My Billionaire Boss Dared Me to Say No, So I Locked the Door novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: Rope
The lake house had one lit window, and the whole of Lake Geneva lay black and still beyond it.
"Phone," Ingmar said.
He stood in the front hall with his palm held out.
Bartek handed over the one in his coat pocket.
Ingmar looked at it, and looked at him, and Bartek looked back with what he hoped was a clear conscience.
"That is the work phone," Ingmar said. "I mean the other one."
"I don't have another one."
"Wrobel."
"Fine." Bartek dug a cheap black phone out of his boot and put it in Ingmar's hand. "It's my spare. Don't read my texts."
"I would not."
Ingmar dropped both phones into a lacquered bowl on the hall table, and the sound of them settling was strangely final.
"Nobody reaches you until Sunday afternoon," Ingmar said.
Bartek felt his stomach turn over, and it was not entirely fear.
The house was long, low and warm, built of cedar and glass.
It had a stone fireplace in the main room and a loft bed under the roof.
Ingmar had laid a table by the fire.
There was bread, a wedge of hard cheese, a pot of soup that had been simmering since noon, and two glasses.
"You cooked?" Bartek asked.
"I heated. The housekeeper cooked." Ingmar pulled out a chair for him. "Eat. You are too thin."
"Everyone says that."
"Everyone is correct."
They ate by the fire.
Ingmar told him about the house, which his father had built the summer before Ingmar was born.
He told him about the winter he was twelve, when the lake froze so hard that a car could cross.
He told it in short, dry sentences, and Bartek listened with the bowl warm in his hands.
He understood that this was not a story Ingmar had told anyone.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Billionaire Boss Dared Me to Say No, So I Locked the Door are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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