He Wants Her Back: The Billionaire's Leading Lady novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Garage

Damon looked at me for one long second.

Then he stood up off his knee, took my hand, and walked me out of the ballroom.

Three hundred people watched us go.

Behind us, somebody started clapping, and nobody knew what for.

He drove himself.

He'd never once driven me anywhere himself in three years.

He took the coast highway with the windows down and my hand on his thigh under his, and neither of us said a word the whole way.

At the bottom of his drive he turned off the road.

Not up toward the front steps.

Down, toward the garage.

The big door rolled up in front of us.

The light came on, the flat white light I'd come in under a thousand times.

Eleven cars in a long row. The concrete floor. The door at the back with the four stairs up to the house.

He pulled in and turned off the engine.

The door stayed open behind us, onto the night and the sound of the ocean.

I sat very still.

I hadn't been in here since the Sunday before the hospital.

I'd forgotten how it smelled. Oil and cold cement and his cologne in the dark.

"This is where you used to come in," Damon said.

"I know where I used to come in."

He got out and came around the car and opened my door.

He held out his hand.

I took it and stood up in my red dress on the concrete.

He didn't let go.

He led me to the back corner, by the door to the stairs, where the light was worst.

"Right here," he said. "Every night. You stood right here and took off your sunglasses and waited for me to open that door."

"Yes."

"And I'd come down and kiss you here, where nobody could see."

"Yes."

He held out his other hand, palm up.

"Give it to me."

I opened my fingers.

The bracelet lay on my palm, the thin gold chain and the one small sapphire.

He picked it up.

"I gave you this in this garage," he said. "On our first anniversary. In the car, with the door shut, because I didn't want my driver to see me give a woman jewelry."

"I remember."

"I've thought about that every day for a month."

He took my wrist and put the bracelet around it.

His hands weren't steady.

He got the clasp on the second try.

Then he went down on one knee on the concrete floor of his own garage, in his tuxedo, with the door open to the drive.

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