Masukit's about to go down, lol. classic kitchen scene.
Luca FerrantiMy burner rang during the cocktail hour, while my father was making a toast about family—it was all that mattered to him.I took it into the service corridor, and a waiter took one look at my face and found somewhere else to be. Good for him.“It’s a woman,” the clerk said. He sounded like a man about to be sick.I waited.“I didn’t pay you four hundred thousand dollars to teach me patience. If I wanted to learn that, I’d have gone to prison.”I’d bought him the way you buy any federal court clerk: through his debts, and one photograph of his daughter’s school I never had to show him twice.“The witness at the closed hearing. She saw everything, and she told them everything.” His breath rattled down the line. “She’s close to your family, Mr. Ferranti. She’s at your sister’s wedding. Right now.”Through the round window in the service door, I could see the lawn. My father with his glass raised. And Mia Sinclair with her back to me, fixing my sister’s veil, her green silk d
Mia Sinclair Three brides, one maid of honor and forty minutes until the music started. “I can’t find my other shoe,” Olivia said from somewhere under the bed. “Bathtub.” I didn’t look up from my phone. “Sarah, if you cry one more time before the photos, you’re walking down that aisle with mascara on your chin. Athena, sit down.” Athena sat. Sarah fanned her eyes with both hands. Jordan had climbed in over her balcony at five this morning, and she hadn’t stopped smiling or crying since. Olivia came back from the bathroom in her slip with a shoe in each hand and a mark on the side of her neck the exact size and shape of Cole Archer’s mouth. I handed her the concealer without a word. “Eleven,” Olivia said, dabbing it on. “Damien called eleven lawyers, and you were the only one who said yes. Do you know what I’d be doing today if you’d said no?” “Smiling at his business partners.” “Smiling at his business partners,” she agreed, and kissed my cheek. Athena made me promise to be
Olivia Callahan It wasn’t Damien who told me. It was Sarah, crying in my doorway two hours before sunset, telling me about the wedding dress Luca had sent to her room. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” “Damien didn’t want you signing out of guilt.” She wiped her face. “And I’m not even really yours.” “Don’t you ever say that to me again. You’ve been mine since you were nine and hiding your peas in your napkin.” She broke then, and so did I. Something slid under my door. Cole’s phone, with a sticky note on the screen: Play it. Please. I played it, and heard Cole tell my husband the one thing he’d never said to me. Something I’d kept locked away since I was twenty came open all at once. I loved him. I opened my door. He was there, of course, right where he’d stood every night for eight years, his eyes red. “Come in,” I said. He stepped inside, and Sarah slipped out and shut the door behind her. “You fired me,” he said quietly. “I’m rehiring you.” “I don’t want to be
Cole Archer She fired me at 9:14 in the morning. By noon, I’d torn Damien’s suite apart three times. Because of one sentence. I watched you stand in front of him and say yes, sir. She hadn’t been in that room. Only Damien and I had. So that had to leave just one option. Someone had bugged Damien’s suite. I swept that suite the way I’d swept a thousand rooms before it. Lamps. Vents. The smoke detector. The back of the TV, the frames on the walls, the underside of every table and chair. I ran the detector over the sofa where Damien had laid down his gun and over the spot on the carpet where I’d stood and told him I loved her. Nothing. Not one bug. Damien hovered in the bedroom doorway, grey in the face, his phone buzzing nonstop in his hand. “She won’t open the door,” he said for the fifth time. “She won’t even answer me.” “She won’t answer anybody, sir.” I could imagine what was going through her mind. Being neglected by her husband who she strived to impress, and now
Olivia CallahanI woke up alone in my own bed, smelling like him, and for one whole hour I was the happiest woman alive.Fifty-three years old, and I’d finally been folded like a pretzel and pounded into a mattress by a man who adored me while he did it.I’d wished for exactly that, sitting alone in an empty wedding venue two days ago. I just never imagined anybody up there was listening.I closed my eyes and let myself have it all over again. I pressed my face into the pillow and laughed out loud like a teenager.Was this what it felt like? Was this what everyone else had been feeling all these years while I stood in the corner at parties, trying to get Damien’s attention? Last night, I was just a woman. A woman somebody wanted so badly his hands shook.I sang in the shower, badly. I put on the yellow dress Damien once said made me look like a lemon, and I wore it anyway.Breakfast on the terrace was a war zone with croissants.The whole family was there, trying to clean up after a we
Cole ArcherI took her face in both hands, the way I’d imagined a thousand times, and kissed her like a starving man, because that’s exactly what I was. I licked into her mouth going slow but deep, and she made a soft, broken sound against my tongue. I wanted to rip that robe off her. I wanted to bend her over the nearest surface.But she had been touched once in thirty-three years. By a drunk man in a hurry who never even looked at her face.So I made myself handle her like she was made of eggshell.I caught her left hand, brought it to my mouth, and kissed the pale stripe of skin where his ring used to be.“Eight years I watched this ring,” I said against her finger. “It was the only thing on you I ever hated.”Her eyes filled. “Cole…”“Let me look at you.”I tugged the knot of her robe loose. The silk slid down her shoulders and pooled at her feet, and there was nothing underneath.She moved her arm across her stomach, suddenly shy, like she’d just remembered she was fifty-three an







