Second Chance Betrayal: A Billionaire’s Sinful Reunion

Isla's POV

The gate code hasn't changed.

I sit with the rental idling at the entrance to Damien Blackwood's Hamptons house, my thumb hovering over the keypad instead of the call button, and some reckless, humiliating part of me is almost disappointed when the numbers I once knew by heart still work. The gate groans open like it's been waiting. A year of silence, and he never bothered to lock me out. I tell myself that means nothing. Men like Damien don't sentimentalize old codes. He simply never thought of me enough to change it.

That's the story I decide to believe, because the alternative that some part of him left the door open on purpose is more than I can carry right now.

I ease the sedan around the curve of the driveway, past the house itself, and park in the shade of the willow tree I used to sit under with a book I never actually read, too busy watching him work through the glass doors. My hands don't leave the wheel right away. My pulse is doing something violent and unfamiliar, hammering so hard I can feel it behind my eyes. I came all this way. I am not turning this car around in his own driveway like a coward.

I loop my bag across my body, tuck it against my hip, and force myself out into the wind.

October off the Atlantic has teeth. It grabs a fistful of my hair the second I step clear of the car, and I curl deeper into my sweater, the collar doing nothing against the cold biting at my throat. Salt rides the air, sharp and familiar, and underneath it, unmistakably, the ghost of this place of ours, of a version of me that used to belong here without asking permission. I hate how fast it comes back. I hate that a smell can undo a year of work.

I am over him. I've said it enough times that it should be true by now.

I climb the front steps two at a time before I lose my nerve, past the same wood siding, the same three peaked rooflines cutting into the gray sky. This house used to be Raymond's before it was Damien's, before a heart gave out on a golf course and left his son everything, including this place, including me though I didn't stay to be inherited along with the rest of it. Raymond had impeccable taste. He'd have hated that I'm standing here shaking.

My hand lifts toward the bell and then simply doesn't finish the motion.

It's the memories that stop me, arriving all at once and without permission the shouting, the door I slammed, the version of myself that cried in a rental car two blocks from a church because I couldn't make myself go inside a funeral home to say the thing I actually meant. There was more good than bad here, though, and that's the part that guts me. The way he used to look at me like I was the only fixed point in a very large, very loud world. None of it changes what came after. None of it changes why I left.

I should have called first. I should have done a lot of things differently.

I turn to retreat down the stairs, already composing the apology I'll leave on his voicemail, when an engine snarls up the drive behind me, that particular arrogant growl I would know blindfolded, in a coma, from the other side of the world. The Porsche. Of course it's the Porsche. He brakes hard enough that gravel sprays, and I freeze on the bottom step like I've been caught somewhere I shouldn't be, which, in fairness, I have.

I brace myself the way you'd brace for a wave you know is going to be bigger than you.

I'm not the woman who used to live here. I've spent a year turning myself into someone harder to break.

The door pops open before the engine's even fully silent. He unfolds out of the driver's seat the way he does everything unhurried, certain, like the world will simply rearrange itself around his timeline. Six-three of him, dark hair pushed around by the wind in that same careless wave my hands used to get lost in. Jeans, a black shirt that has no business fitting him that well, and thirty-eight looking every bit as devastating on him as thirty-four did the year I walked into his chest in a hallway and never fully walked back out.

He crosses the distance between us without rushing, and somehow that's worse than if he'd sprinted. Predators don't need to hurry.

He stops close. Too close. Close enough that I catalog the new gray threading through his goatee before I can stop myself, close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his stare, and when our eyes finally lock, something in my ribs simply gives out.

"Isla." Just my name, low, and it lands somewhere under my sternum like a hand pressed flat.

"Damien." It shouldn't feel like anything to say. It feels like everything.

"I didn't expect you." A beat. "Ever." The temperature in his voice drops ten degrees on that last word, and it lands exactly where he means it to.

I'm a courtroom animal. I know how to hold a line under pressure. So I hate myself for how fast that line collapses. "This was a mistake," I say instead, already pivoting past him. "Forget I came."

His hand closes around my arm before I clear the second step, and heat rockets straight up to my shoulder, down through my chest, settling somewhere I refuse to acknowledge out loud.

"We've made a lot of mistakes, you and I," he says. "I'd rather you not add running away twice in one visit to the list."

He's not wrong, which is somehow the most infuriating part. I can't think in complete sentences when his hand is on me. I never could. "Please don't touch me," I manage, barely above a whisper.

He lets go like my skin scalds him funny, considering who actually did the burning between us and something shutters behind his eyes. "Inside," he says, already turning.

I follow, because some traitorous, permanent part of me will always follow this man. I open my mouth to say his name again, unsure what's supposed to come after it, but he's already moving, already expecting me to fall into step, and I do, because apparently a year hasn't taught me anything new about how to say no to him.

We climb together, matched stride for stride, and he doesn't walk ahead of me the way another man might, doesn't make a display of ownership. That's not how he plays it. He never needed to walk in front to be in control of the room. I understood that once and mistook it for equality. It wasn't. It was never that. I only ever thought I held my own ground with Damien Blackwood. The truth is he simply let me believe it, right up until the day he didn't.

He reaches the door first and pushes it open, and against every instruction I've given myself in the past three hundred and sixty-some days, I look at him one more time before I cross the threshold. His eyes catch mine, and that's all it takes one look, and I'm exactly as lost as I swore I'd never let myself be again.

I hate him.

I have never stopped loving him.

Both are true at once, the way they always have been, and I walk into his house carrying both like stones in my pockets, telling myself I can still turn back even as the door closes behind me.