เข้าสู่ระบบOlivia 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
Cole ArcherShe 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 she thought she h
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
Cole ArcherAfter the talk with Damien, I went straight to my room. If I went anywhere near hers, I wasn’t sure I’d keep my word.I sat on the edge of my bed with my shoes still on, Luca’s voice in one ear and Damien’s in the other, and neither of them would shut up.You’re the man holding the camera.You’d be perfect for her.I’d spent eleven years reading men for a living. I could tell when a man was lying to scare me and when he was telling the truth to hurt me. The problem with Luca Ferranti was that I couldn’t tell which one he was doing.Because he wasn’t wrong about the pictures. I’d been there. I’d held the phone while she posed for a man who wasn’t me.It wouldn’t be the first time I’d watched her dress up for him. On their thirtieth anniversary, she booked the table herself, wore a green dress that turned every head in the restaurant, and waited two hours for a man who never came. She ate dessert alone. Then she got in the car, stared out of the window the whole way home, and
Cole Archer I pulled her door shut behind me and made it exactly one step before my back hit the wall.Eight years of standing guard in hallways like this one, through storms and gunfire, and not once had my hands shaken the way they were shaking now.I’d kissed her forehead and walked out like some kind of saint. I could still hear her moans ringing in my head, I could still smell her on my hands, and my dick hadn’t gotten the memo that I’d just done the honorable thing.I’d meant every word. I needed her to be mine and mine alone. But the gentleman who said it had stayed behind in that room, and the man left in this hallway wanted to kick her door down and finish what she’d started.“Long night, bodyguard?”I knew that voice before I turned around.Luca Ferranti was leaning against the window at the end of the hall, right under the No Smoking sign, with a cigarette between his fingers. He flicked his golden lighter shut.How long had he been standing there? How much had he heard?“M







