Chapter 7: Upstairs

Vivian left, and the chicken and rice stayed where it fell.

The housekeeper looked at the floor.

Then she looked at me, and at Winslow, and at the sixteen inches between us.

"I'll clean that in the morning," she said. "I'm going to my room now. I'm going to wear the earplugs from my sister's wedding."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're very welcome, miss. Good night, Mr. Strathmore."

"Good night."

She climbed the back stairs, and I heard her door close firmly on the second floor.

Winslow put his phone in his pocket.

"You recorded her," I said.

"I wanted her on tape saying that sentence in your hall."

We stood in the black-and-white silence.

My bandaged palm throbbed in time with my pulse.

I took his hand with my good one and went up the front stairs, and he followed without a word.

My room was at the end of the hall on the lake side.

I had slept in it as a child and again as a grown woman waiting out the winter after my father died.

I had never brought anyone into it.

The window was open an inch, and the lake breathed in over the sill.

I shut the door behind us and turned the lock.

Winslow stood in the dark, so large and quiet that the whole room tipped toward him.

"Tell me to leave," he said. "I dare you."

"Take your shirt off."

His breath left him.

I crossed the floor and unbuttoned the shirt myself, one button at a time, my fingers shaking.

I watched his chest rise and fall under my knuckles.

"I've wanted something real for six years," I said. "I want you in my bed tonight, and I want you to stop being a gentleman."

"Is that an order?"

"It's a request."

"Good," Winslow said. "I don't take orders from you."

He picked me up.

He kissed me against the wall first, and it was not careful.

It was four years of waiting, his mouth hot and demanding on mine and his hand spread across the small of my back.

I heard a sound in the room, and it was me.

I tore the shirt off his shoulders.

He was hard and scarred, broad through the chest, with a pale seam of old shrapnel under his ribs.

I ran my thumb along it.

He shuddered.

"Don't look at me like that," he said roughly.

Keep reading free with an account. Start After Divorce, My Ex-Wife Became a Billionaire from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.