the team I was cheering for this game. I stretched out on the couch, slinging my arm across the leather while I waited for the game to resume.Football hadn’t really been a very important part of my life until we moved to Texas. The game was a religion down there, and at some stage as a prepube

EMBER“I’ve never flown first class before,” I admitted to Kaden while boarding the plane. Awed at the cabin, I gaped as I took it all in. “Please tell me we’ll need to go on a much longer flight sometime soon.”When people around me used to talk about flying first class, I never thought I would ever actually get to experience it myself. It always seemed like a bit of a waste to me, paying that much more to reach the same destination at the same time as the people in coach class.I told Kaden that when I saw our flight tickets and noticed he had booked our seats in first, but he smirked and replied that I would understand soon enough. Besides, he had said he liked to travel in style, and there was no reason for us to be crammed into tiny seats and wait in long lines. “What if I like cramming myself in up close and personal to my neighbor and chatting in the lines?” I had joked.Kaden had rolled his eyes. “You can get up close and personal with me in first class anytime you like.”Our

KADENIt was another blistering, hot, humid day in Houston as we made our way to the client’s address. In the sweltering heat, there was a highway mirage on the road that made it look like the surface was wet.Ember fidgeted with her fingers in the car, taking deep breath after deep breath. If I hadn’t known her as well as I did, I wouldn’t have been able to tell she was nervous, though. I was on the lookout for the signs after her confession last night, and even though her breaths were deeper than usual, they weren’t obvious.“You’re going to be fine,” I assured her, reaching over to squeeze her knee. The skin beneath my hand was bare and warm, the simple white dress she was wearing having ridden up when she got in the car.She looked gorgeous and professional in her capped-sleeve dress, the neckline demure and the hem brushing the tops of her knees when she stood. She had paired it with what she had informed me this morning were red “power heels” and had pinned her dark hair up in s