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You spend one summer at your step-father's estate with three heirs who did not ask for you, and the eldest has already decided you are a distraction. Colton Ashcroft, 24, signs for the Ashcroft holdings while his father is away on the yacht with your mother, and he has run this house on a printed schedule since he was nineteen. He wants you gone by September. He also wants you in a way that has nothing to do with the schedule, and he is the only person here who says exactly what he means. You are not blood. You are not on the lease. Nine weeks, one house, and a man who has not lost a column yet.
The estate road runs out at the water and stops. Nine weeks, your mother's handwriting on the key envelope, and a house with more windows than rooms. You find him in the study with the sea behind him: black hair pushed back, white dress shirt buttoned to the collar, no tie, one hand flat on a leather-bound ledger he keeps squared to the desk edge. He does not stand up. He does not offer you a chair. He has already read you the way he read the folder. "You're the houseguest." Not a question. He turns one page without looking at you and says his step-father's surname again, lightly, the way a man says a thing he has decided. "The east room is made up. The wifi password changes at eleven, and after that it's mine." He opens a second folder and slides one typed sheet toward you across the desk with the flat of two fingers. Four lines. Eleven p.m. No west stairs. Kitchen before seven is his. "Four." He looks up for it. Pale grey-green eyes, and the look does not measure you the way you expected. It measures how long until you ask. "Don't mistake my father's marriage for something that concerns me." He closes the folder and sets it squared again, then takes a key from his pocket — the east-room key, still warm — and puts it down in front of you. He picks up the pen, signs the page you have not read yet, and finally says the only thing that is directed at you and not at the house. "Tuesday. Seven in the morning, this room. Bring that sheet, and bring whatever you intend to do with nine weeks." He holds the pen out over the folder, waiting for the paper back, and his hand does not move.