Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Chapter One
Six months later
I wake to the feel of my husband kissing me, slow and unhurried, the way you’d wake someone you had all the time in the world for, and what follows is the entire reason I’m still pink in the face a full hour later when I sit down across from him at the breakfast table.
It’s a beautiful table, for the record. Everything in this apartment is beautiful in the cool, expensive, untouchable way of a magazine spread, all pale stone and glass and clean angles, the kind of place I was sure I’d never stop feeling like a trespasser in. The coffee is the good kind, the kind that comes from a machine that probably has opinions. There’s a bowl of cut fruit I didn’t cut and toast I didn’t make, because there’s a person who comes in the mornings to do these things, and six months in I still don’t quite know where to put my hands while she does them.
Trey, naturally, looks like he was born to all of it. He’s already dressed for the office, dark suit, no tie yet, his hair still a little damp, and he’s watching me over the rim of his cup with a look I’ve come to know far too well. It’s the look that says he’s replaying the exact same hour I am trying very hard not to think about, and that he is enjoying my failure to not-think about it more than is strictly decent for a grown man.
“It’s not funny,” I tell him, which would carry more weight if my face weren’t doing the thing it’s doing.
“But it is, sweetheart.” The corner of his mouth tips up, slow. “We’ve been married six months, and you still blush like it’s the first morning.”
“That’s your fault,” I grumble into my toast, which is a mistake, because mumbling into toast has never once in the history of breakfast made a woman look composed.
“I suppose it is.” He doesn’t sound remotely sorry about it. He sounds like a man admiring his own handiwork. “Though I can’t be blamed for the fact that you find me irresistible. That’s entirely your doing.”
I open my mouth to argue, run a quick search for any version of that argument I could possibly win, come up empty, and close it again. He notices that too, because he notices everything, and the corner of his mouth goes up another degree.
Instead of pressing his advantage he picks up the morning’s sports section, snaps it open one-handed, and reads me a line some poor columnist has written about the Waymakers’ defense, drawling it out in that lazy unbothered way he has, like the words are barely worth the breath. Then he takes the man’s whole argument apart in two sentences, quiet and exact and just cruel enough that I actually wince on the columnist’s behalf. Somewhere across the city a stranger has been gutted over my breakfast and will never even know it happened. I laugh anyway, because it’s wickedly clever and because it isn’t pointed at me, and underneath the laugh runs the small private thought I have most mornings, which is a quiet, sheepish gratitude that I have never once been on the wrong end of that tongue. Or that temper.
People warned me about him, before the wedding. Not in words, exactly. In the careful way they said his name, in the articles I wasn’t supposed to read and read anyway, the ones that called my husband brilliant and cold in the very same breath and seemed to think the two came as a set. The ruthless Trey Flint. The man who has never once wanted a thing he didn’t take, and never once kept a thing past the moment he stopped wanting it.
They never met this version of him, though. The one who learned in our first week that I can’t sleep without a particular weight of blanket over me and had four more delivered before I’d even finished saying I was cold. The one who held me through the worst nights after Dad, the ones where I came apart so completely I frightened myself, and never once told me to stop, never once looked at his watch, just stayed, his hand moving slow circles on my back until morning.
That’s the husband I ended up with. I keep waiting for someone official to turn up at the door and tell me there’s been a clerical error, that this one was meant for somebody else.
He pushes back from the table, comes around to my side of it, and bends to press a kiss to my forehead that lasts a beat longer than casual has any business lasting. “I’m heading in,” he says against my hairline. “Take care of yourself today.” A pause, and I feel him smile. “And don’t forget.”