Chapter 15
The last tremors were still rolling through her when Astoria collapsed against her chest, breathing hard.
Miller kept her eyes closed, one hand tangled in Astoria's hair, the other pressed flat against the damp curve of her lower back.
She could feel Astoria's heartbeat pounding against her own ribs and the small aftershocks still rippling through both of them, and she didn't want to move.
She didn't want to break whatever spell had settled over this anonymous hotel room with its generic art and its sheets that probably had a higher thread count than she knew existed.
Third time. This was only the third time, and already Miller's body knew Astoria's like a map she'd been studying for years.
Astoria lifted her head, her hair falling across Miller's shoulder, and pressed a lazy kiss to her collarbone. Then another, slightly higher. Then the hollow of her throat.
"You're going to start something again," Miller murmured.
"Would that be a problem?"
“We’ve already started something twice tonight.”
Astoria’s laugh was a warm huff against her skin. “I’m aware.”
She shifted, propping herself up on one elbow so she could look down at Miller.
Her makeup had smudged slightly, her hair was a disaster, and there was a flush still high on her cheeks.
She looked nothing like the ice queen Miller had met across a conference table three months ago. She looked soft and satisfied.
Miller reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, letting her fingers trace down the line of Astoria’s jaw. Astoria’s eyes fluttered half-closed at the touch.
“What?” Astoria asked.
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“At what?”
At you, Miller thought. At the way you look when you’re not performing for anyone. At the way you sound when you come apart. At everything I didn’t know I was missing until only recently.
“At the ceiling,” she said instead. “Very interesting ceiling.”
Astoria glanced up at the unremarkable white expanse above them, then back down at Miller with a raised eyebrow. “Liar.”
“Terrible liar. It’s a professional liability.”
That earned her a real smile, the kind that crinkled the corners of Astoria’s eyes.
Miller catalogued it automatically, adding it to the growing collection of expressions she'd learned to recognize: the polite smile Astoria wore like armor, the sharp smile that preceded a devastating argument, the private smile that Miller was beginning to suspect very few people had ever seen.
Astoria settled back down beside her, her head on Miller's shoulder, one leg hooked over Miller's thigh. The weight of her was grounding. Miller traced absent patterns on her arm and watched the city lights paint shifting shadows on the wall.
“What are you thinking?” Astoria asked after a while.
Miller considered deflecting again. It’d be easier to make a joke and keep things light, but she was tired of light. She’d spent thirty-six years keeping things light and look where that had gotten her.
“I’m thinking about how hard it is to leave,” she said quietly. “Every time, it gets harder.”
Astoria’s hand stilled on her stomach. “I know what you mean.”
“If this were just..." Miller trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence. Just sex? Just physical? Just two people burning off tension in hotel rooms? It had never been just anything, not from the first moment their hands had touched over scattered papers in the courthouse elevator.
“Just what?” Astoria prompted.
“I don’t know, easier to categorize.” She laughed. “Hey, I’m a lawyer. I like things I can categorize.”
“And you can’t categorize this?”
“Can you?”
Astoria was quiet for a moment. Her fingers resumed their movement, tracing Miller's ribs, the dip of her waist. “No,” she admitted. “I can't.”
Somehow that was reassuring. They were both lost in the same uncharted territory.
Miller turned her head to press a kiss to Astoria’s hair. She smelled like expensive shampoo and sex and something underneath that was just her, something Miller had started to crave in the hours between these stolen meetings.
“I should get going,” Astoria said, but she didn’t move. “It’s almost eleven.”
“I know.”
Outside, a car passed on the street below, its headlights sweeping briefly across the window. The air conditioning hummed. Miller became aware of her own heartbeat, steady now, and Astoria’s breathing, slow and even against her shoulder.
Thursday morning, Miller stared at the same paragraph of a custody motion for the third time and retained nothing.
The Stewart case was a straightforward dispute over summer visitation.
She’d handled dozens, if not hundreds, like it and could practically draft the response in her sleep.
But her mind kept sliding sideways, back to the weight of Astoria’s body against hers, the sound she’d made when Miller’s fingers had found exactly the right spot, the way she’d looked in the low light of yet another hotel room—
Miller pressed her palms against her eyes and exhaled. This was becoming a problem.
Not the affair itself. She’d made her peace with that, or at least shoved her reservations into a box she didn't open during daylight hours.
She'd recused herself properly. There was no ethical violation, no conflict of interest, nothing that would get her disbarred or disciplined. On paper, she was clean.
But paper wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that she'd excused herself from a high-profile case for reasons she couldn't explain, and Rachel had accepted her recusal with the kind of professional courtesy that made it clear there would be questions later.
The problem was that Valerie Shepry-Dane had looked at her across the conference table and seen exactly what Miller had tried to hide.
The problem was that legal communities were small, and Phoenix Ridge's was smaller, and if anyone found out that Miller Scott was spending her evenings in hotel rooms with the woman she’d been hired to fight against in divorce court—
She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to.
Her phone buzzed, a text from an unknown number that she recognized anyway because she’d memorized it without saving it to her contacts. Plausible deniability, Astoria had called it. As if anything about this was deniable anymore.
She read the text. “Saturday? Same time?”
It was only three words, but Miller’s body responded to them—a flush of heat, a tightening low in her stomach, the immediate mental calculation of how many hours until Saturday evening.
She typed back, “Yes.”
Then she sat there, phone in hand, and thought about what the room would cost. The hotel last night had been even nicer than the one before, which had been nicer than The Meridian where they’d started.
Astoria cycled through them like she was selecting restaurants: never the same place twice, always somewhere with good security and staff trained to forget faces.
Miller didn't know the exact price of a room at last night's hotel, but she could guess.
Three hundred a night, maybe more. Half her weekly take-home for a few hours of privacy.
Astoria never mentioned the cost or hesitated when she handed over her card.
It was nothing to her, a simple rounding error, and Miller didn’t resent that.
Astoria had earned her money and built something real, but it sat strangely sometimes.
The gap between their worlds was made visible in the thread count of sheets and the weight of hotel bathrobes.
“Miller.”
She looked up. Rachel stood in the doorway of her office, her reading glasses pushed up in her hair and a file folder in her hand.
“Got a minute?”
“Of course.” Miller set the phone face-down on the desk.
Rachel stepped in but didn’t sit, which meant it’d be brief. “Just a heads-up on the Shepry case. Settlement talks broke down last week when Valerie rejected the latest offer. She’s pushing for an accelerated trial date now and wants this resolved before the end of summer.”
Miller kept her expression neutral. “She rejected it? I thought she wanted a quick settlement.”
“Apparently the terms weren't favorable enough. She's convinced she'll do better in front of a judge.” Rachel shook her head slightly. “Between you and me, I'm not sure she's right. Astoria's documentation is...thorough.”
Miller’s chest tightened at the name, but she kept her voice even. “Astoria was always organized. I remember the discovery files.”
“Obsessively so. Every receipt, every email, every calendar entry going back fifteen years.” Rachel paused, something flickering across her face. “Valerie says it's evidence of controlling behavior. But honestly? It reads more like someone who knew she'd need to defend herself someday.”
The words landed somewhere uncomfortable.
Miller thought about Astoria's meticulous planning, the way she rotated hotels, the burner-style texting.
At the time, Miller had assumed it was paranoia or maybe just the habits of someone used to being watched.
But what if it was something else? What if it was the learned behavior of someone who'd spent years being blamed for things she hadn't done?
“She’s cold,” Valerie had said in their first meeting. “Incapable of real emotion. She made me feel like I was crazy for wanting affection.”
Miller had believed her. She’d sat in that conference room and looked at Valerie’s practiced composure and had seen a woman who’d been frozen out of her own marriage.
But the woman Miller had been with last night wasn’t cold. The woman who’d laughed against her shoulder, who’d traced idle patterns on her skin, who’d whispered five more minutes like leaving was physically painful—that woman was anything but cold.
“Miller?”
She blinked. Rachel was watching her with that measured look again, the one that saw too much.
“Sorry, just thinking.”