I Slept With a Stranger at the Wedding, and Monday He Was My Boss novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Stage
Katrina's POV
The dance hall at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon smelled of floor wax and old beer and the dust of eighty years of boots.
Dane let us in at the side door with a key he'd borrowed from the Fehrenbachs.
He pulled it shut behind us and slid the bolt.
The long room lay in half dark.
Sun came through the high windows in slanted bars across the maple floor.
At the far end the stage stood empty, with its curtain pulled back and an old upright piano against the wall.
"The recorder's in the back room," Dane said.
"The deputy set it up at noon, on a chair behind the curtain, and he's gone to wait in his car at the end of the block."
"So nobody's here."
"Nobody for an hour," he said.
"Brady said three."
"I haven't been in this room since the wedding," I said.
"I walked out that side door with a stranger."
I turned around and looked at him.
He stood in the middle of the floor in his good white shirt, with his hat in his hand and his face stripped bare.
He had been looking at the stage.
"Say what you want," I said.
"Here?"
"Here."
"I'm going to meet the man who sold you out in this room in an hour," he said.
"I'd like to not be thinking about him until then."
"That's not what I asked."
He set his hat on a table and crossed the floor with the boards ringing under his boots.
He stopped one step away.
"I want to do right here what I didn't do the first time," he said.
"I want to take you up on that stage and strip you in front of two hundred empty chairs."
"And?" I said.
"And I want to hear you say my name in a room where I told you not to say yours," he said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Slept With a Stranger at the Wedding, and Monday He Was My Boss are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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