I checked the time. Somehow, two hours had already passed.
“All set,” I lied.
“Okay! Let me know if you need anything else from me.”
Aspen was a godsend. I’d gone through so many assistants before finding her. She was always eager to learn, which I’d found out was not a common trait among campaign assistants.
“Will do,” I told her.
I grabbed everything I would need for the meeting off of my desk and stumbled into the conference room, scattering papers on the giant table. I arranged them into a neat pile, perfectly ready for this meeting. Even if I would have felt more comfortable after another twenty hours of prep.
Not that I had twenty extra hours. Not as the deputy campaign manager, where I had to oversee all six major departments—fundraising, communications, field, legal, tech, and political. I could spend every day on just one of these areas and not get enough done. But since the mayor’s banquet was the most important thing on the agenda, this meeting was at the top of the list. And I was going to be sure that it went off without a hitch.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Demi said as she entered the room.
Demi was the head of the fundraising department and probably my favorite person in the office. She was a short, curvy black woman from Brooklyn, who always seemed perfectly put together. In fact, she carried her own papers in a notebook with each person’s name labeled on the front and a presentation board with every banquet guest’s name on a sticky note.
“Morning, Demi.”
“Aspen said you came in early again. Are you always going to show us up?” she asked with a grin. She set the board down on the table and then turned to face me, twirling a short corkscrew curl around her finger.
“Too much to do, so little time,” I told her with a shrug. “I’m just going to grab my laptop. We can get started once everyone else is ready.”
“Sounds good.”
I hastened back to my office and grabbed my MacBook, pulling up the figures I had been looking at yesterday.
“Oh, hey, Lark. Do you have a minute?”
I glanced up to see Kelly from HR, peeking into the office. “Um, I have, like, three minutes before my meeting.”
“Perfect! I’m trying to introduce the new attorney we just hired to everyone.”
“You finally filled the position?” I asked in surprise.
We’d been searching for a while for someone with the proper qualifications in campaign finance. I hadn’t thought it would be hard to find someone like that in New York City. Didn’t everyone have a JD here?
“Yep! Come meet him real quick. I sent him to get coffee.”
I shut my laptop and passed Kelly as she sank her hip against Aspen’s desk and started chatting. Clearly, this meet the new guy thing was an excuse to chitchat, but I really did like to know everyone who worked here.
I stepped into the break room just as the new guy turned from the crappy coffeemaker. Our eyes met. Time slowed. Then froze. For the first time, I understood the meaning of my heart skipping a beat. Because it did.
I took in the deep dark brown orbs. Let my eyes crash over the swish of brown hair, the lethal cut of his jawline, the Cupid’s bow of his perfect lips. That body. Holy fuck, the way that body filled out that black suit. And those hands. Builder’s hands.
A part of me ached to step forward.
A part of me remembered what had happened.
How we had fallen apart all those years ago.
“Lark?” he asked in disbelief.
My traitorous heart fluttered.
“Hi, Sam.”
2
Lark
Sam’s eyes swept down my own black suit as he took me in from head to toe. I felt exposed in that look. As if he saw so much more than the rumpled suit to the vulnerable girl I’d been once upon a time.
He reached a hand forward as if he was trying to make sure that I was actually there. Then he quickly withdrew like if he got too close, I’d burn him.
“What are you doing here?” Sam finally managed to get out.
“What am I doing here?” I said in disbelief. “What are you doing here? I’m from New York. I thought you were still in North Carolina.”
“Oh, right.” He rubbed the back of his head. “You’re from New York. I just…I thought you were working for your parents.”
“Oh.”
Because of course he did. That had been the plan after all. One year on the presidential campaign in Madison, Wisconsin. One perfect year with Sam. And then I would come home to New York and take over St. Vincent’s Enterprise. Except everything had changed when I got home. I’d never been the same after that fateful November five years earlier.
“I decided to join Leslie’s campaign instead,” I told him. “I mean, Mayor Kensington’s campaign.”
“Really?” he asked, shock registering on his face. “But…I thought it was just a year.”
“Yeah…it was.”
We were.
I swallowed back the bile at the thought of what had happened with us five years ago. A year of bliss that had gone down in a fiery pit of destruction.
We stood together then like ghosts of our former selves. An echo of what we’d once been. Hurt, betrayal, and still that aching want burning at the edges. That had always been there with Sam. An inevitable force that blew us together, only to slam us into a wall, screeching tires, locked brakes, and cracked windshield, leaving us both a mess.
And still, despite all the walls I’d built up around myself since Sam, seeing him made it feel like my still-bleeding heart was exposed all over again.
“Hey, Lark!” Kelly interrupted, popping into the break room at that exact moment. “Glad you met Sam. He’s going to be a big part of the team from now on.”
I swallowed back bile. Oh no. Oh god. I’d known when Kelly sent me in here that Sam was the new attorney she had just hired. But I hadn’t put two and two together that I was going to be seeing him every single day from now until November.
“That’s great,” I said. “Welcome…to the team.”
“Thanks,” he said softly.
Brown eyes met green in the space between us. There was so much more that needed to be said. So much that had been left unsaid when I returned home all those years ago. I’d never thought that I’d see him again. And now that I was, I had no fucking clue what to do.
“Well, come on, Sam. Lark is late to her banquet meeting, and the mayor just got in,” Kelly said in her default chipper tone. She strode out of the break room and called over her shoulder, “You’ll get your first intro on day one!”
“Ugh, my meeting,” I groaned, turning in place to follow Kelly.
“Wait,” Sam said.
He reached out and this time gripped my elbow. I turned back to face him with wide, shocked eyes. He towered over me. I’d forgotten until that moment how huge he was. All tall, wide-shouldered Southern boy who actually knew manual labor with calluses on his fingers and biceps for days. A man who liked to use his hands…in all the best ways.
“What?” I whispered. I was conscious of Kelly mere feet away and the meeting I was currently supposed to be in.
“We need to talk. Later.”