Chapter 6
Chapter Six
He was already out there when I stepped onto the terrace, leaning against the railing with a drink he wasn't drinking, watching the party through the glass doors like a man studying an aquarium full of fish he had no intention of feeding.
I knew who Donovan Winthrop was the way everyone in that city knew who Donovan Winthrop was.
Old money grown colder and sharper across the generations, a reputation for buying companies the way other men buy shoes, and a long, ugly history with the Hamilton family that predated me by at least a decade.
Charles hated him with the specific venom men reserve for rivals who've beaten them at something.
I'd never once heard the details. I didn't need them to recognize the look on Donovan's face when he glanced at me, which was the look of a man who already knew exactly who I was and precisely what had been done to me.
"You're handling tonight better than I expected," he said, not bothering with an introduction, because men like him don't introduce themselves to people who already know their name.
"Handling it on the edge of insanity, you mean."
"Handling it like you'd rather be anywhere else and you're too proud to let anyone see that." He finally drank from his glass. "I find that more interesting than the alternative."
“What’s the alternative?”
“Hiding out at home,” he replied. “The worst option, even worse than showing up and causing a scene. If you hid it would make it look like you have something to hide.”
"I hadn't realized my evening was a spectator sport."
"It became one the moment Lucy decided to announce her pregnancy at someone else's expense.
" He said it with a directness I wasn't braced for, no hedging in it at all.
"A weapon dressed up as a celebration. I find it almost admirable, honestly, how efficiently she's turned her own body into a message aimed at every woman who's ever underestimated her. "
There was something unsettling about how closely he'd been watching, how much he already understood about a humiliation that had nothing to do with him.
“So, why do you care about any of this?” I asked him.
He looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that strips away the easy answer and waits for the true one.
"I don't, particularly, not about them,” he said. "I'm interested in what you plan to do with all that anger you're not letting anyone see." He paused. "I have a use for it, if you're willing to hear about it."
"You don't know anything about my anger."
"I know you sold your engagement ring within a week," he said, and watched my face carefully when he said it, gauging exactly how much that landed.
"I know because the jeweler happens to owe me a favor, and because I make it a habit to know things about people I might eventually need.
I know you opened an account in your name only.
I know you haven't called Charles back once in three weeks, which tells me you've already decided he doesn't get to control your reactions anymore, even from a distance. "
I felt something cold move down my spine, less fear than a kind of wary recalibration. "That's a great deal of information about a woman you met five minutes ago."
"I find that women who survive humiliation the way you're surviving yours tend to make excellent partners in exactly the kind of arrangement I need.
" He set his glass down on the railing without drinking from it again.
"I'm not interested in soft. I've watched soft fold under far less pressure than what's currently being aimed at you, and it folds quickly, and badly, the moment someone like Charles applies real weight. "
"You make it sound like you've been auditioning candidates."
"In a way, I have," he admitted, with no apology in it at all. "Quietly, for longer than tonight. You're simply the first one who hasn't tried to play act grief for my benefit the moment she realized I was watching."
I should have walked away right there. I didn't. Some part of me, the part that had spent three weeks building a wall out of a sold engagement ring and a private bank account, recognized in Donovan Winthrop the first person all night who wasn't waiting for me to break.