13. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
The clinic was small and beige and smelled like antiseptic. I sat on a paper-covered table in a gown that tied in the back and tried not to think about all the ways my life had led me here.
Full panel, bloods, swabs. The nurse was kind and efficient and didn’t ask questions, which was the whole point of driving three towns over in the first place. No one here knew who I was. No one here would call Posy Wetherell the moment I walked out the door.
“Results in a few days,” she said, snapping off her gloves. “We’ll call the number you gave us.”
“Thank you.”
Reid was in the waiting room when I came out, pretending to read a magazine about fishing. He looked completely out of place, too big for the plastic chairs, too intense for the pastel walls, too everything for this quiet suburban clinic.
He looked up when he saw me, his face carefully neutral. “All done?”
“All done.” I grabbed my purse from the chair beside him. “Let’s get out of here.”
We didn’t talk about it in the car. We didn’t talk about much of anything, just drove in comfortable silence while the sky turned purple and angry overhead. The radio played something soft and forgettable. The air conditioning hummed.
By the time we reached the far end of Newport, the first fat drops of rain were hitting the windshield.
***
The meeting was in a conference room on the fourteenth floor of a glass building that overlooked the harbor.
Two men in expensive suits, both of whom I’d met at charity events over the years.
Charles Whitmore, who ran a shipping logistics firm, and his partner David Thompson, who handled their international accounts.
“Blythe.” Charles stood to kiss my cheek when we walked in. “It’s been too long. I was sorry to hear about… well. Everything.”
“Thank you, Charles.” I smiled warmly, slipping into the persona I’d worn for seven years. “How’s Diane? And the grandchildren - twins, right? They must be walking by now.”
His face lit up. “Running, more like. Into everything. Diane’s exhausted.”
“I can imagine.” I laughed. “And David - congratulations on the Taipei contract. I heard it was quite the negotiation.”
David blinked, surprised. “You follow shipping news?”
“I follow interesting people.” I gestured to Reid. “This is my husband, Reid Navarro. He runs Halyard Capital.”
The meeting lasted two hours. I warmed the room, asked questions, made connections, got them laughing within the first four minutes. Reid closed them with facts and numbers in that flat, precise voice of his, which boats were safe, which weren’t, and what that was worth.
We were extraordinary together.
I’d finish a sentence and he’d pick it up without missing a beat.
He’d start explaining something technical and I’d translate it into terms that made Charles nod instead of glaze over.
By the end of it, the room was half-convinced they were watching a real marriage, two people who’d worked together for years, who knew each other’s rhythms, who trusted each other completely.
“Well.” Charles stood up, shaking Reid’s hand. “I think we have a lot to discuss. I’ll have my people call your people.”
“Thank you, Charles.” Reid’s handshake was firm but not aggressive. He was learning. “We look forward to it.”
In the elevator afterward, we both started grinning at the same time.
“That was-” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I was too giddy, too high on the success of it.
“Yeah.” Reid was looking at the elevator doors, not at me. His reflection was smiling. “It was.”
“We’re good at this.”
“We are.”
Neither of us looked at the other. The elevator descended in silence, but it was a charged silence, something electric in the small space between us.
He’d taken his jacket off in the meeting and rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and his reflection in the doors stood there with its forearms crossed, broad, corded, ruinous.
I watched the mirror version of him instead of the real one, as if that somehow didn’t count, and thought, very clearly: don’t.
I kept watching.
The doors opened. The lobby was chaos.
People crowded around the windows, watching the storm rage outside. Lightning split the sky. Rain came down in sheets so thick I couldn’t see the parking lot.
“Highways are closed,” someone said. “They’re saying flash floods on 138.”
Reid pulled out his phone, scrolled for a moment. “She’s right. Everything’s shut down.”
I looked at the rain. Looked at Reid. Looked at the hotel attached to the office building.
“Well,” I said. “I guess we’re staying.”
The front desk clerk looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, but we only have one room left. Everyone’s been booking because of the storm.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I was too tired to be smart about it. “We’ll take it.”
The room was on the eighth floor. Reid opened the door, and I stepped inside and stopped dead.
One bed. King-sized, dominating the room, covered in white sheets and too many pillows.
And in the corner, behind a glass partition, a hot tub.
I made a sound that was somewhere between a shriek and a laugh. “Oh my god.”
“Is that-” Reid was staring at it like he’d never seen plumbing before. “Is that a hot tub? In the room?”
“It’s a hot tub in the room.” I dropped my purse on the bed and walked over to it, trailing my fingers along the edge. “Reid. There’s a hot tub. In our room.”
“I can see that.”
“We have to use it.”
“We don’t have swimwear.”
I turned to look at him. He was standing by the door, his jacket back on, his face caught between wanting and running.
“What?” I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never seen a pair of tits?”
He swallowed. Hard.
“I don’t think,” he said slowly, his voice dropping, “that anything I’ve ever seen will compare to you, Blythe.”
The words hit me somewhere low in my stomach. His voice had dropped, gone rough, and his eyes were fixed on my face with an intensity that made my breath catch.
I should have backed down. Should have laughed it off, made a joke, retreated to the safety of our careful arrangement.
Instead, I reached for the zipper at the back of my dress.
“Then I guess you’re about to find out.”
I watched his face as I undressed. Watched his eyes go dark, watched his hands clench at his sides, watched the color rise from his collar to his hairline. I took my time. A little striptease, just for him.
I stood there in front of him, and I had never felt so powerful in my life.
“Well?” I stepped into the hot tub, sinking into the warm water with a sigh. “Aren’t you getting in?”
He was frozen. Scarlet to the ears. And there was an extremely obvious tent in his trousers that he wasn’t even trying to hide.
Then he took his clothes off, looking straight at me the entire time.
And I ate him with my eyes, because good God.
I’d already seen it, he’d been half-dressed and soaking when he pulled me out of the ocean, but I’d been busy dying at the time and couldn’t appreciate it.
Now I could. The shoulders, the chest, the flat plane of his stomach and the cut of his hip bones, that lethal V of muscle aimed exactly where I was trying not to look.
And his cock. It was huge, and it was hard, and it left absolutely nothing to guess at.
I cleared my throat. He got in.
And suddenly we were sitting three feet apart in warm water with nothing between us.
The tension was unbearable.
I could see his hands shaking on the rim of the tub. Could see the restraint in every line of his body, the effort it was taking him not to cross the water and touch me.
Under the water, where he couldn’t see, I pressed my thighs together. It didn’t help.
I kept waiting for him to snap, to close the distance, to pull me into his lap, to kiss me the way I’d been imagining for days.
Instead, he asked: “What was it like? Being married to him?”
I blinked. “That’s what you want to talk about right now?”
“I want to know.” His eyes were steady on my face. “I want to understand.”
So I told him.
I told him about the early years, when I still believed Stan loved me. About the specialists and the tests and the monthly disappointment of negative pregnancy results. About the compounded vitamins Sandrine’s doctor prescribed, the ones I took faithfully every morning for seven years.
“Stan told me a job would be embarrassing,” I said. “I was twenty-three. I believed him because I loved him, and because Priscilla agreed, and because I didn’t know any better.”
“And the swimming?”
I looked at the water around us. Steam rising, my skin flushed from the heat.
“I was eight,” I said. “Bailey’s Beach. I went in too deep and got caught in a current. I was drowning, and my mother was on the sand, and she just… stood there. Watching.”
Reid’s jaw tightened.
“A stranger pulled me out eventually. And afterward, my mother told me to stop making a scene.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I never went in the water again.”
“I could teach you.”
“What?”
“To swim.” His voice was soft. “I could teach you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Okay.” He said it in a way that meant later. “Okay.”
We sat in the warm water and the steam rose around us and I felt a wall come down between us, and a steadier understanding settle into the space it left.
“Reid.” I leaned forward slightly. “Why did you really come to Newport?”
He went still.
I counted the silence. One second. Two. Three. The steam swirled between us. Four. Five. Six.
Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.
“Contacts,” he said finally. “Business contacts.”
“You just counted to eleven before you answered me.”
“I know.”
“That’s not the whole truth.”
“No.” He met my eyes, and his gaze flickered, guilt, maybe, or fear. “It’s not. I’ll tell you the rest. Another day.”
I nodded. I didn’t push.
But the lie sat in the steam between us, taking up space, and I felt it there even as we dried off and climbed into bed and lay on opposite sides of the mattress, not touching.
The thing he wouldn’t say.