Chapter Thirteen
449 Words
The three- month mark arrived.
She’d half-forgotten it was coming, which told her something.
He hadn’t forgotten. He came to find her on a Sunday morning— she was in the library with a spreadsheet, because old habits— and he sat in the chair across from hers and said, simply: “Today is three months.”
She looked up.
“It is,” she agreed.
He looked at his hands. He was in a shirt and no jacket, rare on a Sunday, and his hair was slightly disordered, which she’d started to love about him.
“The contract is satisfied either way,” he said. “You’re free to go back to Madrid. The Mendez Group is protected.” He paused. “I want to be clear that there is no business reason for you to stay.”
She folded her hands over her spreadsheet.
“Is that what you want? For me to go?”
He looks at her. “No.”
“Then say that.”
A long pause. Julian Blackwood, who had built an empire on never saying more than the situation required, who had spent thirty- eight years treating vulnerability like a liability.
“Stay,”he said. “Not because of the contract. Not because of the company. Stay because this house is— he stopped. “Because I am different when you’re in it. Because you reorganize everything, including me, and I have spent years resisting that and I find that I no longer want.”
She crossed the room. She took his face in both of her hands the way he so often took hers, and she made him look at her.
“I’m not going to Madrid,” she said.
“Cara —
“I’m staying.” She pressed her forehead to his. “You’re going to have to get used to reorganizing.”
His hands came up to her wrists. His grip was tight and a little desperate in a way she’d only seen once before.
“I love you, he said, like a verdict. Like a man who had examined all the evidence and found no other conclusion. “I need you to know that. It isn’t the arrangement. It isn’t the contract. I love you.”
She kissed him. Long and sure and without any of the tentativeness of their early weeks.
“I know,” she said, against his mouth. I’ve known for a while.”
“Have you.”
“You’re not as unreadable as you think you are.”
He pulled back slightly to give her the look— the single raised eyebrow that meant I profoundly disagree.
She laughed.
He kissed her again.
- Writer
