The Bride He Replaced novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Rule Three

I told Bea I was not coming home that night.

She stood in her kitchen with a wooden spoon and looked at me over her glasses for a long moment.

"Marguerite paid for that test," she said. "She will see the answer before you do, whatever it says."

"I know."

"Then whatever you do tonight, do it because you want to." She pointed the spoon at me. "Eat something first."

I ate half a sandwich standing up, and then I took a cab across the river to the building where Duncan lived.

He opened the door in his shirtsleeves with his phone in his hand.

He put it face down on the hall table before I had said a word.

"I thought you'd want to think," he said.

"I thought for three hours."

"And?"

"Rule three," I said. "Nobody sleeps over."

"I remember it."

"I'd like to break it."

He didn't move.

I watched his throat work, and I watched the hand he had held against the door frame close on the wood.

"You're twenty-nine weeks pregnant," he said. "I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't."

"I don't know what I'm doing."

"I do," I said. "Come here."

He crossed the hall in two steps, and I got my hands in his shirt and took his mouth.

We did not make it to the bedroom for a while.

He had me against the hall wall, with my back on the plaster and his hands in my hair.

I pulled at his buttons with fingers that would not work.

"Slow down," he said, laughing against my neck.

"I've been slow for months."

"You've been slow for six weeks."

"It felt like months."

He walked me backward into his room.

It was plain, with a made bed and a lamp, and a window onto the river.

I sat on the edge of the mattress, and he knelt on the floor in front of me.

He put both his hands, very gently, on either side of my belly.

He kissed it once.

My throat tightened, and I did not want that, not then.

"Don't be sweet," I said.

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