We Never Said We Went Bankrupt! novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Study

We drove for ten minutes without speaking.

The city fell away, and the road ran along black water with a few lit windows on the far shore.

"Well?" I said finally. "What do you do to people who owe you?"

"I collect."

"That's all?"

"That's all anyone ever needs to know."

"She wanted me to ask you."

"I know she did."

"So I'm asking."

He kept his eyes on the road.

"I lend money to people who are about to fail," Lawrence said.

"Sometimes they pay it back, and sometimes they don't."

"When they don't, I take what they put up. It's not a secret. It's not even unusual."

"That sounds like something she'd call a crime."

"She calls it that when it's her."

My pulse skipped.

"Is it her?"

"Ainsley."

He said my name flat, a warning and an invitation both.

"Not tonight. I'll give you every piece of it when you can use it."

"If I give it to you now, you'll spend it on the first room that looks at you wrong."

"Then she'll have the rest of what she needs."

"You don't trust me."

"I trust you completely to do the most satisfying thing in the room."

"That's not trust."

"It's close."

I looked at his hands on the wheel.

Long fingers, a pale knuckle scar, a plain steel watch.

They had rested on my back for two hours, and I could still feel exactly where.

He was thirty-four years old.

I was twenty-seven.

We were both old enough to know exactly what I was about to do.

"Stop the car," I said.

He did.

He pulled onto the gravel shoulder under a line of bare maples and cut the engine.

In the dark I could hear both of us breathing.

"Ainsley."

I didn't let him finish.

I crossed the seat and kissed him.

For one second he was perfectly still, with his mouth hard under mine.

Then his hand came up and closed in my hair, and he took over.

He kissed me like a man who had been waiting a week and had hated every day of it.

His mouth was hot and demanding, his tongue stroking mine, and my whole body arched.

I made a sound I'd never heard myself make.

"Say it," he said against my lips.

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