Aubrey
The elevator rises. I stand next to my legal husband and try not to think about the night we had what seems an eternity ago.
Linden looks at me in the reflection on the elevator doors. Dark suit, white shirt, tie still knotted from the dinner, his hair still neat. By now there's shadow at his jaw and faint redness at the old cat-scratch lines on one hand.
The elevator opens into the private vestibule. The apartment beyond is cool, orderly, lit low.
I keep walking.
Linden follows.
"Say it," he says.
I stop halfway across the main living room and turn. "Say what?"
"Whatever you've been silently composing since we left Harrowgate."
I smile sweetly. "Oh, good. You noticed."
"I noticed when you stopped making jokes," he counters.
"That was my first mistake. Never stop making jokes around a Dunleavy. They start thinking you're having an emotion."
His eyes stay on my face. "You hated tonight."
"No, not tonight. More like...I hated how good I was at the lie.
The proposal story. The marriage. I hated sitting at that table sounding like a press release with a pulse.
I hated that the version your mother bought sounds more plausible than the version where I met you in an elevator with an angry cat clawing its way up your body. "
He grins. "The cat certainly had leverage, didn't he?"
"He had claws," I clarify, and almost laugh.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
I need more space.
"Is there somewhere we can do this that isn't the middle of your living room?" I ask.
"My study. Why?"
I hug myself. "Somewhere quiet. Somewhere less... I don't know... stuffy. No staff watching."
"They're all gone at this hour," he says. But he passes me without touching me and opens the door off the hall anyway.
I go in first. Linden follows, and the door clicks shut behind us.
The study is cooler than the main rooms. The privacy glass is clear when we enter, showing the living area behind us and our reflections over the city. The desk runs along one wall.
Linden touches a wall control. The glass turns white.
My pulse misbehaves.
"Better?" he asks.
I shake my head. "Don't do that."
He frowns. "Do what?"
"Make privacy happen with the press of a button," I counter.
He shrugs, and reaches for the control. "I can turn it back."
"No." The word comes out too fast. I clear my throat. "Leave it."
His eyes stay on me. "All right."
Linden stands near the desk, empty-handed, and makes that seem aggressive somehow. Sexually.
"Your mother believed the marriage is real..." I start.
"She wanted to, anyway," he agrees.
"That's worse."
He studies me. "Why is that worse?"
"Because now I have to keep being the woman she met tonight. Whoever that was. I'll have to do it again next time, only better, because she'll be paying closer attention."
"She wasn't paying close attention tonight?"
"She was paying mother attention," I clarify. "Next time it'll be in-law attention. Those are different sports."
His mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "You're not wrong."
That gorgeous mouth...
"Every bad thing here gets wrapped in protection first," I say, because I need to be saying something.
"Your mother gets a sweet proposal story.
The donors get a stable marriage. I get a suite.
The contract gets our first night together scrubbed out of it.
And somewhere in the middle of all that protection there's an actual person trying to remember which version of herself she's supposed to be at breakfast."
"Bullshit," Linden counters.
"I'm in your house."
He nods. "But you have your own suite."
"I'm under your name," I insist.
"You kept Bell," he clarifies.
I lift my hand. "I'm wearing your ring."
He shrugs. "You chose the ring in front of a judge."
I smile sadly. "I did. But we're missing something, aren't we?"
That one lands differently. I watch it land.
His voice drops. "You didn't fall in love with me."
My stomach goes tight. He says it like a fact, and neither of us gets to pretend we didn't hear the part he left out.
"Don't worry," I say. "I won't mess up the branding."
"Cut the bullshit. You want to fight? Fine. Fight me. But don't act like you're under some deposition."
"This whole arrangement is a deposition," I blurt.
"Then walk out." He points to the door. "Go to your suite. Or get a hotel. Tell Dora you want your own car and your own apartment tonight. I won't stop you. No one in this residence will stop you."
"Do you want me to?" I ask.
His face goes still in the way I've learned means he's holding back. "No."
There's no PR-safe version of what that does to me.
My fingers curl at my sides. "Then don't talk to me like the contract is the only thing standing between us."
"It is, though," he says softly.
"That's not true." I take a step toward him. Now we're too close, and I did that. "The contract is the thing we keep pointing at so we don't have to say the sex happened. That we happened."
His eyes flash with a hunger I recognize. "I remember the sex."
I smile. "Congratulations."
"I also remember your boots in your hand at dawn," he says quietly.
My breath stops, then starts badly.
"I remember you leaving before I could ask for anything," he continues. "I remember deciding not to pull footage, not to ask Hollis, not to use any of the things I could've used to find you."
The back of my neck goes hot. Hollis would've found me in an afternoon.
But Linden chose not to ask.
He takes a step closer to me now. I don't move away.
"And now," he says, "I get to watch my mother believe a story I didn't write while you sit beside me pretending the first time I touched you was over bad tea."
My throat works. "You didn't touch me first."
"No?"
"I touched you first. In the elevator. With antiseptic wipes. Because a certain cat tried to shred you."
"That was medical."
"That was foreplay with paperwork," I clarify.
His mouth curves for half a second.
I'm doomed.
Then he reaches for me.
His fingers close around my left wrist, light enough that I can pull back. His thumb rests below the scar there, not on it.
I look down at his hand. At the wedding band on his finger. Of course he can turn marriage into paperwork and still make the ring look real.
"You can move," he says.
"I know," I reply.
"Or tell me to let go," he adds.
"I know."
His voice is quiet. "Aubrey."
"I don't want you to let go." There. Said. Out loud.
His grip changes.
He backs me up one step.
I let him.
Another step.
My shoulder blades meet the glass wall with a soft tap. The surface is cool through my blazer.
He stops immediately, watching my face. "Too much?"
I shake my head.
"Words," he says.
"No," I whisper. "It's not too much."
His free hand braces against the glass beside my head. He's close enough now that I can see the tired red at the edges of his eyes. His shirt is warm from his body.
My thighs press together.
"Contract says no sexual contact," he says.
"That contract also says no kissing needed for donor optics," I tell him breathlessly. "But I can tell you, I'm certainly not kissing you for the donors."
He arches an eyebrow. "Then why are you kissing me?"
"I haven't kissed you," I taunt.
His eyes come back to mine. "Then do it. Or leave."
My pulse trips over itself. "You're bossy. My legal husband."
His face changes. Barely, but I'm close enough to see it.
"Yes," he says.
I grab his tie and pull him down.
The first touch isn't elegant. My angle is bad, his height is ridiculous, and my nose bumps his cheek before our mouths line up. Then he makes a sound against me, low and rough, and all thought drops out of my head.
His hand leaves the glass and finds my hip. His other hand keeps my wrist pinned lightly beside my shoulder.
His mouth moves over mine, hard and restrained until I open for him, and then he loses some of his control.
His tongue slides against mine and I taste tea on his tongue.
He pulls back first.
I chase him half an inch before I catch myself.
His eyes track it.
"Say yes," he says.
"I kissed you," I pant.
"Say it," he insists.
Say what?
Oh.
"Yes," I breathe.
He studies me. "To what?"
My face heats. "Linden."
"To what, Aubrey?" he insists.
He still has my wrist. I could pull free. I don't.
"Yes to this," I say. "Yes to you touching me. Yes to me touching you. Yes to breaking the stupid contract."
His hand leaves my wrist only long enough to pull his tie loose. He holds up the tie. "Wrists in front. Loose enough to pull out if you panic. You say yellow or red, and it's off."
I make a strangled sound. Finally: "And if I say green?"
"Then you keep your hands where I put them and let me make you cum," he replies.
My pussy clenches around nothing.
He wraps the tie around my wrists in front of me, not tight, then knots it neatly enough to make me resent him. I tug once. The fabric gives a little. I can get out if I need to.
I don't need to.
His hand closes over the tie and lifts my wrists above my head against the glass.
My blazer pulls open and my T-shirt rides up at my stomach, and I blurt, "Great, just what your very serious office needed. A stressed-out shelter wife with a belly roll on display."
He stops at once.
His eyes lower to the strip of skin above my waistband. Then back to my face. "Don't do that."
"Do what?" I say. But I know.
"Make a joke about yourself before I can want you exactly as you are," he says.
My throat gets tight.
"Bossy," I say again, weaker.
"Yes." He lowers my bound hands and lets go. Then he drops to one knee.
"Your ankle hurts." He unfastens one boot, careful with the sore side, then the other. "I'm taking these off before you pretend it doesn't."
His hands slide up my calves, over my pants, and he looks up at me from there. All six foot four of him is on one knee in front of me because my ankle hurts.
I grip the tie around my wrists.
He stands again and kisses the place where my T-shirt has ridden up. Once. Open-mouthed. Warm.
My stomach jumps.