An Understated Dominance novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Ninety-One Days

"Get in," I said.

I wasn't going to have this conversation in a parking garage, with a camera blinking over the stairwell.

He walked around and folded himself into the passenger seat.

I started the engine so the heater would run, and I left the car in park.

The garage ticked and hummed around us.

"He's right about one thing," Colter said. "I did live small."

"He's right about two things."

"What's the second?"

"I never asked."

I said it to the windshield.

It was the closest I could come to an apology, and he knew it.

He took his glasses off and pressed his thumb and finger against the bridge of his nose.

"My mother got sick when I was seventeen," he said.

"Ovarian cancer. It took two years."

"My father had a closing in Portland the week she went into hospice."

"He said he'd be back by Friday, and he was back on Tuesday, after the funeral."

My throat tightened.

"He sent flowers to his own wife's bedside from the airport."

"Colter."

"I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me. I'm telling you why I left."

"He doesn't hurt people with his hands. He does it with a calendar."

"Everything in his life is a line item, and I was the largest one."

"He'd already tried twice to stop Fieldwell."

I turned my head.

"What?"

"The supplier in Vietnam that dropped you in year six. The freight contract that vanished in year seven."

"That was him?"

"That was him. He was testing how hard I would fight for you."

"I fixed both. That's most of the ledger."

"You fixed them with money."

"With money and a few phone calls."

"And you never told me my own company was under attack."

"If I had, you'd have asked who," he said, "and I'd have had to say."

I gripped the wheel with both hands.

Every instinct I had said to be furious.

I was furious.

But I was also sitting eighteen inches from a man who had stood between me and a freight tycoon.

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