Chapter 7: The Shoulder of the Parkway

The heater in the truck smelled like hot dust and pine needles.

I had my passport in my lap and my hair plastered to my neck.

I was shaking so hard that my teeth clicked.

Rafe turned the heat up without asking.

He pulled onto the shoulder under an overpass on the Merritt Parkway and cut the engine.

Rain drummed on the roof.

"You dropped a two-million-dollar check in the soup," he said.

"I did."

"I'd like to have seen it."

"It was cucumber."

His mouth moved, and then he laughed, a low, surprised sound.

I laughed too, and then I was crying, and I couldn't tell which one I was doing.

He didn't reach for me.

He just sat with his hands on the wheel and let me.

When I could breathe again, I wiped my face with the sleeve of my blouse.

"She said I was a woman of limited assets," I said.

"She's wrong."

"I know what she meant."

"I know you do."

"For six years everyone in this city has told me what I'm not."

My voice came out thin.

"Eight hundred thousand people read it. A flat front. A plain face. A wife nobody would pick."

"I didn't read it."

"Everyone read it."

"I didn't need to," he said. "I've remembered a woman with a needle in her hair for eight years."

I turned my head.

He was looking straight at me.

It wasn't a polite look.

It started at my wet hair and went down slowly, over the soaked blouse gone see-through at my ribs.

It stopped at my mouth.

My whole body noticed.

"You were a stranger on a stool," I said.

"You had a needle in your hair, and you told me to hold still."

"You held still."

"Because I wanted you to keep touching my arm."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Lost To His E-Cup Mistress from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.