She told him he needed to decide whether they were going to work together or not, because there was no middle ground that did not end badly.
Rhett leaned back and told her he had already decided.
He was keeping her on the project, and she was going to call him Miss Holloway until Lisbon.
It was the kind of answer that was not an answer at all.
So Tessa left the restaurant with as much dignity as she could manage, got home, slid down her apartment door, and admitted the real danger.
The problem was not him.
The problem was that she wanted to go back.
Two weeks later, she was climbing the stairs of the Devereux Group private jet at JFK.
The Lisbon team included Tessa, Kavanaugh, Priya from infrastructure, and eventually Sullivan, who would arrive later on a commercial flight for reasons no one explained. Rhett was already on board in a white shirt, reading The Brothers Karamazov as if he had been born to do morally complicated things at thirty thousand feet.
Tessa pretended to work for seven hours.
Rhett pretended not to notice.
Three hours in, Kavanaugh and Priya were asleep. Tessa had opened and closed the same spreadsheet enough times that even she knew the performance was weak. Seven hours in, Rhett finally spoke without looking up from his book.
“You’re going to have to stop staring at it at some point, Ms. Holloway.”
She denied staring.
He pointed out she had had the same spreadsheet open since New Jersey.
They ended up talking for the last stretch of the flight—about exchange rates, Portuguese heritage laws, border disputes between funds, and the kind of technical details that turned Tessa incandescent when she cared enough.
Lisbon received her like a memory.
The light there was the same light she remembered from childhood visits with her grandmother Lourdes—ochre and slanting, the kind that made old stone look tender. The hotel sat above Avenida da Liberdade with a view of the Tagus. In her room, she found pastéis de nata and ate them before unpacking because some instincts are stronger than self-control.
Her grandmother had already left a voice message.
Walk by Rua do Paraíso, Lourdes said. Look at number 17, where I used to sew. If the house is still there, look for me.
Tessa saved that ache quietly.
The next day, the team drove into Alfama.
Rhett sat beside her in the backseat while the streets narrowed, bent, and rose through laundry-draped balconies, cats asleep in doorways, old women at windows, and the smell of grilled fish drifting out through half-open doors. Tessa knew the neighborhood in the way people know places they have inherited emotionally, even when time has widened the distance.
Rhett asked if she knew it.
“A little,” she said.
“A little or a lot?”
“Enough not to get lost.”
He didn’t push.
At the site, the Palácio Belmonte was wrapped in tarps and scaffolding. Mr. Medeiros, the Portuguese architect, led the tour through the courtyard, the painted tiles, the old fig tree, the coffered ceilings. Then, in the east corridor, he casually indicated a side façade and said it would be torn down to free up ground-floor space.
Tessa checked the wall, the blueprint, and then the document she had printed the night before after researching until two in the morning.
Quietly, in Portuguese, she told him he could not touch that façade. It had been protected since 1998. If he tore it down, the Lisbon Council would stop the entire project.
She handed him the documentation.
Medeiros read it. Drained of color. Agreed immediately to redo the blueprint.
Rhett had not followed the language, but he understood the result. In the car afterward, with the driver still outside, he turned to her and said she had just saved him a lawsuit.
She thanked him with studied calm.
Then he asked if she could go five minutes without calling him sir.
“No.”
That was when he laughed.
Really laughed.
And Tessa discovered that the sound of Rhett Devereux being unguarded was far more dangerous than his cold silence had ever been.
Dinner that night was in Chiado. Candlelight. Bacalhau à brás. Vinho verde. Safe topics at first, then less safe ones. He told her about his mother insisting any educated man should speak at least three languages. He admitted he had failed at Mandarin. He let small pieces of his real life show without making a performance of vulnerability.
When Tessa mentioned her grandmother and said the last time she had been in Lisbon, she had been much smaller, he asked if Lourdes was still alive.
She said yes, in Queens.
“Good,” he said.
Just one word. But it came out like relief.
Later, after separate rides back to the hotel, he texted asking if he could come up for a whiskey.
He stood in her suite by the window with the Tagus below them, asking about her Portuguese, her summers in Alfama, her grandmother. He did not press when she gave partial truths. Then his phone lit up on the coffee table.
Cordelia Vance.
Tessa saw the name. So did he.
He crossed the room quickly, turned the screen over, and said, when asked, that Cordelia was his ex-fiancée from three years earlier. She still called sometimes. He never answered.
Tessa filed every detail away.
Out on the balcony, Lisbon cold pressed lightly against their skin while a cargo ship moved through the dark water below. They spoke about the project. About after. About nothing that meant everything. Then Rhett touched a strand of hair near her face, let his finger stay too long, and kissed her.
Tessa kissed him back.
For a few suspended seconds, the world narrowed to his mouth, his hand at the back of her neck, and the truth they were no longer avoiding.
Then she pulled back and asked what they were doing.
He said he didn’t know.
She told him that meant they had to stop.
He said he didn’t want to stop.
Neither did she.
But they did.
He left, and that mattered.
Back in New York, the tension between them only deepened.
There was another dinner, this time at L’Artusi in Tribeca. Officially it was about final Lisbon details. In reality, the folder between them stayed closed while the conversation wandered through work, city politics, architecture, Juno’s chaos, and then somewhere more dangerous.
Rhett talked about a trip to Florence when he was sixteen, alone with his mother. The way he spoke about her changed him. Softer. Younger. Less controlled.
Tessa did what her grandmother had taught her long ago after her own mother died—when someone opens a door into grief, you do not crowd it with questions. You stay quiet and let them choose what comes next.
So she rested her hand over his.
Three seconds.
Then pulled it back.
He looked at her like no one had touched him that gently in years.
Before dropping her home that night, he told her he wanted to see her Saturday.
It was the Plaza gala.
She was coming with him.
Midweek, in the basement archives, Sullivan found her among old Madrid project files and told her something in a low, measured voice that changed the shape of the weekend before it even arrived.
Cordelia Vance was back as an outside consultant to the board.
Aunt Odette’s doing.
Rhett didn’t know yet.
Then Sullivan asked the question that told Tessa the rest mattered.
“He hasn’t told you about his mother’s funeral, has he?”
No, she said.
Sullivan only told her one thing more. When Rhett did tell her, she needed to listen all the way through and not interrupt.
That was enough to send Tessa to the company database.
She searched three words: Devereux funeral Cordelia.
The file turned up an old gossip item, deleted quickly but preserved by legal. On the day Rhett buried his mother, his fiancée had been seen leaving their Manhattan building with his best friend.
The engagement ended that same day.
Suddenly Rhett made terrible, painful sense.
That night Juno called while Tessa washed dishes and demanded to know whether Rhett was a good kisser. Tessa finally admitted he was the kind that made her forget her own social security number. Juno screamed loud enough to qualify as a public event.
On Saturday afternoon, the dress arrived.
Black Valentino. Backless. A note inside in his handwriting: No need to return it. R.
