17. Imogen
Imogen
It’s three in the morning and I’m still awake thinking about him, which is exactly as pathetic as it sounds.
I’ve tried everything. Looking at the ceiling, counting backward from a hundred in French to bore myself unconscious, listening to the waves, but none of it works, because every time I close my eyes I’m back on that locked side of his bedroom door, his fist in my hair and his mouth on mine.
And another part I really can’t shake was him telling me the truth about the divorce when lying would’ve been easier.
That’s what gets me. He told me the real thing when he didn’t have to. And I’ve been falling for him a little more every day since, like an idiot, like a girl with no experience.
Fraser men don’t love, his ex-wife told me. They collect.
I laughed at her in that hallway, but now it’s the middle of the night and I’m lying here thinking about what she meant by it.
A week goes by, and he runs hot and cold on a schedule I could set a watch by.
After midnight, when Luke’s asleep and the house’s gone quiet, I’m in his bed.
And afterward, in the dark, he tells me things I know he’d never say in daylight.
That he taught himself which fork to use from a library book at nineteen, so nobody at his first real dinner would clock where he came from.
That he sleeps four hours, max, and gave up fighting it years ago.
That there’s a novel on his nightstand he’s read the same six pages of a hundred times and never gotten past.
“Why do you keep reading it if you never get past six pages?” I asked him once, in the dark, my head on his chest.
“Because the first six pages are that good,” he said. “I don’t want to ruin it.”
I didn’t say anything back. There are things you leave alone at two in the morning.
Then the sun comes up, there’s cereal and a schedule on the fridge, and he’s the boss again. I’ve stopped waiting for the two of them to be the same man. I take whichever one shows up.
The car comes at six. I’ve got one dress that survives a room like the one we’re walking into, and I’m wearing it, snag and all.
“Wear the earrings,” Bex told me on the phone this afternoon, because she was raised by wolves with opinions about jewelry.
“I have one pair of earrings.”
“Then that decision’s already made and you’re welcome. Next problem. How’s the kid?” she asked, because Bex always asks about Luke.
“Good. Really good, actually.”
“And the situation?”
“Also good. Complicated.”
“Complicated like you’re handling it, or complicated like I should clear my schedule?”
“I’ll let you know,” I told her, which is not the same as saying I’m handling it, and we both knew it.
The dinner’s in the city, a private room up high, low light, the water glasses already sweating into their coasters.
Luke’s hand finds mine the second the elevator opens, his grip tight.
Ashton walks us in with one palm at the small of my back, warm straight through the fabric, and I feel every degree of it travel up my spine before he remembers what we are in public and takes it away.
“You can leave the hand,” I tell him under my breath. “Purely for Luke. Family-stability optics.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying it tested well at the photo shoot. Very wholesome. Page two would issue you a medal.”
He smiles at that, small and quick but real, and he doesn’t fight it down first the way he used to. A week ago I’d have had to earn it. Tonight he just hands it over.
Then I feel the room, and the match goes out.
It isn’t loud. Men in good suits shaking his hand, a woman with a tablet herding people toward chairs, a dozen quiet conversations and not one of them about us.
But the eyes move wrong. They come to me, slide over to Ashton, swing back, and they’re carrying a question none of them has the manners to ask out loud.
Over by the windows two men have their heads bent together, and whatever passes between them ends with both of them finding me like I’m the punchline.
I get Luke into his chair, fix the collar and tell him he’s the most important person at this table. It’s true, and it gives my hands a job while I work out what’s gone rotten in the air.
A man by the windows leans into the man beside him, and the room’s quiet enough in that gap between conversations that it carries.
That’s her. The tutor he’s been fucking.
He doesn’t even lower his voice much. He doesn’t have to because I’m staff, and staff isn’t supposed to have ears that work at this altitude.
I keep my chin up and fold the napkin into my lap like a woman who heard nothing. The worst part isn’t the sentence. The worst part is that it’s true, more or less. I’ve spent the past week in his bed, and somehow these people smelled it across a dinner table before either of us breathed a word.
“You’re not eating,” Luke says, eyeing my bread.
“I’m pacing myself. I’m a marathon eater. I peak at dessert.”
“There’s dessert?”
“There’s always dessert. It’s the only reason I agreed to leave the house.”
“What is it?”
“A mystery. Mysteries are best, because you can’t be disappointed in advance.” I tear his roll so he stops looking at mine. “Crunchy end or soft end?”
“Crunchy.”
“Brave. I respect a man who eats the dangerous part first.”
That earns the giggle, and for one moment the table goes human, the older man across from us grinning at the kid instead of the gossip.
Then the woman two seats over says, not nearly quietly enough, that Ashton always did like to keep his help close.
This time, even Ashton heard it. His hand goes to the water glass and stops there without lifting it. The muscle at his jaw jumps once, but he doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he turns to the older man and talks about the coast, letting her line go slack and die in the water.
I’d be impressed if my whole body weren’t busy going cold with dread. If this gets out of this room, it won’t stop. It travels until it reaches my father.
I press my thumbnail into the side of my finger under the cloth, the trick I’ve had since I was seventeen. It takes one of these men, one glass, one lean across a table, and ten years of keeping my life off my father’s desk is gone in a sentence I won’t be there to soften.
That’s the whole reason I did it this way. Blind listing, my mother’s name, nothing that could be traced back to him, so that for once one thing in my life was mine. And now any one of these strangers could be the line that runs straight home.
Luke’s hand finds mine again and he leans over, whispering, “Are they being mean to you?”
“No,” I tell him, hating myself for lying. “They’re being boring. It’s a grown-up disease. You’ll never catch it, you’re far too interesting.”
He buys enough of it to return to his food.
Then Ashton’s knee finds mine under the linen and stays. Nothing anyone above the table could catch. It’s just the warm line of his leg against mine, pressed there on purpose, the one thing he can give me in a room where he can’t give me anything, and I hate how fast it works.
He reaches past me for the water and his forearm drags along mine, skin to skin, and my breath catches before I can stop it. He feels it. I know he does, because his jaw tightens and he sets the glass down a hair harder than he picked it up.
“Problem?” he asks, looking at the centerpiece.
“Nope.” It comes out a step too high. “It’s a bit warm here.”
“It isn’t warm.”
“Then I’m having a small medical event. Don’t worry about it, very mild, I’ll pull through by dessert.”
“You’re flushed.”
“That’s the lighting.”
“The lighting’s behind you.”
“Then it’s atmospheric. Atmospheric flushing. Very common in the underpaid.” I take a sip I don’t need, to give a mouth that wants to misbehave a different job. “Eat your dinner. People are watching.”
“I know exactly what people are doing.” He says it to his water, not to me, his voice dropping under the noise until it’s only mine. “Eat. Smile at the kid. Let them watch nothing happen.”
“So this is nothing.”
“This is dinner.” But his leg stays exactly where it is against mine, and he doesn’t move it, and we both sit there knowing the difference between what he’s saying and what he’s doing.
The woman two seats down tips her head back on a laugh, and her eyes catch me on the way down. I give her the pleasant smile I’ve been handing out all night like a toll at a bridge.
It’s almost survivable. I’ve nearly got my pulse down, nearly convinced myself I can ride this out until the car comes and takes the three of us home, when the assistant walks in.
She reaches Ashton’s shoulder and leans down between us, and whether I want to or not, I catch what she says.
“Sir. Mr. Rutledge just arrived.”