Chapter 10 : Dimple Watch

Rory I escaped the fundraiser through a side door forty minutes later, because there's only so much chocolate fountain small talk a person can survive before needing actual oxygen. The balcony I found was smaller than the ballroom's grandeur would suggest existed anywhere on this property, tucked around a corner past a hallway lined with portraits of Sterlings who all had the same unimpressed eyebrows. Cooler air, quieter noise, actual stars instead of chandelier light. I gripped the railing and breathed like a woman who'd just resurfaced from being underwater for an hour, which, emotionally, felt about right. "There you are." Jarvis's voice, behind me, not remotely surprised to have found me. "I was starting to think you'd actually stolen the chocolate fountain." "I considered it. Logistics didn't work out." He came to stand beside me at the railing, tie loosened, jacket unbuttoned, looking less like the polished exhibit his father had been showing off inside and more like an actual person again. "You looked like you needed air." "I looked like I needed a new personality that doesn't involve making small talk with people who own more than one yacht." That got a real laugh out of him, and there it was — the dimple, unguarded, the specific version of Jarvis Sterling that didn't seem to exist anywhere inside that ballroom. I'd started keeping track without meaning to, somewhere around week two, an involuntary little scoreboard running in the back of my head: *public Jarvis, dimple absent. Private Jarvis, dimple present.* It should not have mattered to me which version I was getting at any given moment. It mattered anyway, more than I wanted to admit even to myself, alone, on a balcony, at nearly midnight. "This is the real house, you know," he said, gesturing vaguely at the dark grounds below us. "Not the one in there. This part. Where nobody's watching." "Is that why you keep sneaking out here?" "Caught me." He leaned his forearms on the railing, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine, and didn't move away. "I like the quiet. Not something you get a lot of, being the face of things." "Your dad said that tonight. 'The face of everything we're building.'" I kept my voice careful, testing the water. "That's a lot to carry around." Something shifted behind his eyes, quick, there and gone. "Yeah. It is." A pause, longer than the moment strictly needed. "You noticed that, huh." "I notice things." Same words I'd used with Dray twenty minutes earlier, and it struck me, uncomfortably, how easily I kept saying true things to both brothers like a woman who genuinely believed honesty was a viable long-term strategy for someone lying about her entire identity. Jarvis studied me for a long moment, the easy charm dialing down into something quieter, more careful. "Can I tell you something? And you have to promise not to make it weird." "I make everything weird. It's kind of my whole thing." "Fair." He almost smiled, then didn't quite. "I don't know what it is about you. You showed up two weeks ago and I've thought about you more than I've thought about anyone in — genuinely, I don't know how long. Which is insane, because you're my rookie, and I'm the captain, and there's about four hundred reasons this is a terrible idea." My heart did something violent and unhelpful, the exact same thing it had done in the parking lot with Dray, except entirely different, entirely its own particular flavor of catastrophic. "Jarvis —" "I'm not finished panicking yet, let me finish." He huffed a laugh at himself, running a hand through his hair, and for one unguarded second he looked genuinely lost, a boy instead of a captain, a person instead of the face of anything. "I don't even know what I'm trying to say. I just know I like being around you more than I've liked being around anyone in a long time, and I don't fully understand why, and it's been keeping me up at night in a way that's honestly kind of embarrassing to admit out loud." The balcony went very quiet. Somewhere below us, party noise carried faint and distant, a whole world happening without us in it. "You're staring at me like I grew a second head," he said, softer now. "I'm processing." Which was true. I was processing several things at once, none of them safe to say out loud — that I liked him too, more than the plan had any room for, more than made any sense given who his father was and what I still didn't know about which brother's world my sister had wandered into. That every honest word out of his mouth made the lie sitting in my chest heavier by the second. That I had absolutely no idea how to be the person he thought he was falling for, because that person didn't fully exist. "Rory." He turned fully toward me now, and something in his face had gone unbearably sincere, stripped of every performance I'd watched him give all night. "I don't know what this is. I just know I don't want it to stop." He leaned in, slow, giving me every chance in the world to pull away, and I didn't — couldn't, some traitorous part of me rooted to the spot, the space between us shrinking to nothing, his breath warm and close and — "Am I interrupting something?" Dray's voice cut through the dark from the doorway, flat, unreadable, timed with the precision of a man who either had extraordinarily bad luck or extraordinarily good instincts. Jarvis jerked back like he'd been electrocuted, and I stumbled a half step in the opposite direction, heart hammering so hard I was fairly certain both brothers could hear it from where they stood. "No," Jarvis said, too fast, voice pitched a register higher than usual. "Just — talking. About team stuff." "Team stuff," Dray repeated, flat, gaze moving slow between the two of us, something calculating and unreadable working behind his eyes. "Right." He didn't move from the doorway. Didn't leave. Just stood there, watching us both with an expression I couldn't parse at all — not jealousy exactly, not quite suspicion either, something stranger and more complicated sitting underneath his usual careful blankness, like a man discovering he cared about the answer to a question he hadn't known he was asking. "Dad's looking for you both," he said finally, voice giving away nothing. "Says it's time for photos." He turned and walked back inside without waiting for a response, leaving the balcony ringing with everything unsaid — Jarvis staring after his brother with a small furrow between his brows, like he'd caught the edge of something he couldn't quite name, and me standing there with my pulse still hammering from an almost-kiss that had just gotten interrupted by the one person in this entire house whose reaction to it mattered more than either of them could possibly know.