Jackson and Camille wandered off, leaving me speculating over our interaction with Diana. I searched the lawn for Rhys. He was no longer out there with Fairchild. Thankfully, I couldn’t see my parents either.

Or maybe not so thankfully.

Anxiety ripped through me at the idea they might have hunted Rhys down and were “interrogating” him. Hurrying across the lawn back to the house, relief flooded me when I saw Rhys step outside. I knew he’d been watching for me by the way he strode deliberately toward me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, a little breathlessly. “I got caught up with Diana Crichton Jones, who is a billionaire with a passion for green energy. I think I convinced her to buy a hybrid electric bike. Can you believe that? Diana Crichton Jones on an electric bike.”

Rhys’s lips twitched as he studied my face. “Converting people to green really gets you going, huh?”

I shrugged, glancing at the party behind me. “It’s more fun than talking about terrible nannies, investments, and where I plan to summer.” I turned back to him. “FYI, I plan to summer in Boston. And by “summer”, I mean working like 99 percent of the rest of the world’s population has to do.”

He grinned. “Your family doesn’t summer?”

“When we were kids, we spent the season in our vacation home in Cape Cod, but my mom and dad only spent two full weeks of that with Easton and me. They both worked. My mom’s sister, Aunt Debbie, is a writer, so she would care for us the rest of the time. Mom and Dad would fly to the cape on the weekends and then back to New York for Monday. It was a lot. I didn’t realize that then, but they did what they could to be there for us.”

“They could’ve kept you in New York with them.”

“They could have. But summer in New York can be miserable, and our cape house is right on the beach.” I’d loved our childhood summers in Cape Cod. Until I met Theo and begged my parents to let me stay in New York so I could spend the summer with him. They’d relented.

“Speaking of your family, how’d that go?”

Remembering the lies I’d told my parents, I blanched, looking away. “It went.”

There was such heavy silence from Rhys, it drew my gaze to him. A muscle flexed in his jaw and his eyes were flat. “They’re pissed you’re dating someone like me.”

Why would he think that?

Opening my mouth to deny it, I was cut off by, “Rhys! There you are.”

Fairchild.

Something dark flickered over Rhys’s face before he turned to my boss’s boss with a strained smile. My eyes drifted over Fairchild’s determined expression, and I shivered at the hardness in his gaze.