41. Delilah
DELILAH
He takes me up the stairs by the hand.
The mirror in his bedroom is double-width and double-height, the kind of extravagant monstrosity that only a six-foot-four man with too much money to blow could ever afford.
I’ve stood in here a dozen times and never once looked into it on purpose. I’ve angled my body away from it while I got dressed. I’ve hung a towel over the corner of it.
Kane drags it out into the middle of the floor. The feet scrape on the rug.
“Stand there,” he says, and points at a spot in front of it.
I do. He turns on the lamp by the bed and nothing else.
Then he undresses me from behind. He unzips me and pushes the dress off my shoulders and lets it fall, unhooks my bra with one hand, and crouches to take my underwear down my legs.
The whole time, I’m watching it happen in the glass.
My first instinct is to find the flaws.
“Eyes up,” he says when he catches me doing it. “Look at your face.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where you are.”
I look at my face. It’s flushed and my hair is a mess from the party and my mouth is open a little.
He stands behind me, puts one hand on my belly, and spreads his fingers.
“Do you know what I see?” he says against my ear. “I see the woman who walked into a room full of fifty people and burned her whole life down on purpose because she refused to be lied to.”
“Kane—”
“I’m not finished.” His other hand comes up and closes around my throat.
“I see the woman who called a hundred customers on a landline and apologized for something she didn’t do.
I see the woman who dumped two hundred dollars of buttercream because it wasn’t right.
And I see this.” He runs his hand down over my hip and grips.
“Which is mine, and which is perfect, and which I intend to have right now while you watch.”
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a mirror.”
“Then look away and I’ll stop.”
Yeah fucking right.
He takes me on the rug in front of it, kneeling behind me, one arm hooked around my ribs holding me up, and he makes me keep my eyes open.
Every time they drop, he tells me, Up, Lilah.
It’s awful and it’s incredible, because I can see what he’s doing to me, his hands, the rings, the ink on his forearms, and my own face breaking apart again and again.
In the middle of it, I cry out, “Don’t stop, right there, harder,” and he groans as we both go tumbling into oblivion.
After, when I’m shaking on the floor with my cheek against the rug, he purrs, “There she is. Say what you want and it happens. Every time.”
Kane suggests getting on the bed, but I’m too tired for that, so I just drag him down onto the rug with me. I lie on my stomach with my arms folded under my chin and he lies on his side facing me, tracing a line up and down my spine with two fingers.
I could lie like this forever, I think. Not one thing in my world is out of place.
I turn my head to look at him. “Can I ask you for something else?”
His fingers stop on my back. “You can ask me for anything, sladkaya.”
I take a deep breath.
Don’t chicken out now.
“I want this after Easter.”
Kane resumes stroking my back. “You’ll have to be more specific than that.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I want to hear it straight.”
I push myself up onto one elbow so I’m looking at him properly. My hair falls in my face.
“Easter is three weeks away,” I say. “That’s the end of our deal. Once we get there, the lien goes away and the bakery is mine and we’re square.” I make myself keep going. “And then what? Do you know what happens after that? Because I don’t.”
“You said this was just business,” he reminds me.
“Well, it isn’t.” I bite my lip. “It stopped being that a long time ago and I think you know it. I do, and I’m sick of pretending I don’t.
I want to know if you want me when I don’t owe you anything.
Because if the only reason I’m in this room is that my ex-husband signed my name to a contract in October, then I’d rather find out now than wait until Easter. ”
He takes his time with that. He’s a huge figure, naked and mouth-wateringly beautiful in the darkness. I’ve never seen such a perfect man in all my life.
“And there’s one more thing,” I add. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
“Lilah…”
“You don’t have to say it back. I’m not fishing. I’m just— I’ve spent ten years living my life in fear of what other people might think of me, and I’m never doing that again. So I say things now. Out loud. To people’s faces. It’s a new hobby.” I shrug one shoulder. “It’s going okay so far.”
He sits up. He reaches over, takes my hand, and turns it over in his and looks at it, at the flour permanently living in the creases of my knuckles, at the little shiny burn scar on the inside of my wrist.
“You are not Connor Boyd’s debt,” he whispers. He looks up at me. “You are not his debt and you are not my collateral. Whatever you were in writing in October, you’re not that now. The only thing that ends on Easter is the lien. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Say it straight,” I retort, throwing his own words back in his face.
His mouth twitches. “The debt ends. We don’t.”
I blush. “That’s better.”
“I want every day you’ll give me,” he continues.
“If you tell me on Easter Sunday that you never want to see me again, I’ll go.
I’ll fucking hate it, but I’ll go. But you’d have to tell me—and you’ll have to say it straighter than anything you’ve ever said before—because I’m not leaving on my own.
” He tightens his hand on mine. “That’s the truth. All of it that matters.”
There’s a hitch there, where I feel him not say something else. It’s the same hitch that was there when I asked about his mother at the dinner table and he said not tonight, and when I asked about the map and he changed the subject.
But he answered the question I asked.
And I’ve had ten years of men who never gave me that. Right now, I’m too tired and too happy and too naked to go hunting for the rest.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I lie back down and pull his arm over me like a blanket. “Wake me up at three.”
I’m at work the next morning, happy and humming, dancing, bopping oven doors closed with my hips.
Priya’s stocking the walk-in. Cameron’s out on a run. Jolene is telling a man that no, we do not do gender reveals with colored filling anymore, ever, don’t ask again.
Then Jolene sticks her head through the doorway. “Delilah? Two guys out here want the owner.”
“Inspector?”
“Don’t think so. They’re in suits. Nice ones.”
I set down the bag and wipe my hands. I’m wary. Unexpected visits haven’t gone too well for me lately.
But why would I worry? Kane and I are going to last. My life is finally taking a turn for the better.
The men are standing at the counter. One is older, fifty or so, with silver hair combed hard to one side and a folder under his arm. The other is younger and taller with a flat frown.
“Ms. Dorsey.” Silver Hair puts out a hand. “Garrett Gates. This is my associate. We represent a group acquiring commercial parcels in this corridor.”
“We’re open ‘til six. Are you buying anything?”
It doesn’t take a genius to interpret that as a fairly polite version of “Please fuck off.” Mr. Gates smiles thinly and opens the folder on my counter. He extracts a page and hands it over to me.
It takes me a few read-throughs to be sure I’m getting the number right.
“That’s a joke,” I scoff.
“That’s a cash offer, ma’am. Thirty days to close, no financing contingency, no inspection contingency. We take the building as-is.” He taps the page. “Including the loading area, which I understand needs work.”
“You’re offering me less than I paid for it three years ago.”
“We’re offering you certainty,” he corrects.
The younger one finally speaks up. “It’s a difficult location, Ms. Dorsey.
Difficult year, too, from what we understand.
” He looks around the shop in a way that makes me understand he’s visualizing taking a wrecking ball to every bit of it, if that’s what it takes to make me sell.
“Your dairy and dry-goods supplier terminated your account with no warning in February. Health inspection the following day, unannounced, on an anonymous complaint. Two dozen of your customers received cancellations from an address that wasn’t yours.
And then a rental truck took out your curb and your bollard and left. ”
“That’s a lot of digging in the muck for a guy who came in to buy a building,” I say through clenched teeth.
“It’s diligence, Miss.”
Gates raps his knuckles on the counter. “Ms. Dorsey, businesses in transitional corridors experience disruption. It compounds. One more event of that nature—a shutdown, a fire code issue, an insurance non-renewal, anything along those lines—and the numbers change. Not in your favor, either. I’d hate for you to be sitting across from me in June looking at a smaller number than this one. ”
So that’s what this is.
A threat.
A shakedown.
A few months ago, it might’ve scared me.
Not anymore.
“No,” I say.
“I’d encourage you to take a few days—”
“No. Not a few days, and not a counter or a phone call next week. Just plain old ‘No.’“ I put my finger on his offer and push it back across the counter toward him. “This building has one name on the deed and it’s mine. I bought it and I paid for it, and I turned down money from my own dying father to keep it that way. So you can put your number in the trash on your way out, because it’s not for sale to you or anybody standing behind you.”
The bell over the door dings.
I don’t have to turn around to know who’s arrived. The whole shop tightens up. Yuri comes in first and stops just inside the door, and then Kane walks past him.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look at me. He goes and stands at the end of the counter with his hands in his coat pockets and waits.
Gates has gone a shade grayer than his hair.
Then he turns away from me and faces Kane.
Bad move.
“Mr. Makov,” he says. “Perhaps you’d be willing to talk some sense into your girlfriend. This is a generous—”
“The owner answered you,” Kane snarls in an icy baritone.
Gates blinks. “I’m sorry?”
Kane takes two steps and picks up the folder off my counter with two fingers, like it’s something repulsive he found in a drain, and shoves it into Gates’s chest.
“Are you stupid? She said no. That’s the end of the conversation.” He switches to glaring at the other man. “This bakery is not for sale. It belongs to Delilah Dorsey and it stays that way.”
“We’re simply—”
“You’re leaving,” Kane says. “My friend here will walk you to your car and take your plate number, and if either of you comes within a block of this address again, we’ll have a longer conversation in a place with fewer windows and a drain in the floor to swallow your blood.
Tell whoever pays you that I said that.”
They go. Yuri goes out behind them and stands on the sidewalk, watching their car until it turns at the corner.
Nobody in the shop moves for a second.
Then Jolene says, “Well,” and goes back to the register.
Priya comes over and squeezes my arm hard enough to hurt before returning to the ovens. Angelica exhales and starts the mixer again.
Little by little, the noise comes back in.
Kane stays where he is, at the end of my counter. When I can think straight again, I go to him.
“You have impeccable timing,” I say with a nervous laugh.
He glances at the door. “Yuri called me the moment they walked in. I sat outside for six and a half minutes to be sure you could handle them yourself.”
“Such admirable restraint, Mr. Makov.”
He tightens his fists and grimaces. “It wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”
When he sees my own hands shaking, he reaches out and covers them. “Listen to me, Lilah. Nobody is taking this building from you. I won’t let that happen.”
How fast things change. Three months ago, he was getting ready to take it.
Now, he’s… what? My boyfriend? My protector? My lover? My ruin?
Fuck it. Who needs a name? He’s mine and I’m his. That’s what matters.
“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”
Then I go back to the christening cake, because the shell border isn’t going to pipe itself, and making things sweet is what I do best.