They Sold Me for Five Million, So I Collected It Myself novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Lie

Tamar's POV

He looked at the table when he said it.

That's the thing about a person's tells.

They don't change when the stakes do.

In the courthouse hallway, when Dane Haverly told me we shared a class and it was a small room, he looked at the ground.

Now he looked at the red ledger page, and his thumb rubbed the purple ring on his smallest finger, twice.

"Nothing," he said again.

"That's a lie." I said.

"Tamar..."

"Rule three. No lying. I wrote it down, and you said it was a hard one."

He lifted his head.

I had never seen him hold so still.

"It's not mine alone to tell," he said at last. "That's all I can say. I'm asking you to trust that I'm not doing this to hurt you."

"You're asking me to trust you after the word nothing."

"Yes." he said.

"No."

I stood up.

I hadn't meant to be loud. I'd been planning calm.

But the apartment was still half destroyed, and my notebooks were somewhere on Route 9.

I'd given my whole body to this man twelve hours before.

"You said yes before I finished the sentence," I said.

"What?"

"On the stage. I said, marry me today. You said yes before I got to the last word. People don't do that. People ask what's in it for them. They take a day." I said.

"I didn't need a day."

"You had it ready. You had that word ready." My voice cracked and I made it steady. "So tell me what I'm being used for."

His face changed.

For the first time since I'd met him, he got angry.

It wasn't a shout. It was worse. He went white around the mouth.

"You think I used you."

"I think you knew something."

"And you called me a rental," Dane said.

I stared.

"At the diner. After the courthouse. Cleo asked you what it was, and you said, a twelve-month rental with a return policy. I was at the register." His voice shook. "I paid for the pie and I thought, all right, that's what I am. I can be that. I can be a very good rental. And then last night..."

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