He Was Reborn to Claim Me, But I'm Already Married novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Rose

Ethan hands the rose back on the street. Upstairs he wraps Audra's bruised wrist and the room gets warm. At dawn a lawyer's letter calls the Sturgis house note in thirty days.

I got to the stairs and found Ethan already at the bottom, fully dressed, with the front door open.

He hadn't slept either.

"Stay inside," he said.

"It's my rose."

"It's your sister's rose, and it's Leighton Prescott's car." He glanced at my wrist. "Stay inside for ten seconds, Audra. Then come out and do whatever you want."

He went down the steps.

I counted to ten out loud and followed.

Beacon Hill was dark and quiet, except for the gas lamps and a few upstairs windows that were already turning yellow.

Ethan picked the rose up off the step.

He walked it to the black car at the curb and knocked on the glass with one knuckle.

The window went down, and then the door opened, and Leighton got out.

He looked like he hadn't slept in two lives.

"Sturgis."

"You left something on my step," Ethan said, and held out the flower.

"It's not for you."

"Then it's littering."

A curtain moved in the house across the street.

Leighton didn't take the rose.

He looked past Ethan at me, standing on the bottom step in a bathrobe, and his voice dropped.

"I know what you did, Audra."

"You'll have to be more specific," I said.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about."

I came down onto the pavement.

I was close enough to smell the same cologne he had worn for twelve years of marriage, and my stomach turned over.

"You grabbed my wrist in front of sixty people," I said. "That's what I know you did."

"I'll apologize for the wrist when you apologize for the rest."

"For what?" I said. "I haven't done a thing yet."

That landed.

I saw it land.

His mouth tightened.

"Where is she tonight?" he said.

"Safe," Ethan said. "From you."

"Then you'd better keep her that way."

"Leighton." I stepped between them, which I did not need to do, and which both of them noticed. "Jocelyn is not an object you left in a drawer. Go home."

He stared at me.

In the first life I had never once talked to him like that.

I had begged, and cried, and cooked, and waited.

Ethan put the rose into Leighton's hand and curled his fingers around the stem himself.

"Mrs. Sturgis doesn't take flowers from strangers," he said. "And you're parked in front of my grandmother's house at one in the morning. Go."

Leighton looked at the rose.

He looked at me.

Then he got into his car, and the engine started, and he drove off with the white flower on the passenger seat.

Up and down the street, three more windows went dark.

Ethan locked the front door behind us and stood with his back against it.

"Kitchen," he said. "Sit."

I sat.

He took a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer, wrapped it in a dish towel and knelt in front of my chair.

He took my wrist.

"Hold still."

The cold went in, and I hissed.

"Sorry."

"Don't be."

He pressed the peas against the bruise and held them there with both hands.

His thumb rested over my pulse.

He had a nice thumb.

I had noticed it in October, when he signed the papers, and I had not stopped noticing.

"Who is he to you?" Ethan asked, looking at the bruise and not at me. "He said your name like he'd said it a thousand times."

"He's a man I knew a long time ago."

"You're twenty-four."

"It was a long time ago," I said.

He didn't push.

That was the thing about him.

Ethan listened to what I said and let the rest sit between us until I decided to lift it.

"The rose," he said. "Does it mean something?"

"It means I was the wrong sister."

"You're not the wrong anything."

I looked at the top of his bent head, at the dark hair that needed cutting, and at his big careful hands on my arm.

My heart did something it had no business doing at one in the morning in a kitchen.

I had married him for a signature.

Eight months of separate bedrooms and polite good mornings, and I knew exactly how he took his coffee and which stair creaked when he came home late.

I did not know what his mouth tasted like, and I was thinking about it.

"Audra," he said, very quietly.

He had looked up.

His eyes were dark and a little unfocused.

I leaned an inch toward him.

He leaned an inch toward me.

Upstairs a floorboard creaked, and Jocelyn's voice floated down the stairwell.

"I'm only getting water. Please continue whatever you're doing."

Ethan closed his eyes and laughed under his breath.

He stood, handed me the peas and went to the sink.

I pressed the cold towel to my cheek and told myself the contract said nothing about this.

Clause six said a good deal about this: no romantic involvement, signed by both of us.

It was at six that morning, with the grandmother still asleep, that the doorbell rang.

A courier in a gray uniform handed Ethan a thick cream envelope with a lawyer's name embossed in the corner.

Ethan opened it standing in the hall.

I watched him read the first page twice.

"What is it?"

"A letter from the Prescott Foundation's attorney," he said. "Cornelia Prescott is calling my father's note on this house."

He looked up.

"We have thirty days."

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