Chapter Seven
428 Words
The night of the Morrison dinner was the night the arrangement cracked open.
It was a small dinner— six people, Julian’s associates, old money and new power crowded around a table in Knightsbridge. The host, a man named Carter Morrison, was the kind of person who believed that cruelty passed off as wit was a personality.
He turned it on Cara at the fish course.
“So you’re the Mendez girl,” Carter said. “The second one, I understand? Wasn’t Julian meant to marry the older sister?” He smiled around the table. “One does wonder how that conversation went.”
The table went careful. Julian’s jaw tightened.
Cara took a sip of wine.she set the glass down with perfect steadiness.
“One does wonder,” she agreed pleasantly.
“But then again,Carter, you’ve been married three times, so I imagine you have more experience than most with conversations that don’t go as planned.”
The table exhaled.
Carter’s smile went thin.
“Point taken,” said the woman beside Cara,who was Carter’s current wife, and who raised her glass in Cara’s direction.
Later,in the car, Julian said: “You didn’t have to do that.”
“He was rude.”
“People are often rude to me, I’ve learned to ignore it.”
“I haven’t.” She turned to him. “And I won’t sit at a table and be made to feel like a consolation prize.”
Something came into his eyes. Quick and heated. “You’re not” he started.
“I know I’m not,” she said. “That’s why I said something.”
He was quiet.
She looked at his profile— the hard line of his jaw, the way he held himself even in the back of the car like a man braced for weather.
“Does it bother you?” She asked. “What people say about— how we started?”
“What people say has never concerned me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He turned his head. They were very close in the back seat, closer than she’d realized. His eyes moved over her face.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me.” A pause
“What happened at that altar— I’ve stopped thinking of it as a complication.”
“What do you think of it as?”
He didn’t answer. He looked at her mouth for a half-second— barely, almost imperceptibly — and then looked away.
But she’d seen it.
Her heart had absolutely no dignity.
- Writer
