“Yes, but these are way more comfortable.” I hike up the hem of my dress, enough to show off the lace elastic band holding the thigh-highs up but also to give him a glimpse beneath, to the fact that I skipped panties for my visit here.
His sharp inhale fills the room, but he doesn’t make a move. “As pleasant as this surprise is, why are you here, Abbi?”
Miles is right. Something is seriously off with him today. “I needed to see you.”
He hums to himself. “Did Miles call you in a panic to tell you he’s worried about me?”
“Why would he do that?” I press my lips together to hide the truth. I don’t want him getting into trouble for reporting to me on Henry’s mental health.
Henry smirks. “Because I can’t seem to focus on anything today.”
Focusing is something Henry excels at, even under extreme stress. I scramble for an explanation. “Maybe you have a concussion?” The scrape on his forehead is minor and the doctor at Wolf Cove cleared him, but sometimes these things take a few days to reveal themselves.
“No, that’s not it.” He looks around aimlessly. “I nearly died a few days ago.”
“Yeah, I remember.” The worst, longest twenty-four hours of my life, waiting for an answer from the search teams. I smooth my foot along his thigh for comfort.
“And now I’m back here, dealing with this”—he casts a hand toward a stack of reports—“juggling a million decisions as if it never happened.”
“You didn’t have to come back so soon. You’re the boss. You can take time off.”
“I wish that were true. But everything is in turmoil. This shit my brother pulled is costing us millions to fix.”
I don’t know the first thing about what he’s up against. “But you don’t have to do it all on your own. That’s why you have this floor of executives to handle the work. Get Sunjit on it. He’ll yell at anyone you want him to.”
Henry snorts. “They’re all swamped with their own jobs. I need new people. I fired Scott’s entire team.”
“All of them?”
“Everyone at the management level. If they missed what he was doing, I can’t rely on them. If they didn’t miss it, I can’t trust them. HR is scrambling to promote who they can and recruit for the rest, but I need someone competent to run the entire metals business. I don’t know it. My father knew it, Scott knew it, but I never put effort into it. I was always focused on the hotels.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “It felt more manageable before, when my father was around, as much of a pain in the ass as he was. Now it’s just me.” His eyes wander out the window again. “And is it even worth it anymore? Is this how I want to spend the next however many years of my life?”
This was not what I was expecting when I decided to come here today. “I think this is what they call an existential crisis.”
He barks out a bitter laugh. “That, or a good old-fashioned midlife crisis.”
“You’re only thirty-two. You still have all your hair.” A lush, thick mane that my fingers are itching to crawl through.
“Yeah …” He doesn’t sound convinced. “I keep thinking about that girl that showed up last night.”
“Violet?”
“What if she is Scott’s?”
“Then you have a niece?” I shrug. “That’s kind of nice.” Though the girl seemed terrified of him. Who knows what Scott’s told her.
“She’s not Wolf blood.”
Because Scott was the product of his mother’s affair with William Wolf’s accountant. “But she’s still blood.”
His lips twist and when he speaks, it’s in a quiet, forlorn tone. “I’m all that’s left of my bloodline, Abbi.”
That knot in my stomach flares. Henry is feeling the weight of his family’s absence, as Luca suggested. I reach down to collect his hand from its resting spot on my knee and squeeze. “For now, yeah. Not forever. We can make as many little Wolfs as you want.” We’ve already talked about having children—enough to know that we both want them—but we’ve never delved into the specifics. When do we start? How many do we want?
A pensive look flickers through his eyes, but he doesn’t say anything. With a heavy sigh, as if dismissing that line of thought, he asks, “So, what have you been up to all morning?”
“Oh, you know … Dodging a reporter’s call, letting my mother plan our wedding.”