Total pages in book: 21
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
She got up. Wandered the hall in bare feet, his shirt hanging past her thighs. The house was different at night. Smaller, somehow. The marble floors were cold under her toes, the hallways dim, the photos she passed every day now just shapes in the dark. She could hear the fountain outside, faint through the walls.
She didn't get lost this time. She was learning the house the way she was learning him: by feel, by instinct, by the things that didn't change. Left at the stairs. Past the Monet. Through the hall with the photos.
She paused in front of twelve-year-old Mykos with the dog. Even in the dark, she could make out his hand on the dog's head. That hand. The same hand that traced her collarbone at three in the morning, that signed documents that made people's lives change, that had held her face while he kissed her in a judge's chambers.
What had happened to the dog? She'd never asked. She was afraid of the answer.
She found him in his study.
He was sitting at his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a glass of something dark at his elbow. He looked up when she opened the door. Not startled. Just...aware. Like he'd known she was coming before she did.
"Can't sleep?" Mykos asked.
"No." She hovered in the doorway. She was wearing one of his shirts, because at some point she'd started stealing them from his closet, and he hadn't said anything about it, which she took as either permission or the kind of silence that meant he liked it but would never, ever say so. "Are you okay?"
It was a stupid question. Of course he was okay. He was always okay. He was Mykos Ravensworth; he didn't do not-okay.
He didn't answer.
She should leave. He clearly wanted to be alone. He was working. She was being clingy. She was nineteen years old with a crush on her own husband, which was pathetic in a way she didn't have the emotional bandwidth to examine right now—
"Maika."
She turned back.
The way he said her name. Not like a summons. Not like a command. Raw, unguarded, nothing like the man who sat at business dinners, who commanded rooms, who made grown men look at their shoes.
She went to him.
He pulled her into his lap. Just held her. His face pressed into her hair, his arms locked around her, his heartbeat hammering against her back in a way she could feel through his shirt.
Oh.
He wasn't just dangerous.
He was lonely.
She didn't say it. She just stayed.
His arms tightened. His breath went uneven for just a second, then leveled, like he'd caught himself feeling something and had to wrestle it back into its cage.
She was falling for him. She knew this. It was the stupidest thing she'd ever done, nineteen years old, married to a man who didn't do love, sitting in his lap in the dark while the fountain ran outside, while the books stood guard on their shelves, while somewhere in the house Orion was probably NOT sleeping because Orion didn't seem to require sleep the way normal humans did.
She could feel it happening like a free fall.
She didn't try to stop it.
She was going to get so hurt. She knew that, too. But his arms were around her, his breath was in her hair, his heart was slamming against her back like it was trying to break out of his chest and into hers.
She closed her eyes.
Oh no.
She had thought it was just her nerves talking on her wedding night, but this time she was absolutely certain.
I really am in trouble, aren’t I?
The Girl Who Stayed
the girl who stayed (n.): the one who didn't leave when she should have, didn't run when she could have, and is now wearing a dress that costs more than her old apartment to a dinner where everyone is terrifying
ONE MONTH MARRIED.
She was still going to classes. Orion drove her (in a black car that made every other vehicle in the campus parking lot look like a toy), waited outside the lecture hall in sunglasses, looking like he could dismantle every student in the building without standing up.
Orion's presence alone had everyone talking about her, but when some of her classmates caught a glimpse of Mykos on the rare instance he had time to pick her up from school...
That was when they all freaked out because they knew.
He was Mykos Ravensworth, after all.
Everyone knew who he was.
And since then, her life in college had completely changed. The people who used to ignore her because she was a nobody? They suddenly fawned all over her because to them she was suddenly somebody, and it was just so...strange.
Her whole life, she had existed under the radar, and that was why that thing she told Mykos about having boys lined up around the block? She had lied about that, actually. But somehow, when news of her marriage to the billionaire had become public—it was as if she became attractive simply because Mykos had married her. Or maybe, all of them just wanted to see if they could steal a girl from him.