Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
I made myself continue toward him, very aware of my legs, my face, the sound of my heels on the floor. My pulse had shifted into an embarrassing, hard rhythm. It made me feel as if some animal part of me had begun throwing itself against my ribs.
When I reached the table, he stood.
That unsettled me too, because it felt so courteous, though somehow the courtesy did not dilute his effortless authority at all. If anything it made it seem heavier.
“Alexandra,” he said.
His voice was lower than I had imagined, even and controlled. No rush in it. No false warmth either.
“Porter,” I said, and then immediately quailed at having used his first name so quickly, as though we were already on terms.
His eyes rested on my face for a second longer than politeness strictly required. Appraisingly. I had the vivid, humiliating sense that he had taken in the flush high on my cheeks, the care I had put into my makeup, the fact that I had tried very hard not to look like a woman wearing nice lingerie under her clothes because he had told her to.
I also had the fleeting impression that he had almost just told me not to use his first name, but rather to call him Mr. B or something even more dismaying—sir or master. My tummy’s reaction to the latter brought a transitory crease to my brow.
Porter gestured to the chair opposite his. “Sit.”
Not please sit. Just sit.
I told myself that I was only sitting because that was what people did at tables in cafés. My body didn’t seem interested in such distinctions. I sat at once.
He resumed his seat after I had taken mine. Another tiny thing. Another tiny, somehow infuriating, thing I noticed.
A server appeared as if summoned by Porter’s posture alone. Porter looked at me. “Coffee?”
“Yes,” I said. “Black is fine.”
He glanced at the server. “Bring her coffee. And water.”
The server nodded and went away.
I should have objected to the water, maybe. Or to the way he had ordered for me without checking whether I wanted something else, like a pastry. Instead I sat there with my hands folded carefully in my lap. I tried not to think about how quickly my body had responded to his tone.
“You’re early,” he said, his mouth curving slightly upward, but his eyes tracking my reactions so closely I felt the heat in my cheeks ebb and flow—mostly flow.
“So are you,” I tried.
“I prefer not to keep people waiting.”
Up close his eyes were darker than I had expected. His face was not soft anywhere. Not severe in a cruel way exactly, but disciplined. He looked like a man who had spent a long time making sure he was not ruled by impulse. The fact that he was sitting in a Selecta Arrangements meet-up with me made that restraint feel much more charged, not less: his decision to buy a younger woman for his bed seemed to rest on a bedrock of closely reasoned points.
He let the silence stretch just long enough to make me aware of it. Then he said, “You’ve had a difficult week, I’m guessing.”
The understatement of it, along with the strange intimacy, made me let out a short, incredulous breath. I wondered suddenly if he knew more about me than I had revealed in my SA profile.
“You could say that,” I finally replied.
“I could,” he said. “But I’d rather be precise.”
The server set down coffee and water. Porter thanked him without looking away from me. Once we were alone again, he said, in the same even tone, “You worked for Senator Hathaway until a couple of weeks ago. You were dismissed after Senator Gowry fucked you in his hideaway.”
For a second I genuinely forgot how to breathe.
The room did not change, and yet everything in it seemed suddenly remote. Cups clinked somewhere. Someone laughed softly near the window. I sat frozen with my fingers tightening around nothing in my lap, staring at him.
My face went hot so fast it hurt.
“How,” I said, and then had to stop because my throat felt too tight. “How do you know that?”
He did not answer immediately. “Washington is a small city when it comes to certain kinds of information.”
Humiliation hit me in a hard wave, sharper because I had let myself imagine, stupidly, that whatever had happened in Gowry’s office still belonged in some contained private chamber of shame, rather than circulating among men with influence and women with reasons to look away.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
Porter regarded me for one beat, two. Then he nodded as if I had told him something useful.
“All right,” he said. “Then I’ll make this simpler.”
Nothing about him suggested that simplification would have anything to do with mercy. I felt it at once: I wasn’t going to like whatever he would do next.