“Name them.”
“No more secrets. No more surprises. If you have another wife stashed somewhere, or a second child, or a criminal empire, I need to know now.”
He laughed – a real laugh, short and startled. “No other wives. No criminal empire. One child. His name is Ash. He’s thirteen and he’d rather be anywhere than in the same room as me, which you two already have in common.”
I felt the corner of my mouth twitch. Against my will. Against my better judgment. Against every survival instinct telling me to stay behind the wall.
“One more condition,” I said.
“Anything.”
“I want us to go on a date. A real one. Not a contractual dinner, not a balcony ambush with string lights. A date where we talk to each other like actual human beings and I learn things about you that I didn’t have to hear from someone else.”
His smile widened. “Tonight?”
“Tonight,” I agreed. And then, because I was feeling reckless and brave and more terrified than I’d ever been: “But you’re changing that suit. You look like you’ve been through a war.”
“I have been through a war. You started it.”
“And I ended it with a peace offering.”
“A peace offering that came with conditions.”
“Welcome to diplomacy.”
He grinned, and it transformed his face – the severity vanishing, the angles softening, and there it was again, that glimpse of the person underneath, the one who laughed and loved and lost and was trying, desperately, to do better. My chest did something complicated that I chose not to examine too closely.
“I’ll go change,” he said. He turned to leave, and something in me – the new something, the seedling, the green shoot – reached out before my brain could stop it.
I caught his shoulder. He turned. I stepped forward.
And I pressed my lips to his cheek – the left one, the one I’d slapped, still faintly warm – in a kiss so soft it barely qualified as contact. More breath than touch. More apology than romance. But also, underneath, something else. A beginning.
His whole body went still. Perfectly, completely still, the way a person goes still when they’re afraid that moving will break whatever spell has settled over the moment.
I stepped back. Our eyes met.
“Go change,” I said. “We have a date.”
He nodded. Walked away. Got three steps down the hallway, stopped, looked back at me with an expression I’d never seen on another human face – wonder, and disbelief, and the kind of hope that hurts – and then continued walking, and I stood in my doorway and watched him go and thought:
What am I doing?
I closed the door. Turned around. Sable was sitting on the bed with both hands pressed over her mouth, tears streaming down her face in absolute silence, her eyes enormous above her fingers.
“Don’t,” I said.
She shook her head. Couldn’t speak. The tears kept falling.
“Don’t you dare.”
She removed her hands just long enough to whisper: “You kissed his cheek.”
“Sable-“
“The same cheek you slapped.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.