Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Ipicked up the folder, and for one long moment Donovan's face went carefully, deliberately blank, the particular blankness of a man bracing himself for a loss he'd already decided he had no right to prevent.
I tore the papers in half instead, set the pieces down on the counter between us, and watched something break open in his expression that had nothing careful left in it at all.
"Julia." My name came out of him rough and disbelieving, like he didn't quite trust what he'd just watched me do.
"I stopped being your contract a long time before last night," I said.
"Possibly before either of us was willing to admit it.
I'm not choosing to stay because of revenge anymore.
I gave that up the night Lucy's timeline fell apart in front of two hundred witnesses and I felt nothing but relief that I no longer needed it.
I'm not staying for the money, though I'm grateful for what it gave me when I had nothing else.
I'm not staying for safety, or status, or any of the reasons that brought me to your terrace in the first place. "
He came around the counter slowly, like he still half expected me to change my mind before he reached me.
"Tell me what you are staying for, then," he said, his voice unsteady in a way I'd never once heard from him, not even in the bedroom three days earlier.
"I'm staying," I said, "because I choose you. Freely. Completely. With absolutely nothing left between us that either of us has to perform."
He kissed me the way he had three days before the gala, nothing rehearsed in it at all, and I felt, finally, fully, the particular relief of being wanted by a man who had just proven, with his own hands and his own torn up paperwork, that he had never once wanted to own me.
He simply wanted to be chosen, the same terrifying, unguaranteed way I wanted to be chosen, and standing there in his kitchen with the torn settlement scattered between us, I let myself believe completely that I finally had been.