100% Compatibility novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Study

The study door was open.

It was the only door in the house he had told me not to touch.

A strip of lamplight lay across the hall carpet.

I walked in without knocking.

Ronan stood behind a huge dark desk with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a whiskey he had not drunk.

His father's desk, I thought.

The room was walled in books, and the air smelled of leather and smoke.

"You avoided me for two days," I said.

"Yes."

"Sutton says to ask you what my hundred cost you."

He set the glass down.

"Sutton talks too much," he said.

"Then you talk."

He came around the desk slowly, and stopped with his hands at his sides.

"I took the intake test at twenty-seven," he said.

"Nobody knew, and I used a blind ID, because I wanted to see if my own engine would hold."

"It gave me a hundred."

"Against whom?"

"A name, three weeks later."

"Yours."

My heart did something painful.

"Seven years ago," I said.

"I was twenty-one."

"You were twenty-one, and you were dating my brother within two months."

His voice stayed level, but it cost him.

"I stood across a room from you at a Farnsworth mixer and I watched you laugh at something he said."

"I was going to walk over and tell you."

"And?"

"And I didn't," said Ronan.

"That's what it cost."

It was not the whole answer.

I could hear the missing piece in the way he stopped, as if there was a door behind that sentence with a chair against it.

But I was tired of doors.

I crossed the carpet until I was close enough to feel the heat off him.

"Seven years is a long time to stand across a room," I said.

"It was," he said.

"I'm not across the room now."

He closed his eyes.

"Jacqueline."

"Say it as if you mean it," I said.

"Say it the way you said it in the coat check, and I'll stop talking."

He opened his eyes, and they were black with something that was not anger.

He moved, and I was against the desk with his mouth on mine, and this time there was nothing polite in it at all.

Keep reading free with an account. Start 100% Compatibility from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.