Chapter 9: The Folder

Holbrook Draper woke at four with her hair across his arm and no idea where he was.

Then he remembered, and he lay very still.

Bryony slept on her stomach with one hand open on the pillow.

She had flour in the creases of her knuckles still, and he looked at it until his chest hurt.

He had signed fourteen pages for her in an afternoon.

He had cleared a three hundred eighty thousand dollar loan with his thumb, and he had never once asked himself why it felt so easy.

The truth was that he had wanted to be at that table when she kissed him.

He did not know when he had started wanting it.

He slid out from under her hair and stood up in the dark.

She had written the terms herself, in her own square handwriting.

Separate rooms.

No sex.

A year, and she would walk away with the building.

He had broken term four in a single day, and she had laughed in his arms when she said so.

She was twenty-four, and her mother had sold her, and she had signed a contract with the first man who offered.

What if the last thing she wanted was to wake up next to him and find herself one more thing he'd bought?

He picked up his clothes.

He took his watch from the nightstand.

At the door, he looked back once, and the sight of her made him want to stay.

Then he let himself out and walked down the hall in his socks.

He showered in the guest bath so he wouldn't wake her, and dressed in the dark.

Keep reading free with an account. Start One Kiss, the Billionaire's Bride from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.