Never Yours Again novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Seventeen Years

Ellis's POV

"Take your box and go, Lucy," I said without turning around.

She hesitated behind me, and I felt it on my back.

"Ellis."

"Go. The elevator's on the left. Press the lobby, not the garage."

Rhett watched her cross the room.

He let her pass him in the doorway, and he didn't touch her, and she didn't look at him.

When the front door shut, he turned to me and the smile came back.

"Five years," he said. "And I never once thought you'd be the one."

"The one what?"

"To go behind my back. To put your hands on what's mine."

"I haven't put my hands on anyone."

"You hid with her in a closet."

"I was keeping her away from you."

He laughed.

It was the same laugh he'd had at fourteen, when a teacher told him he'd fail, and he'd said he wouldn't because the school would never expel the Palgrave name.

I had loved that laugh once.

I had followed it through boarding school and two companies and a hundred rooms.

"She isn't a person, Ellis," Rhett said. "She's a habit. A good one. She's loyal, she's cheap to keep and she thinks I'm somebody I'm not. Do you know how rare that is?"

"I know exactly how rare."

"Then step aside."

"No."

He looked at me properly then.

I think it was the first time in our lives.

"What is this?" he said. "You have a crush on my girlfriend?"

"She isn't your girlfriend. She's a woman you've been counting."

"Counting."

"Every time she forgave you, you counted. Every time she cooked, or waited, or called, you wrote it down in your head as something you'd earned." I kept my voice level. "She's not a debt you're collecting. She never was."

His smile thinned.

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