Chapter Ten #2
Not a grab. A grip. His fingers closed around me with the practiced precision of a man who had held women this way before and knew exactly how much pressure to apply -- enough to communicate ownership, not enough to leave marks visible above a bracelet.
His thumb pressed into the soft underside of my wrist, right where the pulse jumped, and I felt the connection instantly.
The same possessive touch he’d used on my jaw in the bridal suite, softened but no less deliberate.
I looked down at his hand.
The skin of my wrist was pale under his fingers. The bruise from months ago had faded completely -- no yellow, no green, nothing but the memory of color living under new skin. His platinum watch caught the string light. The custom cufflink winked.
I looked up at his face.
His eyes were pale blue and utterly still. I had seen them angry. I had seen them perform kindness. I had never seen them like this: calculating, reassessing, the look of a man whose plan had encountered resistance he had not budgeted for and who was now running new numbers in real time.
I did not look away.
The string quartet played on. Ice clinked. Someone laughed. Grant Stewart held my wrist and waited for me to yield. I did not yield.
Rogue came in from my left, and he wasn’t alone.
Beast on one side, Silas on the other, both of them in the same borrowed suits.
Rogue stepped into the space between Grant and me -- not crowding, not touching, just positioning his body in a way that Grant was forced to drop my wrist and step back.
Rogue was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his back through the cut.
He didn’t say anything.
He looked at Grant. His expression was flat -- not angry, not threatening, just completely blank in the way I had learned was more dangerous than either.
His hands were at his sides. His weight was evenly distributed.
He was just standing there, looking at a man who had never in his life been looked at that way by someone he couldn’t buy.
Grant’s gaze moved from Rogue to Beast to Silas and back. He picked up his scotch.
“You must be the husband,” he said. The tone was the same one he used on waitstaff in restaurants where the silverware cost more than the meal. Clipped. Dismissive. The courtesy of a man who had categorized Rogue the moment he saw the cut and decided the category didn’t merit his full attention.
Rogue didn’t answer.
“I’d like a moment with my fiancée,” Grant said. He took a sip of the scotch. His hand was steady. “Alone.”
“She’s not your fiancée,” Rogue said. Quiet. The way he said things that didn’t need volume.
I stepped forward.
Not behind him. Beside him. My shoulder came even with his arm, and I felt him shift his weight -- not away from me, but adjusting, making room for me.
I put my chin up. I set my shoulders back the way Monica had, when she’d pressed her hand between my shoulder blades and said stand like you mean it without saying anything at all.
“You don’t own me,” I said.
I didn’t shout it. I said it clearly, evenly, with the kind of volume that carried to the cluster of guests nearest the bar and nowhere else.
My voice didn’t shake. I was surprised by that.
My hands were at my sides and they were steady too, and I looked at Grant Stewart across the two feet between us and I watched the words land.
His jaw tightened. One muscle, then two. His gaze moved from my face to Rogue’s and back. The nearby conversation had stopped. Three women in cocktail dresses were pretending not to listen while their champagne flutes hung suspended at exactly the wrong angle for drinking.
Grant set his scotch down.
He straightened his jacket. One hand at the lapel, a smooth motion he’d performed ten thousand times in front of mirrors.
He looked at me for one more beat -- long enough to make sure I registered that he was looking -- and then he nodded, once, the nod of a man concluding a meeting that had gone off-script.
“Enjoy your evening,” he said.
He walked away. Not fast. Not the retreat of a man who’d been bested.
The controlled, measured exit of someone filing the entire exchange into a cabinet he would open later, when the room was empty and the decisions were his to make alone.
His shoes made no sound as he walked. The crowd parted for him.
I watched him go. My chest was rising and falling faster than it should have been, and the adrenaline had my fingertips buzzing, but my hands stayed where they were, flat at my sides, and I breathed through my nose and counted the bulbs above the bar until the numbers stopped mattering.
Rogue’s hand came to rest at the small of my back.
Not pulling me. Not guiding. Just there, warm through the fabric of the dress, his palm flat against the curve of my spine.
He didn’t say anything. He stood beside me and watched Grant disappear into the crowd -- with the quiet, focused attention of a man who had already decided what he would do if it came back.
Beast murmured something to Silas. Silas nodded. They moved off toward the far wall, disappearing into the crowd with the practiced ease of club men accustomed to working unnoticed, and Rogue’s hand stayed where it was.
I turned toward the side of the pavilion.
He followed.
The alcove was ten steps from the nearest cluster of guests, tucked beside a service door that led out to a stone patio where the caterers smoked between courses.
The noise of the gala reached us here as a distant hum -- the quartet, the talk, the delicate machinery of wealth congratulating itself on its own generosity.
A single wall sconce threw a weak yellow light across the carpet.
Beyond the service door’s small window, the night was black.
I leaned against a decorative pillar.
My hands were trembling. I could see it now -- a fine, involuntary shake at the fingertips that I couldn’t make stop by thinking about it.
My cheeks were hot. The adrenaline was still running its course through my body, and my heart was doing something complicated against my ribs.
I pressed my palms flat to the column behind me and let the cool of the plaster seep into my skin.
Rogue stood in front of me. He’d taken his hand off my back when we moved into the alcove, and now he had both hands in his pockets, his weight on one hip, his gaze on my face. The cut looked wrong over the suit jacket. I loved how wrong it looked.
“You okay?” he said.
I nodded. The nod was honest. I was okay. I was shaking and my heart was racing and I had just told Grant Stewart he didn’t own me in a room full of people who had spent years teaching me that he did, and I was okay.
He watched me for another beat. Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket -- not the cut pocket, the suit pocket -- and pulled out a small blue box.
He didn’t open it. He held it in his palm and looked at it, then at me.
“I meant it,” he said.
I looked at the box. I looked at his face. The flat dangerous expression was gone. What was left was the thing I had seen on the side of the road that day, when I’d pulled the bike up in front of him and he’d said there she is like he’d been waiting.
“When you told me we were married, even if I still don’t quite understand, did you mean what you said about forever?
” I asked. My voice was low. Direct. It didn’t shake.
He’d dropped that particular bomb on me last night.
I still couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it.
How did someone get married without actually getting married?
He held my eyes. The gala noise washed against the alcove wall behind us, and the weak yellow light caught the silver at his temples -- not the distinguished silver of Grant’s hair, but something rougher, something that had been earned in ways money couldn’t touch.
“Every word,” he said.
I reached for the box. He let me take it. My hands had stopped shaking.