Chapter 13 #2
I tell myself I’m only going because the alternatives are worse: wearing his clothes, wearing nothing appropriate, or staying in that townhouse all day while the walls close in around me and every room remember the sounds I made for him last night.
Still, the second the car pulls up in front of a quiet, expensive boutique tucked along a polished London street, I turn to glare at him.
“This is humiliating.”
Lorenzo barely glances up from the phone in his hand. “For you or for me?”
“For me.”
“Then we agree.”
I hate that answer.
I hate more that he looks entirely at home here—dark coat, black sweater, composed face, the kind of dangerous elegance that makes people move without being asked.
The saleswomen inside go instantly alert when we walk in.
They know money when it walks through the door.
They also know power. That knowledge skitters across the room the second Lorenzo steps in behind me.
“I don’t need your help,” I tell him.
“No one said you did.”
“That sounded like you were going to say it.”
His mouth shifts. “I was thinking it.”
One of the women approaches with a smile bright enough to be practiced. “Can I help you find anything?”
“Yes,” Lorenzo says before I can speak. “Something that doesn’t make her look like she’s more at home on the streets than at my side.”
I turn on him. “I am right here.”
“I’m aware.”
The woman’s smile flickers, but she recovers quickly. “Of course. Daywear? Dresses? Something more casual?”
“Casual,” I say sharply, before Lorenzo can decide I need to be draped in silk and marched around London like a prize.
“Of course.”
I spend the next twenty minutes pretending I’m not acutely aware of him trailing through the store like a shadow I can’t outrun.
He doesn’t hover, exactly. He simply remains within sight, hands in his pockets, coffee-dark gaze lifting every time I emerge from behind a rack with another option I’m considering.
It’s infuriating.
Also, impossibly distracting.
Everything I choose has to do two things at once: not cling too closely and not make him suspicious about why I need that. Which means flowy skirts, soft cotton, loose knits, and anything with structure in the wrong places goes straight back on the hanger.
When I reject a fitted cream dress without even taking it off the rack, he says from across the room, “That one would’ve looked good on you.”
I don’t look at him. “Maybe I don’t care.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
I shoot him a glare over my shoulder. “You are a plague.”
His expression doesn’t change. “And yet you still came out with me.”
I mutter something obscene under my breath and follow the saleswoman toward the fitting rooms before I do something stupid, like throw a shoe at his head. A nice, pointy one that probably costs more than my college tuition.
The fitting room is enormous, bigger than some bedrooms I’ve slept in, with soft lighting, a velvet bench, and a mirror that feels determined to show me far more than I want to see.
I shut the door firmly behind me and call out, “You are not coming in here.”
His voice drifts through the wood a second later, maddeningly calm. “I hadn’t planned to.”
“That sounds like a lie.”
A pause. Then, “It sounds like self-control.”
I roll my eyes so hard it almost hurts.
The first few dresses are immediate disasters. Too tight. Too sheer. Too expensive looking in a way that feels less like me and more like something he would choose. By the fourth one, I’m sweaty, irritated, and one bad zipper away from losing my mind.
Then I find the sundress.
It’s soft blue, almost the color of faded sky, with delicate straps and a bodice that skims rather than clings. The waist sits high enough to flatter without trapping me, and the skirt falls loose from there in a graceful sweep that hides more than it reveals.
Relief loosens something deep in my chest.
I pull it on carefully, turning this way and that in the mirror, adjusting the neckline, smoothing the fabric over my hips, making sure nothing shows that shouldn’t. It’s pretty. Feminine. Quietly lovely in a way I haven’t felt in months.
For one dangerous moment, I almost smile at my reflection.
Then there’s a knock.
“Elizabeth.”
I freeze. “What?”
“Open the door.”
“No.”
A beat.
“Why?”
I snatch the light cardigan I’d set aside and clutch it across my middle on instinct. “Because I said so.”
His voice drops, low enough to slide through me. “That dress isn’t armor, cara.”
My pulse stumbles.
“It’s also not an invitation.”
“Open the door.”
“No.”
The handle turns.
I stare at it in disbelief. “Lorenzo—”
The door opens anyway. He steps inside and closes it behind him before I can stop him, and suddenly the fitting room feels half its original size. My heart slams once, hard.
He sees the dress first.
I watch it happen—the slight stillness, the way his gaze takes in the pale blue, the soft line of the skirt, the bare skin of my shoulders and collarbones. He looks at me like he’s forgotten every other language he speaks.
Which would be flattering if it weren’t so dangerous.
I tighten my hold on the cardigan bunched across my stomach. “Get out.”
He doesn’t move.
“Lorenzo.”
“You look beautiful.”
The words land too softly. Too sincerely. And I hate that my breath catches anyway.
“You don’t get to walk in here.”
“No,” he says, stepping closer. “But I did.”
“That is not the winning argument you think it is.”
A shadow of a smile touches his mouth, then vanishes just as quickly. His eyes drop to the thin straps at my shoulders. To the place where the fabric curves over my chest. Back to my face.
And then lower again.
Not low enough to discover anything. My grip on the cardigan keeps the line of the dress broken, the shape beneath it obscured. But low enough to make me intensely aware of every inch of skin the sundress leaves bare.
I angle my body, turning one shoulder toward him.
He notices but instead of commenting, he lifts one hand slowly, giving me time to stop him.
I should. Instead, I stand there breathing too shallowly while he brushes his knuckles down the strap at my shoulder, so light it could almost be an accident.
“You like this one,” he murmurs.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I swallow. “Because.”
He steps closer. Close enough that I can smell clean soap and dark cedar and the faint lingering trace of coffee beneath it. Close enough that if I shifted even slightly, the fabric of my dress would brush his coat.
“It softens you,” he says, voice quiet. “Makes you look like something I was never meant to touch.”
A shiver runs through me so sharp it almost hurts. I hate him for saying things like that and I hate myself more for loving it.
“It’s a dress,” I whisper.
His gaze drifts over me again, slower this time. Hungrier. “No.”
I clutch the cardigan tighter. “You need to leave.”
“And yet,” he says, his hand sliding from the strap to the curve of my upper arm, “you’re still standing here.”
I should move.
I don’t.
The silence thickens.
His thumb strokes once, lightly, along my bare skin. Nothing obscene. Nothing even close.
It feels devastating anyway.
“Tell me to go,” he says.
I look at his mouth.
That is my first mistake.
The second is answering honestly. “I want to.”
His eyes darken. “But?”
I hate that single word. Hate how easily it pulls the truth to the surface.
“But I know you won’t.”
Something almost like approval flickers across his face.
“Probably not.”
I should be furious.
Instead, I’m breathless.
He reaches up and catches a loose strand of my hair, tucking it behind my ear with a tenderness that feels indecent in a fitting room, in the middle of London, in the middle of everything that still lies shattered between us.
“You have no idea what you do to me in this color,” he says.
My laugh comes out unsteady. “That sounds like your problem.”
“It is.”
The answer is immediate and rougher than before.
I look up at him and wish I hadn’t, because there it is—that crack in his control, that dark, addictive hunger he tries so hard to bury beneath all that composure. It makes the room feel warmer. Closer. Like the air between us is slowly catching fire.
“Lorenzo—”
His hand slides to the side of my neck. His thumb rests beneath my jaw, tilting my face up the smallest amount.
“Tell me this means nothing,” he says quietly.
My pulse is loud enough to drown out thought.
“It shouldn’t mean anything.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He leans in just enough that the edge of his mouth almost brushes mine. The restraint of it is brutal.
Outside the fitting room, I can hear the faint murmur of voices, the muffled music floating through the boutique, the rustle of hangers and footsteps and ordinary life continuing as though I’m not standing here coming undone in a sundress while the man who ruined my wedding looks at me like he wants to devour me slowly.
I tighten my fingers around the cardigan. “You’re impossible.”
A low sound leaves him. Not a laugh. Something darker.
“And yet I think a part of you loves it.”
Heat floods me. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” He moves so he’s behind me, and we’re both facing the mirror. “Let’s try something, shall we?”
My breath catches. His doesn’t.
In the mirror, his gaze locks with mine, steady and merciless, and I feel it everywhere, like he’s touching me already, peeling me apart layer by layer without even lifting a hand.
Then he does.
His fingers slide to my hips, slow enough to make my knees threaten, firm enough to remind me exactly how easily he could undo me if he chose to.
He doesn’t pull me back against him right away.
He lets me feel the space between us first, the anticipation of it, the knowledge of what’s coming. The knowledge of what I want.
My lips part.
“There,” he murmurs, eyes on mine in the glass. “That look.”
“What look?” My voice is breathy and I hate that he can hear it.
“The one that says you’re trying very hard to remember why this is a bad idea.”