Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
I don’t know her. I’m certain I’ve never seen her in my life. So there’s no good reason for the look on her face to land in my stomach like a swallowed stone, no reason at all for the little voice that picks exactly this moment to inform me, with great calm, that whatever I signed up for on that porch, the kiss was the easy part.
Chapter Four
THERE’S ONE BED.
I want that on the record, the brochure having promised “a private stateroom appointed for two,” which I’d read on the platform purely to avoid reading Loukas’s face, and which I’d chosen, in my optimism, to interpret as a generous concept rather than a literal inventory.
But here we are. The porter’s bowed himself out with the discretion of a man paid handsomely not to have opinions, and here it is, this bed, this single regrettably beautiful bed dressed in linen so white it looks like an accusation.
And there’s exactly one of it.
“There’s one bed,” I announce accusingly, in case he’s somehow missed the central feature of the room he’s paying for.
“I can count,” Loukas says drily, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it as though the matter’s already been settled in a meeting I wasn’t invited to.
The stateroom’s paneled in a honeyed wood polished until you could lose a thought in it, with brass fittings and a window the length of the whole wall, and through it the country’s already begun to come apart into motion, San Antonio thinning into low hills and live oak and the long gold run of ranchland sliding by faster than anything that big has a right to move.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to read a piece of ground by holding still on it, by standing in one spot until the land forgets I’m there and gives up what it’s doing, where the wind sets, which fencepost the kestrel favors, how the slant of things tells the hour. None of that works at speed.
The window hands me a hundred things I know how to read and tears each one away before I can finish it, hills and a hawk and a far stock tank gone again, and it leaves me with the specific unmoored feeling of a bird that’s only ever been carried and never once flown.
I make myself look away from the glass. Watching it too long does something to my chest I haven’t got a name for and didn’t pack for.
“I’ll take the floor,” I tell him.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then you take it.”
“Neither of us takes the floor.” He says it without heat, the way he says most things, a man stating a plain fact rather than an order, which is somehow worse than an order, the trouble with a fact being that you can’t argue it. “If a steward comes in the night with extra towels and finds my fiancée curled on the rug like a dog put out for the evening, the whole performance collapses. We share the bed. We don’t touch. You’ll find I’ve remarkable discipline when the situation calls for it.”
I’ve slept in worse places than a millionaire’s floor, and I open my mouth to tell him so, and then I make the mistake of picturing the bed and the not-touching and the long dark hours of both, and my mouth, which has betrayed me at every turn today, declines to say anything at all.
And then he does the one thing I’ve no defense against, so much harder to stand than the arrogance.
He crosses to the bed and turns it down himself, this man who has people to turn down beds, folds the white linen back with two slow hands, and sets the better of the two pillows on the side away from the door.
“You’ll take this side,” he says, like it’s nothing, like it isn’t the single most cared-for I’ve felt in a decade. “If anything comes through that door in the night, it comes through me first.”
He says it plainly. Not as gallantry, not performing it for an audience there’s no audience for, just a fact he’s arranging the room around, and something behind my ribs goes perfectly still, the way the birds go still when the big shadow passes over and they understand, in their small wild bodies, that for the moment they’re safe.
I’ve spent twenty years being the one who stands between the door and the soft helpless things. Nobody stands between the door and me. I do my own standing.
I don’t know what to do with a man who looks at a strange room and decides, without being asked, without being paid extra, that the danger should reach him before it reaches me.
“I can look after myself,” I tell him, and it comes out smaller than I want it to.
“I’m aware.” He straightens, and for a moment those black eyes rest on me with something that isn’t heat and isn’t mockery and is somehow more dangerous than either. “Humor me anyway.”