Profit Prophecy novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Penthouse

Veronica didn't speak in the car.

She drove her own black coupe through the dark with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the gearshift.

I sat with Preston's card in my fist, and I wanted to put it through a window.

"You went white in there," she said finally.

"I'm fine."

"You're not. You crushed that card into a ball."

I looked down.

It was true.

The gold edges had cut a line across my palm.

"She's marrying him," I said. "She told me she'd rather live in a van."

"People say a lot of things at twenty-three."

"That's what she said."

"Then she said something true."

Veronica pulled into a garage under a tower on the North Shore and parked in a slot with her name on it.

She turned off the engine, and the quiet pressed in.

"Come up," she said.

"I should go back to the motel."

"You should," she agreed, and looked at me with her gray eyes in the dim light. "Come up anyway."

The elevator was glass, and the city fell away beneath it.

She stood a foot from me and watched my reflection in the doors.

I could smell her perfume, something dark with cedar in it.

The doors opened on the thirty-first floor into a room made of windows.

The lights of the three rivers lay under us.

She dropped her keys in a bowl, stepped out of her heels and walked to the glass without turning on a lamp.

"You're angry," she said to the window.

"Yes."

"Good. Come here."

I crossed the floor.

She turned around and put both hands flat on my chest, and pushed me back against the glass.

It was cold through my shirt.

She was five foot nine in bare feet, almost my height.

Her hands went to my tie, and she pulled it loose in one long slide.

"Tell me to stop," she said.

"No."

"Good boy."

I should have bristled at that.

I didn't.

Her mouth was on mine before I could think, a hard, hungry kiss that tasted of champagne, and my hands found her waist and the bare skin of her back.

She had been waiting, I realized.

The whole night, the whole week.

I turned us both and she landed against the glass with a small, pleased sound.

"There he is," she murmured against my jaw.

She was thirty-one and I was twenty-six, and neither of us pretended the five years meant anything.

I kissed her throat, and she tipped her head back and let me.

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