Chapter 13 #2
She studies the house in silence. I watch her profile in the dashboard light, the elegant line of her throat, the way her lips part slightly as she thinks. My body aches to reach across the space between us.
Movement at the side of the house catches my attention. The woman emerges from the service entrance, glances back, hurries toward the street.
"Who's that?"
"Caregiver. For his wife."
The woman disappears around the corner, and I dismiss her from my thoughts. She's background, civilian, not my concern.
Daphne turns to look at me fully, and in the dim light from the streetlamp, her eyes are almost black.
"You're not the monster they said you were."
The words slide under my skin, sweet and devastating. My hands tighten on the steering wheel until the leather creaks.
"You don't know that."
"Don't I?" She shifts, and her knee brushes mine. The contact burns through my jeans, straight to my already hard cock. "A monster wouldn't sleep on the floor. Wouldn't bring paint. Wouldn't peel oranges."
"Those things don't make me good."
"No. But they don't make you a monster either."
I start the engine before I do something I can't take back. Like pull her across the console and claim her mouth, show her exactly what kind of monster I can be.
The drive back is silent, but the air between us thrums with everything unspoken. Her breathing fills the cab, and I memorize the rhythm of it.
Back at the apartment, she goes straight to bed without speaking. I hear her breathing deepen within minutes. Exhaustion from the confrontation, the drive, the weight of everything she's learned tonight.
I sit in the chair by the desk, facing the room. Not trying to sleep, just thinking.
Three facts settle into place:
First: she's not an asset. Never was. The theory is dead. Nicolas is an innocent painter who found an open gate. The coincidence I built into conspiracy was just that. Coincidence.
Second: she's not needed. The operation doesn't require her. There's no leverage necessary because there's no threat from her father. I could send her home tomorrow, tonight even. Give her back to Nicolas and Pristine and the life I interrupted.
Third: I'm going to keep her anyway.
The recognition doesn't arrive as revelation. It's been in my body for days, maybe since the beginning. In the way I can't stop bringing her breakfast. In the lamp I moved to her bedside. In the way I gave her my shirt to sleep in. In every small surrender that's led to this moment.
A week, maybe less, until the announcement. Then Hallstein becomes untouchable. Twenty-one days already gone from the original four weeks. Before then, he dies. The case closes. And I keep her.
I walk through what letting her go would look like: driving her back to Pristine, watching her climb out of my truck at that cottage, Nicolas running out to embrace her.
Her returning to Miss Macie's, to teaching eight-year-olds, to deflecting the hardware store owner's patient advances.
Marrying him eventually, because that's what the town expects. Living her small, safe life.
The image makes my vision go dark at the edges.
The vein in my temple pounds at the thought of her with another man, of anyone else touching what's mine.
She's mine now, has been since the moment she didn't flinch when she first laid eyes on me.
The world can't have her back. Nicolas can't have her back.
The verdict they rendered nine years ago was that I'm a man who takes what he wants, who forces his will on others. They were wrong then. But I'm about to make it true.
Because I'm keeping her.
The silence of that decision settles into my bones. Tomorrow she'll wake thinking she's still captive. Next week, after Hallstein is dead, she'll still think there's some operational reason she's here. I'll maintain the fiction as long as necessary.
The taste of her name in my mouth. The way she looked at me in the truck's darkness, seeing something in me I'd forgotten existed. The sound of her breath in the enclosed space. These are the things that justify what I'm choosing.
I unfold my bedroll against the back wall, remove my boots, lie down facing the room. But tonight, something shifts. The eight feet between us feels like an ocean I need to cross.
I stand. Move silently across the floor until I'm beside her bed. She sleeps on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek, dark hair spread across my pillow. In sleep, all the sharp edges soften. She looks younger, vulnerable in a way she never allows when awake.
My hand hovers above her hair. One touch. That's all I want. To feel the silk of it between my fingers, to know if it's as soft as it looks.
I pull back before I make contact. Instead of returning to my bedroll, my usual place against the back wall, I sink to the floor beside her bed, my back against the frame.
Close enough to hear each breath, to smell the vanilla sweetness of her skin.
This position is new, a break in my pattern, but I need the proximity tonight.
My cock throbs at being this close, at knowing she's inches away, unaware of how near I am. Tomorrow morning she'll wake thinking she's still my leverage, still trapped here for some operational purpose. The deception makes heat pool in my gut, makes my cock leak against my jeans.
She shifts in her sleep, murmurs something that might be French, might be nothing. The sound goes straight through me.
The word escapes before I can stop it, barely a whisper in the dark:
"Mine."
She doesn't stir. But the word hangs in the air between us like a promise. Like a threat.
Like the truth neither of us is ready for.