The Professor's Captive Wife novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Light Under the Door

"Because you never asked me," I said.

My voice came out wrong.

High and thin.

"You heard nine seconds, and you never once asked me."

"I know."

"You married me, and a week later you moved downstairs, and I thought it was me." I was crying now, and I hated it. "I thought I'd done something on the honeymoon. I thought I was bad in bed. I bought books, Eliot. I bought books about it."

He flinched.

"I thought you were bored," I said. "I thought you'd married the waitress for the committee and found out the waitress couldn't talk about Austen."

"Sylvie."

"And all that time you thought I was laughing at you."

"Every day." He came around the desk. "Every time you laughed at anything, I thought it was me."

"Why didn't you ask?"

"Because I was afraid you'd say yes."

That stopped me.

He was standing in front of me now, not touching me, his hands open at his sides.

He looked older than thirty-eight.

He looked like he hadn't slept on that couch in two years so much as lain on it.

"I'd rather have had you for money than not have you," he said. "That's the truth. That's how far gone I was. I thought if I didn't ask, you'd stay."

"So you just stopped talking to me."

"I stopped trusting myself to." His voice cracked on it. "I'd open my mouth at dinner, and everything that came out would have been begging. So I said nothing."

"You had sex with me."

"I couldn't stop that." His eyes were wet. "God knows I tried."

I hit him in the chest with the flat of my hand.

Not hard.

He didn't move.

I did it again, and he caught my wrist, gently, and held my hand flat over his heart.

"I love you," he said.

He'd never said it.

Not at the clerk's office.

Not in the dark.

Not once.

"I have loved you since you told the dean of engineering his wine was corked," he said. "I will love you if you leave me. I'll love you if you divorce me and marry a pastry chef and have eleven children who hate books."

A laugh came out of me, soggy and furious.

"Pastry chefs don't marry pastry chefs. It's a known rule."

"Then a bread guy."

"Faye would kill me."

He smiled.

It was the first time I'd seen him smile at me in daylight in two years, except it wasn't daylight, it was ten o'clock at night in a room with a blanket folded on the couch.

I looked at that blanket.

Then I took his hand off my wrist and held it.

"You're not sleeping on that tonight," I said.

He went very still.

"Sylvie."

"Upstairs," I said. "Our bed. Now. Before I change my mind and kill you instead."

I pulled him by the hand out of the study and up the stairs, and he let me.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and I stood between his knees.

"I want to kiss you," I said.

"Do it."

So I did.

Not on the mouth.

On the hollow of his throat where his pulse beat hard and fast.

His hand came up and fisted in my hair.

Not to guide.

Just to hold on.

I unbuttoned the first button of his shirt.

Then the second.

The third.

I spread the shirt open and put my mouth on his chest.

He made a sound I had never heard from him.

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