Page 57 of Knot Her Beta

“Yeah.” I lean my head on his shoulder. “Yeah, we’re going to be pack.”

Now, all we have to do is wait for our Beta to come home.

Chapter Fifteen

Grady

The Wednesday meeting runs until two in the afternoon.

By the time my father dismisses the room, my leg has gone numb from the knee down, and the headache behind my eyes has settled in to stay. I need fresh air, not the recycled stuff pumping through the estate’s heating system.

I push through the French doors onto the terrace, and the cold hits me like a wall. March in Connecticut means frost still clinging to the north-facing stone, the manicured lawn gone damp and spongy underfoot, and gravel paths edged with mud where the frost has softened. The sky hangs low, white-gray, the kind of sky that promises nothing except more of the same.

My cane taps over a wet gravel path, taking it slow to give my knee time to warm up to walking after so many hours seated. It reminds me of the main path that runs up from the docks to the Homestead on Misty Pines, but the gravel here is smaller and crushed finer.

I round the corner of the east wing and find Caroline walking the perimeter path, a leather portfolio tucked under one arm, her coat buttoned to the collar to stave off the cold. She doesn’t pretend to be surprised to see me, and I’m not surprised to see her.

“Your father mentioned you might need a walk after that presentation,” she says, not even bothering with a pretense that she just happened to be here.

I appreciate the honesty, even if I don’t appreciate the setup. “He’s not subtle.”

“No.” One corner of her mouth lifts. “He never has been.”

She falls into step beside me without waiting for an invitation and matches her pace to mine, hers a half-step shorter to accommodate my limp. The gravel crunches under our feet, and the sound carries in the cold, still air.

“How’s the leg holding up?” she asks.

“It’s been better.”

She accepts this without pushing for more. Another thing I appreciate about Caroline Bennett. She asks the questions that matter and leaves the ones that don’t alone.

We pass a row of bare oaks, their branches black beneath the gray sky, arranged in a perfect line along the path. Damp earth rises from the thawing ground, rich and cold, undercut by a distant hint of wood smoke from the estate’s chimneys.

Halfway down the path, Caroline stops and opens the portfolio.

The site map for the proposed expansion of the Bennett Group’s media holdings is rendered in crisp detail, new offices sketched in pale blue, the publishing acquisition arm labeled in my father’s spidery handwriting, a digital media division outlined in red. It’s thorough. It’s smart. It folds into existing infrastructure with the efficiency of a plan years in the making, not days.

Caroline taps a section near the center with one finger. An office suite, larger than the others, positioned where the editorial and acquisition teams would intersect.

“There’s an opening,” she says. “Not hypothetical. Real. A role you could step into right away, with authority and room to grow.”

I study the map. The office has windows on two sides with good light. Someone thought about sightlines, workflow, and the kind of space a person might want to occupy for ten or twelve hours a day.

“You’d have signing authority on acquisitions under two million,” she continues. “Full editorial input on the lifestyle vertical. We’re now treating the Portland-Bar Harbor gap as a priority. You’d own that strategy from conception through execution.”

She says all this the way she says everything, logical and already stress-tested against every variable she can think of. There’s no sales pitch or attempt to dress this up as something it isn’t. Just the facts laid out.

“It makes sense,” she says.

And she’s right. That’s the part that lodges in my chest and refuses to let go, no matter how hard I try to shake it.

Our skills align. My background in publishing, my work with Chloe, the transition to freelance work, and my constant vigilance on the market. Her family’s resources, their distribution network, their existing subscriber base. Our goals overlap. Their expansion into coastal markets, my understanding of those markets. Our families would benefit. The Finch name on the masthead, the Bennett Group’s reach extended. All of it logical. All of it right.

When she looks at me, there’s no expectation of romance. “You’d be good at it. We’d be good together as a team.”

I believe her, because Caroline Bennett doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean, and because the evidence is right there on the page in front of me, in the alignment of skills and resources and timing that turns this from merely possible into almost inevitable.

My brow furrows as I look from the plans to her. “Why not you?”