Chapter 44
Back then, Owen looked so thoroughly soaked in pleasure that it was almost indecent. It was in the fine-cut beauty of his features, in the easy languor threaded through his whole body, in the way everyone around him seemed to be scrambling, just a little, to earn his favor.
Looking back, Sylvia realized that Owen had somehow recognized, without a single introduction, that she was Heston’s friend. She, on the other hand, had not noticed a thing, which was why she kept narrowing her brows every time he glanced in her direction.
Of course, Owen’s attention wasn’t lost on Sylvia alone; her friend Carly, who had come with her, had noticed it too.
Taking a sip of her drink, Carly was the first to bring him up.
“Looks like he’s interested in you.”
“Interested? That’s ridiculous.”
But Sylvia had already figured out that his gaze was a long, long way from friendly interest. Every time he looked at her, it was with a cool, almost bewildered expression, as if she were some gaudy ornament that had no business being in a perfectly arranged room, something he was silently asking, Why are you still there?
“Why would that be ridiculous? You’re honestly one of the cutest girls here. You know that? Men always like the cute type. Not the kind of woman like me, with a face that looks sharp enough to cut glass and a liver built for hard liquor.”
Carly’s self-deprecating habits only surfaced when she was drunk. She might call herself a hard drinker, but Sylvia knew she couldn’t even properly handle two glasses of beer.
Abandoning her frantic search for Sir Worth, Sylvia reached out and stopped Carly before she could keep drinking. Carly was still having a hard time after parting ways with Mason, the boyfriend she’d dated briefly.
“See? He’s looking again.”
Now with her drink taken away and practically buried against Sylvia’s back, Carly pointed again toward Owen. Sylvia lifted her head at the words and met Owen’s eyes. Owen merely turned away as if he didn’t care and began speaking with some of the others.
Carly, perhaps because that gesture reminded her of her ex-boyfriend Mason, began muttering in a deep, gloomy voice.
“Listen, Sylvia. If a good-looking man keeps making you doubt yourself, then he’s either a total psycho, a sleaze, or someone who’s deeply interested in you. If a man was born handsome, he’s been through enough in life that he’d never go around confusing people for fun.”
Having delivered her sage truth, Carly staggered away in disgust, and Sylvia remained there, still waiting for Sir Worth while gradually inching elsewhere whenever the crowd pressed in around her.
Then, all at once, someone spoke to her.
“Could you hand me that bottle? No, not a glass one. A bottle. Preferably one that’s still as full as possible.”
Somehow, she had ended up standing near the table where the bottles of liquor were being set down.
Even though he addressed her so casually, she didn’t feel the slightest trace of discomfort. Perhaps it was because of that soft, unhurried way he spoke, and the odd gentleness in his voice.
Before she quite realized what she was doing, she carefully chose a bottle by weight and handed it to him. Only after facing that dazzling, smiling face did she finally understand that the “center of the gathering,” the man she had been absolutely certain she would have no reason to speak to, was standing right in front of her.
So he was drinking with the others, then.
Because Sylvia felt awkward at parties like this, she silently hoped he would leave soon. But instead of returning the way he’d come, he took a swig straight from the bottle and settled against the wall she had claimed for herself. He already looked a little drunk, his movements sluggish, but his face was so perfectly composed that she couldn’t tell whether he was really intoxicated at all.
Why is he leaning there?
She was still hesitating over that thought when someone else, quite drunk, stumbled into her as she stood blankly near the table. With practiced ease, Owen caught her as she swayed and guided her over to stand beside him.
“Sylvia Appleton, right?”
He said it so casually that Sylvia was too stunned by the fact that he knew her name to even register the hand that had slipped around her waist and then away again. When he saw her eyes go wide, Owen gave a low laugh, pointed a finger at himself, and introduced himself.
“I’m Owen Summers.”
Then he took her hand, wound their fingers together, gave it a lazy shake or two, and let go. Sylvia was flustered—not because some strange man kept touching her so carelessly, but because he had introduced himself as Owen Summers.
To think she would meet the owner of that name here, like this.
“Owen’s the most loyal man I know.”
Not long ago, after returning from a mission, Heston had told her he’d made a trustworthy friend. It was the first time in her life she’d ever heard him speak of someone that way, so Sylvia had assumed the man named Owen must be the sort who could be called a second Heston Lockwood.
But the man standing before her looked painfully distant from that description. People shouldn’t be judged by appearances alone, of course, but she couldn’t exactly ignore the implications they carried, either.
The Owen Summers in front of her now did not, no matter how she looked at him, seem like the sort of man to be wrapped in heavy words like loyalty or trust.
Just to confirm it, she asked, “You’re Heston’s friend?”
Owen nodded without the slightest hesitation. Then he took another drink from the bottle, and Sylvia, despite having received a clear answer, still felt more confused than before. He and Heston were really friends? There was not a single thing about him that looked compatible with Heston, not one.
No, it was more than that. They seemed like two men who would interpret the very weight of the word friend differently.
For Heston, a friend was someone he could devote his life to. For this man, it seemed harder to imagine anyone who wasn’t his friend.
“How on earth did the two of you even become friends?”
Sylvia heard herself ask it before she could stop herself. But once the words were out, they sounded sharper than she’d intended, sharpened by the noise of the crowd and the heat of the alcohol in the room.
It came out almost like, How did someone like you become Heston’s friend? Which was rude, certainly, though she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought it. Still, she hadn’t meant to speak so bluntly.
Owen looked at her, amused, as though she were more flustered by her own words than by anything he had said. His bright amber eyes seemed to sparkle even more when interest lit them, and she had trouble meeting his gaze directly.
Sylvia cleared her throat and belatedly tried to explain herself. “I mean, you know how Heston came back from his last mission badly injured? I thought something serious must have happened on the job he did with you, but Heston won’t say anything, so I figured if I asked you, maybe I’d get an answer.”
Her tone softened into the polite, coaxing register she used when making a request. In truth, it was the only approach she had left. But the man before her was not easy, and he simply shrugged.
“No idea.”
It was the same answer she’d gotten when she’d once asked Heston what had happened after he returned with a bandage wrapped around his thigh. No idea.
But the feeling beneath it was entirely different. With Heston, there had been embarrassment, a kind of evasiveness. With this man, it was as though he truly didn’t remember—pure indifference.
Sylvia frowned and scratched her cheek.
Truthfully, she wasn’t all that interested in how Heston had gotten hurt. What she wanted was confirmation from someone else’s mouth that Heston had been injured while carrying out a mission alone, without a partner.
No, come to think of it, even if someone insisted otherwise, she wouldn’t have changed her mind. That was the very reason she had come to a party she hadn’t even wanted to attend, all for the sake of waiting for Sir Worth, her superior.
Then Owen, as if he had already guessed why she was here, said, “Sir Worth disappeared with a woman. Probably won’t be back for two hours.”
Sylvia had no idea how stunned she was at that moment. It felt as though this complete stranger had read every single thought in her head without effort.
Could he know that she liked Heston? Worse, had he somehow sensed the guilt she’d felt after seeing Heston hurt, and the anxiety that someone else might become Heston’s partner?
No. No, that couldn’t be.
He had only noticed that she’d been glancing around so obviously from the start, and then simply identified the person she was most likely looking for.
“It’s fine. I can wait.”
“Sure, then.”
She had thought he might try to stop her, but Owen simply nodded, took his bottle, and wandered off to another part of the room.
It was the sort of attitude that suggested he had no lingering attachment whatsoever, as if he hadn’t just been speaking so familiarly to her a moment before. Sylvia watched his back in bewilderment, then found herself alone again, waiting for Sir Worth.
But Sir Worth never came, not even after two hours, and in the end Sylvia had no choice but to go home without ever asking him to make her Heston’s Supporter.
Of course, in the end, it had been the right decision not to go out of her way to expose a weakness and beg a superior who was constantly arriving late to class drunk and spending the night at parties with women.
It had taken a little longer, but Sylvia had eventually become Heston’s partner by proper means, without relying on her father’s connections.
“Back then, Heston was so badly hurt he was practically out of his mind. And I was about to ask someone my father knew to pull strings for me.”
Returning to the present, Sylvia frowned down at the lukewarm fruit tea on the table, her expression uncomfortable.
Then she tried to remember when the rumor that Owen was a womanizer had first attached itself to him. She went over the past five years carefully, from the first time she’d seen him to just a few days ago, but she couldn’t recall a single instance of such a rumor following him around.
Why?
Surely it wasn’t because he had no women around him the way Heston did. If that were the case, the same rumors would have clung to him too—words like being impotent, or a block of wood, or liking men, and so on.
But unlike Heston, Owen’s rumors were spotless, and that was what Sylvia found strangest of all. Could a man like that even exist?