Imogen Ashworth

Imogen had exactly four minutes before someone noticed she was gone, and she intended to use every second of them.

She slipped through the side doors of the ballroom, past the caterers restocking champagne, past a bored security guard who didn't even look up from his phone, and out onto the terrace where the noise of three hundred donors trying to impress each other finally dropped to a low, distant hum. The cold air hit her bare arms first. Then the quiet. She loved the quiet more than she'd ever admit to anyone in her family.

"If you're hiding from someone, you should know this is the first place they'd look."

She spun around. A man stood near the far railing, jacket off, sleeves rolled up despite the chill, a half-full glass of something amber in his hand. His mask, black and simple, had already been pushed up onto his head like he'd given up on the whole charade an hour ago.

"I'm not hiding," Imogen said.

"You climbed out a side door during the auction's biggest lot."

"I stepped out for air."

"For four minutes and counting." He tilted his head. "I've been watching the door."

"That's a strange thing to admit to a stranger."

"You said you weren't hiding. I said I was watching a door. We're both being strange tonight."

She should have gone back inside. She knew that even as she crossed the terrace toward him, drawn by something she couldn't name and didn't trust. Maybe it was the mask still pushed up on his head, or the fact that he hadn't asked her name yet, hadn't asked whose daughter she was or which company she represented or why she was standing alone at an event full of people who all seemed to know each other.

"What number are they on?" she asked.

"Fourteen. A weekend at some vineyard in Tuscany. My assistant already bid on it twice by accident because she kept raising her paddle to scratch her nose."

Imogen laughed before she could stop herself. "That's a five-figure mistake."

"Six, actually. But she's mortified enough that I'm choosing to find it funny instead of expensive."

"That's generous of you."

"I'm told I have my moments." He held up the glass. "Do you want a drink? I can flag someone down, though the wine in there tastes like it's trying very hard to be more expensive than it is."

"I'm fine."

"Suit yourself." He set his own glass down on the railing, untouched after that. "So if you weren't hiding and you weren't getting air, what were you actually doing out here?"

"Counting how long I could go without anyone in that room asking me a single question about myself."

"How's that working out?"

"You just asked me for four."

"I asked you four questions, and you've answered zero of them honestly, so I don't think it counts against your streak."

She looked at him properly then, really looked, the way she rarely let herself look at anyone at these things because it always felt like an invitation to be looked back at in return. He wasn't handsome in the practiced, photographed way most of the men in that ballroom were handsome. He looked like someone who'd rather be anywhere else and had made an uneasy peace with not getting to choose.

"Fine," she said. "I was hiding. Happy?"

"Thrilled. What are you hiding from?"

"A version of myself that everyone in there expects me to perform. It gets tiring."

"That sounds worse than my assistant's Tuscany problem."

"It's a close second."

He smiled at that, an actual smile, not the polite closed-mouth version she'd been handed all night by men who wanted something from her family's name.

"Can I ask you something and you actually answer it this time?"

"Depends on the question."

"What's your name?"

Imogen hesitated. It was such a small, ordinary question, and yet out here, on this terrace, with a stranger who hadn't once glanced at the room to check if anyone important was watching him talk to her, it felt enormous. If she gave him her name, he'd know exactly who she was within one sentence. He'd know her family, her sister, her father's company, every context that came stapled to it whether she wanted it there or not.

"I'd rather not," she said. "Not yet."

"That's fair." He didn't push, which surprised her more than anything else he'd said all night. "Then I won't give you mine either. Feels only right."

"You don't want to know who I am?

"I know exactly who you are. You're the woman who counts minutes on a terrace to avoid a room full of people asking her questions. That's more than most people learn about each other in an entire evening."

Something in her chest loosened, just slightly, like a knot she'd been carrying so long she'd stopped noticing its weight. "That might be the nicest thing anyone's said to me tonight."

"Then the bar was tragically low, and I'd like to raise it if you'll let me."

"How do you plan on doing that?"

"I could ask you to dance. There's music in there somewhere, underneath the sound of everyone talking about themselves."

"I don't dance well."

"Neither do I. We'd be terrible together. I think that's the appeal."

She should have said no. She'd spent her whole life being the sensible one, the one who read every contract twice, the one who never did anything without weighing the consequences first. But there was something about being nameless out here, about being a woman on a terrace instead of the Ashworth daughter nobody proposed to, that made the sensible answer feel very far away.

"One dance," she said. "And only because your assistant's Tuscany mistake has put me in a generous mood."

"I'll be sure to thank her."

He held out his hand, and she took it, and for the length of one song that neither of them danced particularly well, in a hallway just off the terrace where no one else had wandered, she wasn't anyone's shadow. She wasn't the sister who ran spreadsheets no one thanked her for or the daughter whose work never carried her own name. She was just a woman dancing badly with a stranger who'd asked to know her and then, when she said no, had simply decided to know her anyway, in the only way that mattered.

When the song ended, neither of them let go right away.

"I have to go back in soon," she said, though she made no move.

"I know. So do I."

"This was..." She searched for the word and couldn't find one that didn't feel too small.

"Nice."

"It was the best conversation I've had in that building in three years, and I own half of it."

That startled a laugh out of her again, and it was in the space right after that laugh, with her still smiling and not yet ready to let the moment end, that he leaned in and kissed her. It wasn't rushed. It wasn't the kind of kiss men gave when they wanted something, the kind she'd learned to brace for and deflect at every gala her mother dragged her to. It was slow enough that she could have stopped it if she wanted to, and she didn't want to, not even a little.

When he pulled back, his hand was still at her jaw, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"I should tell you something," he said quietly, and something in his voice had changed, gone careful in a way it hadn't been all night.

"What?"

"My name. Who I actually am here. I think you'd want to know before—"

"Sir." A voice cut through the hallway, low and urgent, a man in a dark suit appearing at the far end like he'd been searching for exactly this spot. "They need you inside. Now."

The stranger's jaw tightened. He looked back at Imogen, and for just a second she saw something flicker across his face that looked almost like regret, or maybe fear, though she couldn't have said fear of what.

"I have to go," he said.

"Wait." She caught his sleeve before he could turn. "You didn't finish.

Who are you actually here for?"

He opened his mouth to answer her, and behind him the man in the dark suit said something low and clipped that she couldn't quite make out, something with real weight in it, something that made the stranger's whole posture change from a man on a terrace back into whoever he was inside that ballroom.

"I'm sorry," he said instead, already stepping backward down the hall. "I have to go. I'll find you before the night's over, I promise."

He didn't find her.

By the time Imogen worked up the nerve to go looking for him twenty minutes later, mask back in place because some part of her had decided that was safer, the ballroom had shifted entirely, tables cleared for an announcement she'd missed the beginning of, and every face she searched belonged to someone else. She stood at the edge of the crowd, scanning sleeves rolled up, masks pushed back, anything that might match the man who'd known her without knowing her name, and found nothing.

He was simply gone, and she never learned who he'd been at all.