Page 66 of I Want You

“Damn it, Victoria, pick up the phone!” Harper mutters, beside herself.

She hangs up and dials again. Her heart is racing.

“Your call is being…”

“Shit!” she yells, nearly throwing her phone to the ground.

Harper leans against a pillar in the hallway, trying to catch her breath, but her chest feels tight. Tears finally break through her defenses and begin to roll down her cheeks. This can’t be happening again. It can’t be that history is repeating itself exactly. Not after everything they’ve been through in the last few weeks.

“Harper!” Solange and Julian appear at the end of the hallway, running toward her. Solange stops short when she sees Harper crying and grabs her by the shoulders. “Oh my God, Harper! What did that viper do to you?”

Harper tries to speak, but the lump in her throat stops her.

“Paris…” Harper manages to say.

Julian’s eyes widen, and the color drains from his cheeks.

“What do you mean, Paris?”

“Eleanor… she got Victoria the editorship of a new magazine in Paris,” Harper says between sobs, wiping away her tears. “And Victoria’s gone. Again…”

Solange lets out a curse in French.

“That witch!”

“Are you sure Victoria’s going to sign?” Julian asks, gently taking Harper’s hand. “Knowing Vance, maybe she spat in Eleanor’s face.”

“She got into the elevator without even looking at me, Julian,” Harper replies, her heart shattered. “She had… the same guilty look she had when we got divorced.”

Harper starts crying again. Then she clutches her phone to her chest, desperately hoping for a message—a sign that the woman she’s still madly in love with isn’t going to break her heart all over again.

But the screen remains black. And what they experienced in Chicago suddenly feels like a distant dream from which she’s just awakened.

Chapter 23

Victoria Vance has been staring at the contract on the table—still unsigned—for exactly forty-seven minutes.

Before her, the pages drafted by the group’s legal department seem to recite a mocking monologue about every promise she’s made lately.

Next to her, a printed ticket for Sunday’s 10:00 p.m. flight glistens. Eleanor has had the tact—or the monumental nerve—to order her assistant to book the first-class ticket even before Victoria could say a word. As if she could just pack up her life all over again.

“This is fucking crazy…”

Victoria rests her elbows on her knees and covers her face with her hands. She’s turned off her phone. And not because she doesn’t know Harper is looking for her. It’s precisely because of that.

The doorbell to her apartment pierces the silence in the living room. Three rings in a row, hysterical and insistent. For a second, she crosses her fingers, hoping it’s the Chinese takeout she ordered. Then she hears the knocking on the door.

“Victoria! I know you’re in there!”

Her heart skips a beat. She jumps to her feet, almost tripping over the corner of the coffee table.

“Open the door right now, or I swear I’ll kick it down!”

The voice comes through muffled, but with such a note of anguish that Victoria’s panic instantly turns into a searing wave of guilt. She strides across the living room. She stops at the threshold. She turns the latch and pulls the door open.

Harper appears on the other side, her hair tousled by the autumn wind, her coat half-buttoned, and a face that tears at Victoria’s heart. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are shining like two living flames; Victoria is certain she’s been crying.

“Why the hell did you turn off your phone?” is the first thing she blurts out, without even a measly “hello.”