Chapter 5

AURORA

Kieran's mouth kept moving.

Slow, open, patient, right along the side of my neck where he already knew it would ruin me. His tongue traced the line of my pulse. His teeth grazed. His hand slid up my ribs and settled, broad and warm, over my breast.

My spine arched off the mattress without my permission.

The sound that came out of me the second time was softer. Lower. The sound of a woman who had just been pushed over an edge and was already looking down for the next one.

On the other end of the line, I heard my husband's breathing change.

"Aurora." Rhett's voice was rising now, that controlled edge he used when he was moments from losing it in a boardroom. "I know what I just heard. Who is in that room with you?"

Kieran lifted his head just enough to look at me. His eyes were steady. He was giving me the choice. Say the lie. Hang up. Burn it down.

I held his gaze.

"I'm busy, Rhett." My voice came out level. Breathy, but level. "Can I call you back?"

A beat of pure silence.

Then: "You can call me back?"

"That's what I said."

"Aurora, I swear to God, if there is another man in that room, you will regret—"

Kieran's mouth closed over my nipple.

I gasped. Loud. There was no hiding it. There was no softening it. The gasp went straight down the line and into my husband's ear and the sound he made in response was somewhere between a snarl and a wounded animal.

"Who is he?" Rhett was shouting now. "Who the hell is he? Aurora, you listen to me, you tell me where you are right now—"

"I'll call you back tonight," I said.

I ended the call.

I set the phone face down on the nightstand and I turned my face into the pillow and I let out a slow, shaky breath that I had been holding since yesterday afternoon in the hedge.

Kieran lifted his head. He studied me for a long second.

"How do you feel?" he asked quietly.

I thought about it.

I thought about the sound Rhett had just made. The pure, blind, possessive rage of a man who had been cheating on his wife for eight months and could not stand the idea that she might cheat back for eight seconds.

Something inside my chest uncoiled. Just a little. Just enough.

"Alive," I said.

He smiled. Small. Real.

Then he kissed me again.

---

He drove me home in silence an hour later.

We hadn't talked about rules. We hadn't talked about how often, or where, or what we were going to tell people, or whether we had an endgame beyond the obvious one. There would be time for all of that.

For now I sat in the passenger seat of his black car with my hair still damp and my mouth still swollen and the ghost of his hands still printed into my hips, and I watched the countryside slide past.

Kieran pulled up two blocks from my house. We had agreed on that part without needing to agree on it. He killed the engine.

"He'll come at you," he said, looking straight ahead.

"I know."

"He'll turn it around. He'll make it your fault. He'll try to frighten you. He may try worse."

"I know."

He turned his head and looked at me.

"If anything happens, Aurora. Anything at all. You call me. I don't care what time."

I nodded.

I got out of the car. He didn't drive off until I had turned the corner and he could no longer see me, which I only knew because I checked.

I walked the last two blocks slowly, my mind trying to catch up with my body, my body refusing to be anything other than what it had become in the last twelve hours.

My street was quiet. The maple trees were dropping their last red leaves. A neighbor waved from across the way and I waved back and my face did the smile for me without asking.

I turned up my own walkway.

The front door was open.

Not wide. Just a thin sliver, the way a door sits when someone has pushed through it in a hurry and not bothered to pull it closed behind them.

My feet stopped.

Rhett wasn't supposed to be home. He was two hours away at a boutique inn with my little sister. He had told me so himself, with a kiss on my forehead at six in the morning while I pretended to still be asleep.

Unless he had left.

Unless he had thrown my sister's clothes at her and gotten in his car the moment I hung up on him and driven ninety miles an hour down a wet highway to beat me home.

The curtain in the front window twitched.

A shape moved behind it. Tall. Broad. Rhett.

He was waiting for me in my own house.

My phone was in my back pocket. Kieran's number was the last one in it.

I didn't reach for it.

Something had changed in me on that bed. Something I was still only beginning to understand. The woman who had walked out of my house yesterday morning would have run. Would have called for help. Would have made herself small and scared and apologetic by the time she pushed open her own front door.

I was not that woman anymore.

I squared my shoulders. I walked up my own front steps. I pushed my own front door the rest of the way open.

I stepped inside.

And froze.

Because Rhett wasn't alone.

Noelle was sitting on my couch. Mascara smudged halfway down her face. Hair still damp from somewhere she had been in a hurry to leave. My robe. She was wearing my robe. The pale blue one Rhett had bought me for our first anniversary.

Rhett stood in the middle of my living room with his hands on his hips. His jaw was tight. His eyes were red-rimmed and furious.

Between them, laid out on my coffee table like evidence at a trial, was a thick stack of photographs.

Of me.

Of Kieran.

Of the two of us walking into the Hartwell Estate yesterday evening. Of us leaving this morning. Of his car at the curb two blocks from our house, taken ten minutes ago.

Someone had been watching us.

Someone who had been faster than I had given them credit for.

Rhett lifted his eyes to mine. His voice came out very low and very quiet and very, very deadly.

"Sit down, Aurora. You and I are going to have a conversation."