My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Daylight

I was in the ice house at five, with the sun not up and the door still chained.

I had the key, because Agata had put it in my hand at supper without a word and closed my fingers over it.

The cold store on the Strand runs a hundred and forty feet front to back, red brick outside and white tile within.

Down the middle stand the cutting tables, long slabs of stainless steel with a gutter along each edge.

I had carved four hundred swans on those tables.

I stood at the far one in a sleeveless cotton dress with my arms pebbled and my breath showing, and I waited.

I heard the chain rattle.

Then the door shut, and his boots came down the aisle between the stacked blocks, and I did not turn around.

"You said daylight," said Marcello.

"That's the light." I nodded at the high window, where the first gray had come up over the water. "It counts."

"It's not much."

"You'll see me well enough."

He stopped a yard behind me.

I could feel his body heat on my back, a warm square in all that cold.

I turned.

He had come in his shirt and slacks with no jacket, and no tie.

His eyes were black in the half dark, and they went down me once, slowly, and came back up.

"I'm going to start," I said. "Watch me."

"I'm not looking anywhere else," he said.

"Good. Keep your hands where they are."

"Then yes," he said.

I put both hands flat on his chest.

His heart was going hard under my palms, and I felt it jump.

I took hold of his shirt and undid the first button, then the second.

His skin was hot and dusted with dark hair, and a long pale scar ran along his ribs.

I put my mouth on it.

He made a rough sound and his hand came into my hair.

"Not yet," I said, and I took his wrist off my head and put it back at his side.

He let me.

I unbuttoned the rest slowly, with his eyes on my face.

When I pushed the shirt off his shoulders, he stood there bare to the waist with the white tile behind him, broad and scarred and rising and falling with each breath.

"God," I said, before I could help it.

"You're staring."

"I'm allowed. It's my day."

I stroked down his chest and his stomach, and I dragged my nails lightly across the muscle above his belt.

He shuddered.

I felt it under my hands, a long ripple from his hips to his throat.

"Nina," he said.

It was the first time.

I had waited for it since the seawall, and it was low and rough and not at all controlled.

I looked up.

"Say it again," I said.

"Nina," he said.

"Again."

"Nina," he said, and his hands were fists at his sides, and the muscles stood out in his forearms.

"You can touch me now."

He picked me up.

He did it all at once, with his hands under my thighs, and set me on the cutting table with my legs around his hips.

The steel was freezing against the back of my knees, and I gasped, and then his mouth was on mine and I stopped noticing.

He kissed me hard and fast, and there was no patience left in it.

His tongue was in my mouth and his hand was in my hair, and the other was tugging the shoulder of my dress down off my arm.

I pulled the dress over my head myself.

I wasn't wearing anything under it.

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