She had told herself, on the drive up, that she was here for the quarterly report and the linen order. Both were true. Both were also beside the point.
A new handkerchief sat folded at the bottom of her bag, clean and pressed. Belonging to someone on these grounds. Someone who had specifically told her to stay away from the estate.
"Go home. Don't come back." He had said.
She had driven home, appreciated her father for preparing dinner she didn't eat, made tea she didn't drink, and spent the night turning the words over until they lost their shape.
She was here anyway.
The pine-lined path carried the morning in — cold air, birdsong, the soft creak of branches overhead. Then, before the mansion came into view, she heard it. The sound of impact and movement, deliberate and rhythmic, carrying through the trees with the soft wind of the morning. She had always kept walking when she heard it. Today she didn't.
She walked in.
The air carried the faint mix of sweat and the metallic tang of blood. Sunlight streamed across the clearing, glinting off treadmills, weight racks, and machines set against packed earth and wooden posts. Groups of men moved through their drills with practiced precision. Their rhythm echoing the discipline of the place.
And at the front of it all, shirtless and arms crossed, stood her destination.
She had managed his events, fielded his last-minute changes, and seen him in tailored suits at every function she had run on these grounds. He had always been handsome in the way powerful men often were, easy to look at, easy to file away.
Out here, neither was true.
Broad shoulders tapered into a narrow, powerful waist. The kind of build that had no business belonging to a man who presided over the kind of gatherings she had spent two months organizing.
He watched the drills without moving, without speaking, without needing to. The clearing organized itself around him the way a flock of birds organized itself around a hawk, not from instruction, but from something older and more instinctive than that. Every man in that space knew exactly where he was without looking and none tried to look. Eyes stayed forward, on the drills, on the ground, anywhere but him. As though looking directly was a risk none of them were willing to take. The stillness he wore didn't calm the ground. It pressured it.
She adjusted the report in her hand and kept moving.
Then she felt it. Low and distinct. The same pull from the night before. Her eyes moved without her permission toward the equipment rack along the far edge of the clearing. Alaric stood with a rag slung over one shoulder, half-turned from the group, hands working through the motions of stacking gear. Not training. Not among them. Working.
His face had the same blank expression he always wore, but his eyes were on her. Steady and concentrated, tracking her across the clearing as she walked toward the same man he warned her against. The CEO of Melby Event and Logistics. Her Boss.
"Mr. Jax." She greeted him with the report extended
He turned. "Ms. Caelora." The voice of one who had never had to repeat himself twice.
He took the report, eyes moving across the first page in a single sweep. "You could have emailed this." He held it out without looking and Ronan appeared at his shoulder to collect it.
"I have other business to take care of today, sir," she said.
"What other business?" His gaze settled on her and she felt the urge to straighten her spine, to speak with more words than the question required. But she had survived the last two months for a reason.
"I have a linen order to sign off on in person. The Solenne Dinner is three weeks out and the supplier won't release the consignment without a physical confirmation."
"Okay." And without a second glance he returned his eyes back to the training. Arms crossed at his back.
She turned to walk out, still aware of Alaric's gaze on her, when suddenly she heard a crash close to her.
One of the men misplaced his foot and slipped off a treadmill moving at top speed. He got up and straightened immediately. Fear more evident on his face than pain.
"Are you o-?" Her words got stuck in her throat.