Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Chapter Three
“SMILE LIKE YOU DON’T want to push him onto the tracks,” Mellie hisses anxiously in my ear, which is, frankly, asking a lot.
Mellie’s the publicist, and she’s been circling me for forty minutes with a lint roller and the grim energy of a woman who’s been told her year-end bonus depends on whether I look in love. The platform at the restored Sunset Station in San Antonio is a wall of noise and bodies, photographers ten deep behind a velvet rope, a brass band someone with more money than judgment decided we needed.
And the train itself, which I’ve been trying not to look at directly the way you don’t look at the sun, except looking at it’s the entire point, that’s what all of this is for.
Someone’s poured a fortune into making it gleam. The dark green lacquer alone must’ve taken a team of men a month, hand-rubbed, the gold lettering along the carriages real leaf and not paint, I can tell from here, having once spent two weeks pricing gold leaf for a donor plaque I couldn’t afford in the end and replaced with a laminated sign. That’s what nobody warns you about being broke, that it turns you into a permanent appraiser.
I can’t look at a beautiful object anymore without running the meter on it, and standing here I’m doing the only sum I know, which is how many feet of flight cage this would buy, how many winters of heat, how many of Dr. Abacan’s invoices, and the answer the train keeps hissing back at me in long theatrical breaths of steam is all of them, Blythe. Every single one. And then some.
I’ve been a fiancée for ninety seconds and I already want a divorce.
“You’re scowling,” Mellie warns me reproachfully while beaming at the cameras the entire time, a ventriloquist of panic. “The Karalis fiancée doesn’t scowl. The Karalis fiancée is radiant. The Karalis fiancée would die for the brand.”
“The Karalis fiancée would like a chair,” I mutter back pleasantly while beaming right back at them, and somewhere to my left I feel rather than hear Loukas hold his breath on what I’m choosing to read as suppressed laughter, though on a man that controlled it could just as easily be indigestion.
Then he turns to me, and the noise of the platform drops away the way it does right before something happens.
“Give me your hand,” he says quietly.
“I’d rather give you a list of grievances.” I say it sweetly, for the band, for the cameras, for the part of me that needs one last shot before the cage door shuts.
“You’ll have time for the list. We’ve a week.” His voice is low and even, pitched for me alone under the brass and the camera-clatter, and there’s something in it that isn’t performance, something that prickles the back of my neck in warning. “Your hand, Blythe. They’re watching, and a man doesn’t make his fiancée ask twice.”
So I give him my hand.
And I hate that I give it easily. I hate that some part of me has been standing at a window for eighteen years waiting to be asked, and here’s the truth I’ve never said out loud to anyone, not to Sergeant, not to the dark of my own bedroom. I decided a long time ago that I was a woman who didn’t need this.
I built a whole life on it, the fake wedding ring I used to wear to keep men at a polite distance, the sensible flats, the way I let the whole county call me the bird lady like it was the entire sum of me, a fortress I spent two decades raising stone by stone.
And the truly humiliating part, the one I’d deny under oath, is how fast the whole structure forgets what it was for the moment Loukas Karalis takes my hand like it was always going to be his.
He takes it the way he takes everything, in his own time, like a man who’s never once doubted his welcome. And my body, the traitor, the same body I’ve trained for eighteen years to feel exactly nothing in this man’s vicinity, just hands itself over and asks him where it should sign.
Behave, Sensible Blythe says.
I don’t. I haven’t behaved within a mile of this man since I was twenty-one, and I’m not about to develop the knack on a train platform with a hundred cameras watching.
And from his pocket comes the ring.
I’d braced for a ring. I hadn’t braced for this ring, an old European-cut stone the color of river water under ice, set in something worn and warm and clearly not bought yesterday off a man in a glass case, and the cold of the metal sliding home over my knuckle sends a strange electric jolt straight up my arm, and for one unguarded second I forget none of this is real.