Chapter 15
I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. The carriage creaked and the city breathed and every inch of me remembered the window and his voice and the heat of his palm under silk.
“Are you attracted to me,” I asked, eyes on the horse’s flicking tail, “or is this a job you’re very good at pretending to enjoy?”
His arm rested along the back of the bench. His knuckles brushed my shoulder like an accident that wasn’t one. “You’re really asking after everything I’ve shown you?”
“You’ve shown me you’re good at control.” My voice came out thin and wobbly. “Control looks the same on a fantasy and a payroll.”
He shifted just enough for his thigh to press mine. “My massively hard cock should speak for itself.”
Heat punched low. “That’s crude.”
“That’s honest.” He tipped his head, studying my profile like I was a skyline. “You want more words than that?”
“I want to know if you’re here because of me or because of a letter with a price tag.”
His mouth curved. “Both can be true. But this is not a paycheck. I don’t need the money.” He slid two fingers under my chin, made me face him. “Look at me. I know your name. I knew it before this.”
“Because you’re friends with my brother.” It came out harsher than I meant. “You knew ‘Simone’ from his life. You call me ‘Lady’ like this is anonymous, but it isn’t.”
He smiled, small and dangerous. “I do know your name.” He leaned close enough for the word to land against my mouth. “But you’re my Lady.”
Something in me went hot and molten at the way he said it. It didn’t sound like a placeholder. It sounded like a possession.
“It’s more complicated than Alpha Mail was supposed to be,” I said, because if I didn’t keep the argument alive I would lose the last thread of my composure. “No names. No overlap. None of this.”
“Do you want to call it off?” he asked lightly. “I’ll tell the driver to turn around. I’ll take you home. You’ll run your class and get back to your clients.”
“Absolutely not.”
The laugh that left him was quiet and satisfied. He looked at the driver, then back to me. His hand settled warm and heavy on my knee. “Good.”
The horse slowed, then picked up, hooves ringing on stone. We turned off the usual route into a darker lane where the gas lamps burned softer and the houses crouched behind deep gardens. Night pressed close. Spanish moss made lace out of branches above us.
He slid his palm up my thigh. Bare skin. A slow, steady climb. He wasn’t in a hurry. I was almost shaking.
“You’re wound tight,” he murmured. “Tell me again how this is a job.”
I gripped the edge of the bench. “You’re unbearable.”
“You’re beautiful when you’re angry.” His thumb stroked, lazy and sure. “Open your knees.”
I looked at the back of the driver’s head. He was obedient. Eyes forward, shoulders square, every inch of him pretending we didn’t exist.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“You already are.”
He was right. I hadn’t noticed. My body had made the choice while my brain was trying to function.
“Do you know what I see when I look at you?” he asked.
“An easy mark,” I said. The joke tried to land and broke apart. I was too breathless for humor.
“I see a woman who spends her days giving every piece of herself away,” he said, voice low and certain.
“Always on call. Always holding someone else’s body together when they can’t.
You live like the whole world depends on you being steady.
” His hand slid higher, heat blooming under his touch.
“And now, finally, you want to be the one who’s held.
You asked for what you needed, and you hate that you did. ”
“I don’t hate it.”
He tilted his head. “No?”
“I hate that I like you.”
He smiled. “Better.”
We bumped over a seam in the road. His hand steadied me. He didn’t stop moving.
“Do you trust me, Lady?”
My throat tightened around the truth. “Yes.”
“Good.” He lifted his hand away.
I almost cried out. It came out as a broken inhale instead.
“Put your heel on the edge,” he said, voice quiet enough that it felt like it lived inside my chest. “There. Now the other.”
The dress fell like water around my hips. Night hid us and didn’t. The suggestion of exposure made every nerve burn hotter.
“Atticus,” I said, because his name was a lifeline and a dare.
“Hm.”
“This is crazy.”
“That’s what you wanted.”
“I didn’t want—” I stopped because the carriage turned and the wind lifted the hem of my dress and he slid from the bench to the floorboards in one clean, fluid motion that knocked the rest of my sentence into the dark.
He knelt between my knees like prayer looked good on him. The carriage rocked. The horse snorted. Far off, someone laughed from a porch. In our pocket of shadow, he pushed my dress higher with careful hands, as if the silk might bruise.
“Eyes ahead,” he said to the driver, voice even as weather. The man’s shoulders went straighter.
My lungs forgot how to work. “Atticus?—”
“Be quiet now.” No threat in it. No heat. Just care wearing authority’s clothes. “You’ll scare the horse.”
I choked on a laugh that didn’t survive. My head tipped back against the cushion. The sky above us was a smear of indigo and bloom. I looked at it because looking down and seeing him like that would undo me.
He started with the inside of my knee. A slow kiss that burned. The other knee next, same reverence, same ruin. Then higher, inch by inch, as if he had divided my skin into a map with stops he refused to skip. My hands found the edge of the bench and held.
“God,” I whispered.
He made a low, approving sound. His fingers pressed where my thigh met the rest of me. Not yet. He wasn’t cruel for sport. He was building something on purpose.
The carriage clicked over stone. The world narrowed to breath and motion and the small sounds I couldn’t swallow. My heels dug into the rail. The dress became a tent and a secret. He moved under it like he had all the time in the world, and I had none.
“Say you want it,” he said.
“You know, I do.”
“Say it.”
“I want your mouth.”
The words made heat streak through me like lightning. He rewarded my honesty.
“Good girl,” he said.
Then he put his mouth on me.
The world tipped. The city vanished. My fingers dug crescents into the upholstered bench. I tried to stay quiet and failed. The first sound was a gasp that slipped out of me. He answered it with more pressure, more intent, and the gasp turned into a broken, breathy yes .
He held my thighs steady with his hands, thumbs anchored where they could calm my shaking, and worked me until thought was a thing that lived far away and had nothing to say to me. The rhythm of the wheels fused with the rhythm of his mouth until I wasn’t sure which one kept time for the other.
“Atticus,” I said again, wrecked now. “Please.”
He hummed like he liked the way I said his name. The vibration rolled through me and something in me shattered, then kept shattering. I would have floated away, if his grip hadn’t kept me there.
I had never been this undone. Not like this, with my dress hiding and revealing, a man kneeling on wood in the middle of a city that would know my name, if it tried. I should have been terrified. I was free in a way I didn’t know how to make small.
“I can’t,” I panted. “I can’t—I’m?—”
“You can,” he said, voice dark and warm against my skin. “You will.”
The last thing I saw clearly was the arch of a wrought-iron gate flashing past and the glow of a porch light tilted like a halo.
Then the world went white around the edges and narrowed to a point.
I broke like a fever breaking. Heat and relief and the kind of tears that didn’t make it out of my eyes because breath had stolen all the exits.
He didn’t stop until I pushed a shaking hand into his hair, not to pull him closer, but because my body had gone too bright to bear and I needed gravity.
He eased back with a final, slow press that made me whimper. The air hit my skin and felt almost cold. I pulled the hem of my dress down with clumsy hands that didn’t want to obey anyone. He didn’t rush me. He rose in that unhurried way of his and retook his seat like he had only adjusted a cuff.
I tried to breathe like a person. It was comical. My chest worked in small jumps. My thighs were tremors. The night smelled like jasmine and horse and something sweeter that had my name on it.
He looked satisfied and entirely unrepentant. His hair was a little mussed from where I’d gripped him. His mouth was … flushed. I had to look away or I would combust.
My laugh came out broken. “You’re impossible.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I should be furious.”
“You will be later,” he said, amused. “You’ll call me a terrible man again.”
“You are.”
“Like I said, you didn’t ask for a good one.”
I pressed my palms to my cheeks. They were hot. “You can’t say things like that in public.”
“No one is listening.” He glanced at the driver. “Are you?”
“Just the road, sir.” The man’s voice was steady. His ears were red.
I wanted to crawl into the seam of the bench and live there. I wanted to laugh like a crazy person. Instead, I pressed my fingers to the pulse in my throat and tried not to float away.
We turned down a larger street. The lamps threw broader circles.
Voices carried from a block ahead, not private murmurs now, but the busy hum of people clustered at the seawall where the breeze was stronger.
A tourist crowd. A few couples. A family with a stroller.
A dog straining toward something he wanted to sniff.
“Breathe,” Atticus said softly.
“I’m trying.”
“Don’t try.” His hand came to rest on my knee. A simple weight. “Just be.”
Be what? Ruined? Free? A woman who had written a letter and then climbed into it? The answers rose and crashed like tide against stone.
We coasted nearer the cluster of bodies. The driver slowed to give the horse a breather, as if he sensed the shift in the street. Atticus’s hand slid higher again, not for mischief this time, just a reminder that I belonged to the moment and to him inside of it.
“Now,” he said, and there was a smile in his voice, “you can be furious.”
“Why.”
“Because we’re not alone anymore.”
“What—”
He tipped his chin toward the seawall, and my heart performed a long, sick drop that started in my chest and landed in my knees.
A woman in white stood near the end of the row of people, blonde hair sleek, posture clean, the faintest gold glinting at her throat.
Alicia.
Stephen’s Alicia.
She had a hand lifted in a half-finished gesture, mid-laugh at something a man had just said. The man turned his head. The streetlight caught his face.
Stephen.
I went still all the way through. There are kinds of stillness that are peace. This wasn’t one of them. This was the stillness of a fawn in tall grass when a shadow crosses the ground.
I was mortified.
The carriage rolled into the edge of light like a stage direction. Alicia’s eyes flicked toward the movement out of habit. Saw us. Paused. Recognition moved across her face, fast. Her smile thinned into surprise.
Stephen followed her gaze.
For a fraction of a second there was no sound in the world but the soft belly-deep exhale of the horse and the tiny tap my pulse made against the inside of my lip where I was biting it.
Atticus didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away. He didn’t bother to look sorry. He lifted his free hand and wiped his mouth with the back of his knuckles in a slow, unapologetic pass that left no doubt what we’d been doing in the dark.
Alicia’s eyes widened. Stephen’s mouth hardened.
The carriage kept moving, slow as judgment.
I forgot how to breathe. I remembered it too late.
And that’s where the night split.