Too Late, the Alpha Lost Me After Two Weeks' Notice novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: Four Unsent Letters
The water in the clawfoot tub was hot enough to turn my skin pink.
Cass sat at the tap end with his back against the cold enamel and his knees up.
I sat between his legs, leaning against his chest, with the steam coiling around us and a candle going on the sink.
It was Thursday night, the twenty-second, and the Hall was dark, and no one had knocked on my door.
"I have something to show you," he said.
"Now?"
"Before I lose my nerve."
He reached over the side of the tub to the pile of his clothes, and came back with four envelopes.
They were creased and soft at the corners.
He laid them in a row along the edge of the tub.
Each had my name on the front in his block capitals.
"What are these?"
"Invitations," he said. "I wrote them three years ago. I never sent them."
I stopped breathing.
"Three years."
"It was three springs ago. I looked up one night and you were still at your desk."
His voice was quiet.
"It was ten o'clock, and you were eating crackers. And I thought, I want to take her to dinner."
"Cass."
"I wrote the first one that night. I wrote four. They were all wrong."
His chin rested against the top of my head.
"And then I thought, she works for me."
His arms tightened.
"If I ask her, she can't say no without it costing her something. So I put them in the drawer."
I picked up the first envelope with wet fingers.
The paper was thin.
I slid the card out and read the first line aloud, my voice not quite steady.
"Dear Ebba, I would like to take you to dinner at the Lariat on Friday."
My voice wobbled.
"I don't know how to ask you without it being an order."
I looked at the second line, and I couldn't read it.
I put the card down on the enamel.
Tears ran down my face and dropped into the bathwater.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I was so careful. I was so careful that I stole three years from both of us."
"You didn't steal them."
"I did."
"You were polite."
"I was a coward in good manners."
I turned in the water.
I turned all the way around and knelt facing him between his knees.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Too Late, the Alpha Lost Me After Two Weeks' Notice are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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