Chapter 4 - Collision
The summit was everything she’d imagined it would be—bright, loud, overwhelming, a sea of tailored suits and name tags and conversations about revenue streams and brand identity. Audrey slipped into the back of the grand ballroom for the opening remarks, her head down, her attention focused on the notebook in her lap, and when Julian walked onto the stage, she didn’t even look up.
She didn’t need to. She’d know the sound of his voice anywhere.
“Good morning,” he said, and the timbre of it—deep, warm, with that faint gravel at the edges that used to make her shiver—hit her like a physical blow. “Thank you all for being here. Four years ago, this company was at a crossroads. We were successful, yes. But we’d lost something. We’d forgotten that hospitality isn’t about marble floors or five-star restaurants or the number of zeros on a balance sheet. It’s about people. It’s about making sure every single person who walks through our doors feels seen. Heard. Valued.”
Audrey’s pen froze mid-sentence. She looked up.
Julian stood at the podium, the lights catching the silver at his temples, his shoulders broader than she remembered, his face sharper, harder, as if the last four years had carved lines into him that hadn’t been there before. He was still devastatingly handsome—the kind of man who made every woman in the room lean forward a little, every man straighten his tie. But there was something different about him. A quietness. A gravity. When he spoke about feeling seen, his eyes drifted across the crowd, and for one split second, they met hers.
The room went silent. Or maybe it was just that Audrey couldn’t hear anything over the roaring of her own blood in her ears. Julian stopped speaking. His hand tightened around the edge of the podium until his knuckles turned white. Somewhere in the front row, Madison Carter shifted in her seat, her perfectly styled red hair catching the light, and followed his gaze to the back of the room.
Audrey’s instinct was to run. To grab her things and bolt for the exit, to catch the first train back to Albany, to pretend none of this had ever happened. But she forced herself to sit still. To hold his gaze. To show him, without a single word, that she wasn’t the girl who’d run four years ago. She was someone else now. Someone he didn’t get to affect anymore.
Julian blinked. He cleared his throat. He finished his speech, but his voice was different now—tighter, higher, as if he were speaking through glass. When he walked off the stage, he didn’t look back. But Audrey felt his absence like a missing tooth.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur. She attended the sessions, she shook hands, she handed out business cards, but her mind was elsewhere. Every time the ballroom doors opened, she expected to see him. Every time a man in a dark suit walked past, her heart jumped into her throat. By lunch, she was so exhausted she could barely keep her eyes open, so she slipped out through a side door and headed for the private garden terrace tucked behind the hotel, the same place where Julian had proposed to her seven years earlier, down on one knee in the falling snow, promising her forever.
The terrace was empty, just as she’d hoped. She sat on a stone bench, closed her eyes, and let the crisp October air fill her lungs. Just a few more hours, she told herself. Then you can go home. Then everything can go back to normal.
“Audrey.”
Her eyes flew open.
Julian stood ten feet away, his hands in his pockets, his face pale beneath his tan. He looked as if he’d been running. As if he’d spent the last three hours searching every room in the hotel just to find her.
“Hi,” she said, and was proud of how steady her voice sounded.
He took a step toward her, then stopped, as if he was afraid she’d run again. “I thought I was imagining things. Up there. On stage. I thought… I thought my mind was finally playing tricks on me.”
“Nope,” she said, standing up, slinging her portfolio over her shoulder. “It’s really me. I’m here for the summit. Business. That’s all.”
“Business.” Julian repeated the word like it tasted bad. “Four years. Four years of nothing. Not a word. Not a text. Not even a divorce paper. And now you just show up? At my hotel? For business?”
Audrey lifted her chin. “I’m a designer. Your team invited me. If you have a problem with that, take it up with them. I’m not here to rehash the past, Julian. I’m here to work. And then I’m leaving.”
She started to walk past him. He moved so fast she didn’t see it coming—one minute he was standing still, the next his hand was wrapped around her wrist, his grip firm but not painful, his skin burning against hers.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice breaking. “Please. Don’t walk away from me again. Not until you let me say what I’ve been practicing in the mirror every night for four years.”
Audrey froze. She should pull away. She should tell him to go to hell. She should walk back into that hotel and get on the next train home and never think about him again.
May you like
But she didn’t. Because for the first time in four years, she looked into Julian Foster’s eyes and didn’t see the distracted, success-obsessed man she’d married. She saw something else. Something raw. Something honest.
She saw regret.
