The Phoenix's Rebirth for Revenge novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: Not in the Contract

He didn't kiss me back right away.

For one awful second he was perfectly still, and I thought I'd misread everything.

Then his hand came up into my hair and he kissed me like he'd been waiting all day to be asked.

The fridge was cold against my back.

His mouth was hot.

I made a sound I'd never heard myself make, and he swallowed it.

"This isn't in the contract," I said against his lips.

"I wrote the contract," he said. "I can amend it."

"That's not how contracts work."

"It's how mine work."

He lifted me onto the kitchen island.

The marble was freezing through my leggings.

I hooked my ankles behind his knees and pulled him in, and his breath went out of him in a rush.

"Coralie," he said, rough.

Nobody had ever said my name like that.

Not in this life, and not in the last one either.

In the last one, by thirty-two I'd stopped expecting anyone to.

His hands slid under the hem of my T-shirt and stopped on my bare waist, thumbs on my ribs.

"I'm not stopping," he said.

"Don't."

He laughed, a short surprised sound against my neck.

I'd never heard him laugh.

I wanted to hear it again.

The hall light snapped on.

We froze.

Gran stood in the kitchen doorway in her nightgown and Ambrose's bathrobe, holding an empty glass.

She looked at us.

She looked at my legs around his hips and his hands under my shirt.

"I came down for milk," she said.

Ambrose did not take his hands off me.

I was impressed and mortified in roughly equal amounts.

"Second shelf," he said.

Gran crossed the kitchen, opened the fridge, poured herself half a glass and put the carton back.

She shut the fridge door with her hip.

"Your grandfather," she said to Ambrose, "would have had the decency to take her upstairs."

She walked out with her milk.

The hall light snapped off.

I buried my face in Ambrose's shoulder and shook.

"Is she going to be like that forever?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Good." He pulled back and looked at me in the dark, and he wasn't laughing now. "She's right, though."

"About your grandfather?"

"About upstairs."

My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.

In the life I'd already lived, I'd been a woman nobody touched.

I'd lain on a cellar floor knowing nobody was coming.

"Take me upstairs," I said.

He carried me up the stairs without turning on a light.

The dark made it worse, or better.

Every step jolted my thighs against his hips, and I could feel him through his sweatpants, hard against me.

"You carried me right past my grandmother's door," I said.

"I carried you up stairs. Your grandmother approved."

"She said your grandfather would have done it better."

"She said he'd have known to take you upstairs." He hit the top landing and turned. "I'm doing exactly that."

"Congratulations on meeting the minimum standard."

He kicked his bedroom door shut behind us and set me down beside his bed.

The room was dark except the streetlamp through the open window, grey sheets on a big low bed, everything neat, everything his.

I reached for the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it off over his head.

He stopped with his arms still raised, like he hadn't expected me to move that fast.

Good.

I put both hands on his chest and pushed.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me.

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