He Dumped Me at Our Rehearsal Dinner, So a Man Twice My Age Took Me Home novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms Till Sunday

Over room-service coffee she sets the terms of the week, in the shower he washes her hair and takes her from behind against the tile, and she goes home in his coat to find her things on the steps and Lauren waiting with a check.

"Rules," Brendan said. "Let's hear them."

It was seven in the morning, and the sun was coming up behind the cranes on the far bank.

A man from room service had wheeled in a cart with two pots of coffee, eggs and a plate of biscuits.

He had gone away without once looking at the bed.

I sat cross-legged in the sheet with a biscuit in my hand, and I realized it was my wedding day.

It was Saturday the twenty-fifth, and at four o'clock I was supposed to be walking down an aisle.

I started to laugh, and I couldn't stop.

He waited, drinking his coffee, until I wiped my eyes.

"One," I said. "Until Sunday night. Then you go home and I go home, and nobody follows anybody."

"Agreed," he said.

"Two. No last names. I don't want mine in your mouth, because anybody who hears it knows the Boykins. I want one week where I'm only Belle."

"Then I'm only Brendan," he said.

"Three. No pasts. I won't tell you about him, and you don't tell me about whoever she was."

"I don't talk about mine anyway," he said.

"Four. Nothing bought. No jewelry, no dresses, no flowers. I'm not for sale, not even for a week."

He looked at me over the rim of his cup.

"That's a short list," he said.

"I'm a short-list person," I said. "Do you have any?"

"One."

"Go on."

"In bed, what I say goes," he said. "Out of bed, you decide everything."

I felt that line low in my stomach.

"And out of bed I decide who decides in bed," I said.

"That's the same rule."

"It is not, and you know it."

His mouth moved, and I'd have bet money he was trying not to smile.

"Done," he said.

"Done," I said. "I'm on the pill, and I had a checkup in September for the honeymoon."

"I had one in August. I'm clean."

I put the biscuit down, because all at once I wanted both hands free.

"Then come here," I said.

"No."

I stared at him.

"Shower first," he said, and he got out of bed, naked and unhurried, with the light from the window on his back and the long white scar under his ribs. "You still have rain in your hair."

The shower was bigger than my aunt's kitchen.

He turned it on and held his hand under it until it was right.

Then he put me under the spray and stood behind me with a bar of hotel soap.

He washed my hair.

I hadn't expected that.

His big hands worked the shampoo through it slowly, with his fingertips firm against my scalp.

I stood with my eyes closed and my palms against the wet tile and let him.

Nobody had washed my hair since I was six years old, and my mother had still been in the house.

"You've gone quiet," he said.

"It's nice."

"Good."

He rinsed it out, one hand shielding my forehead.

Then he soaped my shoulders and my back and my waist, and when his hands slid around to my breasts I leaned back into him.

He was hard against the small of my back.

"Brendan."

"Hands on the wall," he said.

I put them flat on the tile at shoulder height.

He covered my right hand with his left, his fingers laced through mine.

With the other hand he drew my hips back and bent me forward, just enough.

I felt him at my entrance, thick and slick from the water.

"You'll tell me if you want more," he said against my ear.

"More," I said.

"I haven't done anything yet."

"I don't care. Do it."

He pushed into me in one long slow slide, and my forehead dropped against the wall.

He filled me completely.

The water ran down both of us, and I could hear it hit the glass, and my own breath, and his, rough and close.

"God, you feel good," he said.

"Move."

"Not yet. Let me feel you."

He held still, buried in me, with his palm covering my hand, and I clenched around him on purpose.

He swore and his fingers tightened on mine.

"Don't," he said. "Or I'll lose it."

"Good," I said.

"Belle," he said.

"I want you to lose it."

"Not before you do."

He began to move.

It was slow at first, deep and steady, his hips pressing into me and drawing back until I was pushing to meet him.

He slid his right hand down my stomach to the place where we were joined and found my clit with two fingers.

The first slow circle made my knees go.

"I've got you," he said. "Hold still. Let me."

"Harder," I said.

"You're doing so well."

"Brendan, harder."

He gave me what I asked for.

His thrusts came faster, with a wet slap I could hear over the shower.

His fingers kept their steady pressure on my clit, and the heat gathered in my belly until it was almost pain.

"That's it," he said. "Come for me. Let go."

I came with my mouth against my own arm, a long shuddering wave that locked my thighs and made me cry out against the tile.

He held me up with one arm around my waist and kept moving through it.

"Good girl," he said, rough, close to my ear. "That's my good girl."

Then his rhythm broke, and he groaned and buried his face against my neck.

He came inside me, hard, with his hand tight over mine on the wall.

We stayed there under the water a long time.

When he turned me round and kissed me, it was slow and deep and almost gentle.

"Eight o'clock," he said. "I have a car coming for a meeting."

"On a Saturday?"

"The sea doesn't know it's a Saturday."

He had the hotel press my blue dress while we dressed.

It came back on a hanger in a paper sleeve, dry and warm, and I put it on in front of him.

"That's not a gift," he said. "That's the hotel's iron."

"I accept the iron."

At the door he took his suit coat off its hook and held it out to me.

"Your coat's still wet and the morning's cold. Give it back on Sunday."

I took it.

That was the first rule I bent, and I didn't care.

I walked out of the hotel on River Street at half past eight in the morning, in a stranger's coat, over the cobbles.

I took a cab across town to the townhouse on Taylor Street where I had lived with Whit for five months.

The cab driver didn't ask where I'd been.

When we turned the corner, I saw my life on the front steps.

Six black trash bags, my grandmother's quilt on top, and a box of books that had burst at one corner.

On the top step stood Lauren Boykin, in a cream coat and pearls, with a folded piece of paper in her hand.

She was waiting for me.

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