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Chapter Forty-Two
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2026-10-15 20:14:13After dinner, we moved to the living room. It was a comfortable space that felt entirely different without the house full of people that had been here the last time I visited. I settled into one end of the couch with my wine, and Antonio sat at the other&nb
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After Hours Service Chapter Forty-Five
I climbed back into his lap, my knees bracketing his hips on the couch, and he pulled me against his chest with both arms. His heart was still hammering—I could feel it against my ribs, fast and irregular, the rhythm of a man who'd been taken apart. His chin dropped to the top of my head, and we stayed like that for a long moment, breathing.The piano music had shifted to something slower, more minor. Rico's tail thumped once against the floor, a sleepy acknowledgment, before he settled deeper into his spot by the hearth.Antonio's hand moved. A slow trace from my jaw to my collarbone, his fingertips following the line of bone like he was memorizing the geography of me. The touch was unhurried, almost clinical in its attention, and it made my skin prickle in its wake."Stay tonight." He didn't say it like a command or a question. It landed somewhere in between, a statement of intent dressed up as an offer.I lifted my head from his shoulder to look at him. His amber eyes were soft, an
After Hours Service Chapter Forty-Four
The name sat between us like a bridge neither of us needed to cross again. Caterina. Fourteen years of carrying it like a stone in my pocket, and now it was just—out. Spoken. Heard. Received without fanfare or consequence. The absence of its weight left me dizzy, unmoored, like the first time I'd taken off a cast and discovered my arm could swing free.Antonio's thumb traced a slow circle against my hip where his hand rested, and I could feel the calluses on his palm—rough, deliberate, the hand of a man who'd held weapons and steering wheels and probably a few necks in his time. The piano music drifted from somewhere I couldn't place, filling the warm stone space with something that sounded like rainfall translated into chords.I shifted in his lap.Not because I was uncomfortable. Because I was restless. Because the relief of confession had curdled into something sharper, something that buzzed under my skin like a current looking for a ground wire. I'd spent fourteen years being care
After Hours Service Chapter Forty-Three
"Did you suspect?" I asked. "That I was hiding something?"He was quiet for a beat too long. "Yes."The word landed like a stone in water."My original background check showed gaps. Inconsistencies. Things that didn't add up." He met my eyes. "I recognized that there were things you didn't want discovered. And I chose not to investigate further."I stared at him. "You chose not to —""Your reaction to the background check wasn't ordinary privacy concern, Kate. It was fear. You were afraid of what I might find." His voice was even, factual. "I stopped because you deserved to decide whether to tell me."My hands had stopped shaking. They were perfectly still now, frozen in a different kind of stillness. The stillness of a woman realizing that the man beside her with the resources to uncover anything, to hire investigators, to dig into every record and every database and every sealed file, had simply chosen not to."You could have found out," I
After Hours Service Chapter Forty-Two
Afterdinner,wemovedtothelivingroom.ItwasacomfortablespacethatfeltentirelydifferentwithoutthehousefullofpeoplethathadbeenherethelasttimeIvisited.Isettledintooneendofthecouchwithmywine,andAntoniosatattheotherend,andRicoimmediatelywedgedhimselfbetweenus.TheGermanShepherdwaslargeenoughthathisinsertionbetweentwoadultsonacouchconstitutedaphysicalevent.Heturnedinacircle,steppedonAntonio'sthigh,steppedonmyknee,andfinallystretchedoutlengthwis
After Hours Service Chapter Forty-One
I took a very large sip of wine. Antonio refilled my glass without comment, and his free hand dropped beneath the table to scratch behind Rico's ears. The dog's tail thumped against the floor in a slow, contented rhythm. The candlelight caught the planes of Antonio's face, the strong line of his jaw, the ink visible above his collar, and I thought, with a clarity that startled me, that I had never seen him like this. Relaxed. Unperforming. Just a man in his own home, eating food he'd made, with a dog at his feet and a woman across from him.I liked this version. I liked it more than the expensive dinners and the charged glances and the careful courtship. I liked the flour on his clothes and the way he tore bread with his hands instead of using a knife. I liked the way he refilled my wine without asking, the way he listened when I talked about Lindsey's system for rating emergency patients on a scale of one to ten based on how much the owner was at fault for the animal's conditi
After Hours Service Chapter Forty
I should have been watching the pasta. I was not watching the pasta. I was watching his hands. The way his long fingers pressed into the dough, folding it, guiding it, the flour catching in the lines of his knuckles and the creases of his palms. The tendons in his forearms shifting beneath the ink — dark patterns I couldn't fully see from this angle, but which I knew from previous close inspection involved script and geometric shapes and at least one image that looked like a family crest.He had surgeon's hands. That was what I'd thought the first time I'd treated his gunshot wound, when I'd had to cut through his shirt and examine the entry wound in his left shoulder. Steady, precise, capable of both violence and gentleness depending on the instruction they received."You're staring," he said."I'm observing the pasta.""You're observing my hands.""The hands are part of the pasta process. They're instrumental. I'm being thorough."He set down th
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