Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Charles cornered me in a hallway at a benefit dinner a month later, while Donovan was deep in conversation with a board member across the room, and I felt the familiar cold drop in my stomach the moment I recognized his particular walk, the one that meant he'd decided something and intended to act on it before anyone could stop him.
"You know what men like Winthrop do with women like you," he said, low, his hand closing around my wrist before I could pull away, his grip carrying just enough pressure to make the point without leaving a mark that would show up in a photograph.
"He's using you to spite me. The second I'm sufficiently humiliated, he'll be done with you, and then where will you be? "
"Considerably better off than I am right now," I said, "given that the man you're describing has never once slept with one of my best friends.”
His grip tightened, almost imperceptibly, the particular tightening of a man who'd just realized his argument wasn't landing the way he'd planned it would in his head.
"He doesn't love you, Julia. He's incapable of it.
Ask anyone who's done business with him.
He calculates everything, and the second the calculation stops favoring you, you'll learn exactly how cold that house can get. "
I told him to let go of my wrist, my voice flat and even, refusing to give him the satisfaction of watching me panic.
He didn't let go immediately. He held on a half second longer than necessary, just to prove to himself he still could, and that half second was apparently long enough for Donovan to notice across the room.
I saw him moving before I fully registered I'd seen him, cutting through the crowd with the kind of speed that draws attention even when a man is trying not to draw it.
By the time he reached us, Charles had already released my wrist, but Donovan's eyes went straight to the faint red mark left behind, and something in his expression shifted into territory I hadn't seen from him before.
"Touch my wife again," he said to Charles, quiet enough that only the three of us could hear it, "and I will make sure the rest of your business interests collapse as thoroughly and publicly as your engagement did. I have considerably more patience for ruining men than you have for surviving it."
Charles left without another word, his jaw tight, his composure cracking at the edges in a way I'd never once seen from him during our entire five years together. Donovan watched him go, and then looked down at my wrist with an expression that had nothing false in it at all.
"Are you alright," he asked, and his voice had gone rough in a way I hadn't heard from him before, not in public, not ever, and I realized, standing there in a hallway that suddenly felt too small, that I was watching a man stop faking possessiveness and start feeling it instead.
He guided me to a quiet alcove off the main hall and held my wrist gently between both his hands, turning it under the light to check for marks, his thumb tracing the faint red line Charles had left there with a care that felt disproportionate to the actual injury.
"I should have crossed that room faster," he said, more to himself than to me.
"You crossed it fast enough." I watched his face, the tight line of his jaw still visible even as his hands gentled on my skin. "Donovan. It's fine. He didn't hurt me."
"That isn't the part I'm angry about," he said, and didn't elaborate further, and I didn't ask him to, because some part of me had already started to suspect I knew exactly which part he meant.