Right up until he asked his first question. Then all the heads in the room turned as one.
“What?” He pointed to the part of the document they’d been discussing. “I did the reading.”
McConnell made a strangled-sounding noise with his throat.
Fortunately, Thomas jumped in before McConnell’s eyes could actually pop out of his head. “Mr. Bellamy does bring up a good point.”
Rylan swiveled back and forth in his chair as the discussion shifted. Over the course of the next hour, he left the running of the meeting to the people who’d been there all along, but he managed to keep things pointed in the direction he wanted them to go.
The direction Lexie had laid out for him.
He looked over at her as the tide started to turn in their favor, quirking one eyebrow in a silent question. Good enough for you?
She made a show of heaving her shoulders as she sighed, but her smile belied it all.
After what felt like about a million years, the meeting neared its close. Just one item left on the agenda.
McConnell looked around the room, and Rylan could see him counting in his head. Well, Rylan had done his counting, too. “As for the matter of reversion of the Bellamy family’s controlling interest . . .” His gaze went to Rylan.
The bastard wasn’t sure he had the votes to stay in control. Honestly, Rylan wasn’t sure he had enough support, either.
But there was one motion he was sure he could get through.
Rylan cleared his throat and stood. “I’d like to call for a ninety-day grace period before the vote.”
Relief fairly rippled through the room. McConnell’s shoulders even lowered a fraction. “The motion stands,” he said. “Simple majority.”
Hands went up in the air to the tune of aye, and Rylan sank back into his seat.
Ninety days. Ninety days to shore up support, to devise a strategy.
To decide exactly how far he wanted this all to go, and whether or not he was prepared to take the helm.
The meeting adjourned shortly after, and Rylan stretched his arms over his head with a sense of satisfaction. There was still a lot to figure out, but he’d taken the first step, at least. He’d shown up. Claimed his place. And declined to let Rome burn.
Standing, Rylan packed up the briefcase, holding off the couple of folks who seemed to want to strike up a conversation by nodding toward his sister. He made his way over to her while she was still finishing her notes.
“So?” he asked. “How’d I do?”
“There’s room for improvement.” She closed her folio and set her pen down. “But I think you’ve got potential.”
He smirked. She’d begrudged him his father’s favor for so long. Even that admission felt like a triumph. “Glad to hear it.”
Rising, she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You cut it a little close there with the timing.”
The corner of his lip threatened to twitch up, but he held steady, expression blank. “Sorry. Traffic across the Atlantic Ocean was a bitch.”
“Asshole.” Her frown held for another few beats. Then all at once, it fell away and she held out her arms.
He stepped into the hug, scooping her up.
“Thanks for coming,” she said into his chest.
“Thanks for the push.”
He held her close for a long minute. There weren’t going to be any big emotional declarations here. Hell, already they’d said more than they usually did. That was how they worked. But all the same, it was apology and forgiveness. Approval and acceptance.
Letting her go, he stepped away.
“So,” she started, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “You want to grab a drink or something? Dinner at Ai Fiori’s? I can probably call in and get Dad’s table. God knows he’s not using it.”
He jerked his thumb toward the door. “Nah. Just got into town this afternoon, and there are some things I need to do.”
“Pfft. It’s been a year. No one’s going to care if you put them off another day.”
“But I will.”
She gave him an appraising look, and not for the first time, he felt like she could see right through him. After a second, she glanced away and shrugged. “If you say so. You have a place to stay?”
God, he hoped he did. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Well, if you don’t . . .”
He shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’m good.”
“Suit yourself. Later this week, though, let’s catch up. We need to talk strategy going forward for handling all of this.” She gestured at the board table.
“Sure.” He half turned away, one foot already edging toward the exit.
She stopped him before he could go. “Rylan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re home.”
His heart did something strange and complicated inside his chest at that word. Home. “Yeah.”
“It’s just—I don’t have a lot of people left who I can count on. Who I can trust. It’s nice to know you’re one of them.”
He swallowed down the things he wanted to say to that. Managing the barest excuse for a smile, he touched the outside pocket of the briefcase. Felt the spiral binding of the sketchbook he had placed there through the leather.
The fact that he still had it said he wasn’t worthy of anybody’s trust.
But he was trying to be.
Nodding, he turned his back on Lexie, on the room as a whole.
At his father’s insistence, he’d sacrificed the parts of his life that happened beyond this building, but not anymore. He had other responsibilities, other apologies to make.
He just had to pray that they’d be heard.
chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
“I didn’t peg you for a Brooklyn girl.”
Kate startled and whipped around, managing to yank her headphones out of her ears and knock over a brush in the process. As she fumbled for them both, she darted her gaze up. Liam, one of the guys from her program, stood behind her, looking way too amused at having caught her unawares. If the streaks of paint on his jeans and in the front of his messy, sandy hair were anything to go by, he’d been in the studio for a while. She must’ve really been out of it not to have noticed him until now.
As she ducked to retrieve her brush, she smiled. It wasn’t that she hadn’t made other friends among the students here, but Liam was the one who made a point of saying hi to her, of offering to grab her a coffee when he went on a caffeine run. She wasn’t under any illusions. The niceness was probably flirtiness, but that wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
If there was one thing she had learned from the mess this summer, it was how to handle a guy who wanted to get in her pants.
The slow flicker of a smile on her lips faded and died. She faltered as she stood back up. This summer . . . Well, she’d learned a lot of things, and most of them the hard way. But that was fine. Time healed all wounds, after all. The scars Rylan had left on her heart weren’t gone yet, but they were slowly closing over, leaving her stronger than she had ever been.
Slowly but steadily, she was recovering.
Now if she could only say the same about her art.
With a grimace, she glanced over her shoulder at the painting she’d been working on. Liam had recognized it at least, so that was something.
“What’s wrong with Brooklyn?” she asked.
“Nothing. Well, unless you’re talking about Park Slope, in which case only everything.” Liam grinned. “But Bushwick is pretty legit.” He nodded toward the photo she had tacked up beside her easel. “That’s where you took that?”
“Yeah.” She’d been scouring a bunch of local neighborhoods, taking pictures, looking for different sorts of architecture, different types of cityscapes. She just couldn’t seem to connect to them the way she had the sights in Paris. Trying to paint from them didn’t feel the same.