Chapter Five
SO I’VE DECIDED TO be adoring.
I want it on the record that this is a business decision and nothing whatsoever to do with how a certain man left me against the paneling twenty minutes ago with a promise in my ear, and certainly nothing to do with my wanting, in some disgraceful back room of myself, to find out what the alternative felt like.
I made a deal. I took the money. A professional honors her contracts, and tonight the contract says I walk into this dining car on Loukas Karalis’s arm wearing his ring and a smile fit to light the place, and so that, gritted teeth and all, is what I do.
He notices, naturally. The man notices everything.
“Careful, agapi,” he murmurs against my hair as we step in, low enough for me alone. “A man might think you’d turned over a new leaf.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I murmur back, smiling for the room. “I’m only doing it for the money.”
“Naturally.” His hand settles at the small of my back, the heat of it coming through the silk, and I feel the curve of his mouth at my temple. “We’ll see how long the money holds you.”
And then I see her, and every clever thought in my head goes quiet.
The woman in the red coat from the platform is sitting at our table. Except she’s shed the coat, and she’s wearing my fiancé’s first name instead, draped over both syllables like she owns the rights to it.
“Loukas,” she says, the second time in under a minute, drawing it out slow and low, the voice you’d use to gentle something and keep it still, and I understand all at once, before a single fork’s been lifted, exactly why I’m here.
The dining car’s a long jewel box of a thing, white linen and brass-shaded lamps and crystal that throws little knives of brightness every time the train sways, the silver so heavy I’d nearly need both hands to lift it, and out past the black glass the country’s rushing by invisible in the dark, so the car feels like a sealed room flung through nothing, ten couples shut inside it with their money and their appetites.
A roomful of people sorts itself for me the same way an aviary does, into who holds still and who can’t, who’s settled and who’s only pretending, where the predator is and which way the predator’s looking. It takes me about as long as it takes to unfold my napkin.
The predator’s across the table, and she isn’t looking at me at all.
She’s looking at the man whose arm is coming around my chair.
“You remember my wife,” says the man beside her, and there’s such plain happiness in his voice it takes me a second to catch up.
He’s older than her by a good twenty years, soft and silver and beaming, a man built entirely of good cheer and bad eyesight where it counts, and when he looks at her his whole face opens like a window.
Artie, Loukas called him in the corridor, gripping my hand a degree too tight, the only warning I got. Artie Kraus, my oldest friend in this business, you’ll like him. He hadn’t said one word about her.
He hadn’t needed to. She’s saying it all herself.
“Bettina,” the woman supplies, and she smiles at me with a great show of charm that stops a clean inch short of her eyes, then turns the same smile on Loukas and lets it thaw several degrees, a thermostat she works with insulting ease.
“We’ve heard so much, and so suddenly. An engagement.
To think you kept her a secret all this time, you wicked man. ”
“Some things are worth keeping,” Loukas says smoothly, and his arm comes around the back of my chair, his hand settling warm at the curve of my shoulder, one fingertip drawing a slow line along my collarbone.
I lean into it without being told to.
That’s the part I’ll have to answer for later, alone, on my half of the one bed.
Not that I leaned in. That I wanted to. That after eighteen years of bracing every muscle I own whenever this man came within ten feet of me, my body has gone and decided, tonight, in front of an audience, that the weight of his hand is just where it intends to stay.
And the touch is meant to be theater and it isn’t, it never is with him, it goes through me low and sure and entirely off the script we agreed on, and I take a long drink of wine I don’t taste and blame the wine.
Behave, Sensible Blythe says. You agreed to this.
I’m behaving. That’s the whole problem. Behaving means sitting here in his arm being adored, and being adored by Loukas Karalis turns out to be a quiet form of ruin I hadn’t budgeted for, that idle touch mapping one small stretch of me over and over while I smile at a table full of strangers and try to remember how breathing is meant to go.
I watch her watch us. That’s my entire evening, the soup and the fish and the endless courses going by untouched while I run a quieter sum underneath, and here’s the total I keep reaching.
Bettina Kraus doesn’t look at Loukas the way a married woman looks at her husband’s old friend.
She looks at him the way I look at the field behind my property, the one I’ve decided is mine in every way but the deed.
She looks at him like a thing she’s already chosen and is only waiting out the paperwork on.
And every time her husband laughs his big warm laugh and pats her hand and tells the table how lucky he is, she smiles down at him fondly and lifts her eyes back to Loukas over the top of his silver head.
So that’s it. That’s the why he wouldn’t give me on the porch.
He didn’t hire a fiancée to charm investors. He hired a wall, and I’m it, a body to stand between himself and a woman who’s marked her husband’s oldest friend as already hers, a woman who can’t be told no in any language that won’t blow up the friendship he’s spent thirty years building.
I’d be insulted, if I weren’t so busy being impressed by the sheer economy of it. He went and found the one woman alive who’d take his money, loathe him start to finish, and never once be tempted to want what Bettina wants.
Except.
Except he hasn’t stopped, his fingers idle at my collarbone like he’s forgotten they’re there, that slow unhurried touch going on and on while the table talks, and I haven’t forgotten, I’m aware of it like a struck match held a half-inch from dry grass.
And I think, with some alarm, that he may have chosen wrong.
That the one woman alive who wasn’t supposed to want him is sitting in the curve of his arm tasting nothing on her plate, counting the seconds between each slow stroke like a woman keeping time to a song she swore on everything she’d never learn the words to.
“You’re very quiet, Blythe,” Bettina observes pleasantly, turning the full beam on me, and the table’s attention swings to follow. “I do hope Loukas warned you what you were marrying into. We’re a demanding little family, the people on this train. We don’t share well.”
“Funny,” I say lightly, lifting my heavy silver at last. “Neither do I.”
And then I go off-script entirely.
I bring my own hand up to cover his where it rests on my shoulder, lace my fingers through his, and lift our joined hands a few inches so the old river-ice stone catches the lamplight for the whole table to admire.
I feel the breath catch in him, the small surprised hitch, since this part’s mine and he didn’t see it coming.
I turn and give him the besotted bride with everything I’ve got, the woman who got the impossible man.
And the look he gives me back isn’t all performance, and we both know it.
A quick cold thing crosses Bettina’s lovely face, there and gone.
Artie roars with delight and declares that he likes me, likes me very much, that Loukas has done well for himself at last. Under the table, hidden by the heavy linen, Loukas’s free hand finds my knee and presses once, hard, and I can’t tell anymore whether it’s gratitude or warning or the same thing happening to him that’s happening to me.
Two tables down, I catch the couple Loukas pointed out in the corridor, the only people aboard he seemed glad to see.
A big golden rancher with cold blue eyes gone soft at the corners, and a small dark-haired wife tucked under his arm, both of them watching us with the quiet amusement of people who’ve sat right where I’m sitting, the wife murmuring something up at the man that cracks the ice in his face clean down the middle into a smile.
I haven’t time for them yet. I’ve a wall to be, and a fire to put out, and the fire appears to be me.
“Tell me, Bettina.” I go on sweetly, before she can take back the field. “How did you and Artie meet? I do love a story where someone gets exactly what they were after.”
The table laughs, taking it for a bride’s fond curiosity.
Only Bettina hears the blade folded inside it. And only I see her decide, in the half-second before she laughs along with the rest, that whatever it takes and however long the journey runs, she’s going to make me sorry I ever set foot on this train.