Did she know about the deal her husband had made with Royce? How Macalister had bought me for one hundred thousand shares? Macalister was Zeus, but she wasn’t Hera. At least, not in jealousy or fidelity—I’d seen her and Vance together, after all.
I stared down at the wood grain running through the table and tried not to think about it.
At seven-thirty sharp, I peered up at the closed library door, and trepidation twisted in my core. The sensation was becoming familiar. Macalister was already in there because I could hear his heavy footsteps moving around. I filled my lungs with a deep breath, grasped the knob, and pushed the door open.
Awareness ghosted across my skin like a whisper. Something was . . . different. The room looked the same with its bookshelves full of colorful spines, and the smell of leather and oak was as I was accustomed to. The man who stood by the window wore one of his many impeccable suits, not a cufflink or a hair out of place.
But he didn’t have to say a word for me to know something was wrong. The nearly empty tumbler of amber liquid in his hand did.
I’d never seen Macalister Hale drink.
The night of the initiation, he’d toasted with a glass of champagne, but he’d only taken a single sip before handing it off to his wife. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d merely pressed the glass to his mouth and faked the action of letting the alcohol past his lips.
He demanded precision in all aspects of his life. I assumed he didn’t drink because he wouldn’t want anything to impair his judgement or make him vulnerable. But there was a bottle of Macallan 1926 on the table that was half empty, and an unused glass rested beside it.
Macalister’s shoulders rolled back, and he straightened to his full, daunting height. His gaze pierced into me while accusation swamped his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Was I early? I wanted to shrink back into the shadows, but there was nowhere to hide. I bit down on the inside of my cheek to muster the words. “It’s seven-thirty.”
His arm extended out before bending at ninety-degrees, pulling back his sleeve and making the Cartier watch on his wrist visible to him. He checked the time and frowned. “So it is.”
Rather than take a seat at the desk where the chessboard waited for us, he stayed at the window and finished his scotch. Not in savoring sips as it was supposed to be done, but in one huge swallow.
The whole day had been weird, but nothing set me more on edge than the way Macalister looked now. The only emotions I’d seen from him were the hard, shallow ones. Anger. Disappointment. Envy.
This man now was barely recognizable. He looked exhausted.
And utterly human.
I hadn’t taken my hand off the doorknob yet. Like a chess piece, I’d moved but was still considering before committing to it. “Do you want to postpone?”
“No.” He strode to the desk, put down his empty glass and refilled it, then poured a few sips-worth into the other glass. “You’ll join me in a drink while we play.”
It wasn’t a request, and his order made me squirm inside my skin. Sharing a drink with my future father-in-law should have been a nice gesture, and the scotch he’d poured wasn’t an ‘average day’ kind of whiskey—not even for one of the richest men in America. It was far too fine, too expensive.
I didn’t like how it made the evening seem like we were friends. We’d never be friends. He was more than twice my age, and the power dynamic between us was wider than the Atlantic.
“I’m, uh, not a scotch drinker,” I said.
He wasn’t fazed and held the glass out to me. “I don’t remember asking.”
My heart sank. I closed the door and went to him, mumbling a thank you as I took the scotch. At least he hadn’t poured heavy and was only wasting a few thousand dollars on me. Like a gentleman, he waited until I sat before he did. Two months ago, I wouldn’t have warranted this sign of respect from him. For years, he hadn’t noticed my existence.
Not until his son showed an interest.
Macalister’s steely eyes weren’t as focused as they normally were. While we played, his moves were still deliberate and cunning, but they were slower. Last night, he’d gone on the attack, and even the way he’d set his pieces down was sharp and aggressive. It had been a quick death.
Now, it was slow and agonizing. He slid the marble pieces across the black and white checkerboard like soap slicking across skin.
“You haven’t touched your scotch,” he said as his queen glided to a new spot close to my king. “Check.”
I’d learned that the game of chess was played in three phases. The opening, the middlegame, and the one we’d just entered—
The endgame.
I picked up the tumbler and sipped the scotch while pretending to consider my options. There weren’t any, really. I knew how it was going to end no matter what I did. Royce’s words echoed in my mind. He doesn’t play a game unless he’s sure he’s going to win.
Macalister’s heavy gaze drank me in as the flavor of burnt rubber rolled across the tip of my tongue. I guarded my reaction carefully. He didn’t need to know I hated his expensive scotch or the way he looked at me. Chess wasn’t the only game we played every night. The stakes on the unspoken game were much higher.
I moved my bishop to block in a futile attempt, sacrificing it and only prolonging the inevitable.
His voice was unsteady, rather than gloating like he usually did. It was as if he were sad the game was over. “Checkmate.”
It was the longest game we’d played yet, but he wasn’t satisfied. As I rearranged the pieces into their starting positions, I tried to ignore the man who’d won and his strange behavior.
He said it quietly. “You’re improving.”
“Still a long way from beating you,” I grumbled, then sucked in a sharp breath. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. I finished arranging the pieces into their starting positions and stood from my chair, relieved to escape—
Only to be frozen in place by his command.
“Stay.”
There was a hint of desperation in the word, so faint I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it. I didn’t want to stay. This mortal version of Macalister was the scariest of all.
My voice went soft, not wanting to disturb the shadows in the room. “Is everything all right?”
His expression shuttered, like I’d uncovered a dark secret. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ve never seen you drink before.”
His gaze fell to his hand wrapped around the glass. “I do, once a year.”
He lifted the drink to his lips and fixed his stare on me while he drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed with each slow, deliberate swallow. It made me uncomfortable. He looked at me like he’d rather be savoring me than the liquor. When he finished, he set the glass down and ran his finger along the rim. It was an absentminded gesture, but it rang false. Everything he did was calculated and measured.
“Once a year?” I asked.
“Yes.” The pad of his finger curved another loop around the edge of the glass. “The day my wife died.”
SIX
MY HEART SLOWED TO A STOP. “That’s today?”
Macalister’s expression was vacant stone, matching the marble chess pieces. “Losing Julia was the second most difficult day of my life, so you’ll have to forgive the scotch. I’ve done it for the last fifteen years, and it has become a tradition of sorts.”