Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
It gave him nothing now.
And that was the thing he could not rationalize. That this floor, this window, this skyline, all of it his, all of it made of the same substance as his discipline, had lost the ability to quiet whatever was happening inside him, and the only thing that quieted it was a girl with a limp and a Bible study case who had walked into his lobby uninvited eight days ago and had, without any apparent effort or awareness, dismantled something he had spent thirty-one years constructing.
He gritted his teeth.
The door opened.
He didn't turn. He didn't need to.
Olivio? Her voice, slightly tentative, the way it was when she wasn't sure if she was interrupting. I made tea. I wasn't sure if you wanted any, but I made extra in case, so there's a cup on your desk if you—-
Thank you, tesoro.
A pause. Then the soft sound of her approaching, and she appeared at his shoulder, not quite touching, as though she was reading whether he wanted her close, which was its own devastation because she was always doing that, always reading him with a gentleness that should have been easy to dismiss and wasn't.
He didn't look at her. He looked at the city.
Something wrong?
No.
Another pause. Then, instead of withdrawing the way he'd half-expected, the way the women he'd known before would have retreated from a closed answer, she stayed. Just stood there, looking at the view beside him, her arms folded against her chest, and didn't press.
He looked at her.
She was watching the skyline with the expression she had when she was genuinely curious about something, slightly forward in her posture, as though the city were a book she was trying to read from a distance. She had her lower lip caught between her teeth. She had no idea he was watching her.
Something in him went very still.
He reached out and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.
Her head turned. Her eyes found his, and whatever was in his face made the color climb from her throat into her face with the total transparency of a person who had never once in her life managed to hide what she was feeling, and the sight of it hit him with the blunt, inconvenient force of a thing he had no defense against.
He kissed her temple.
Turned back to the window.
The Marquez family, he said. There is a dinner arranged for next week. He kept his voice even. I would like you to come.
Her head turned toward him. Of course. Should I read a briefing file?
Yes. I'll have one prepared.
A beat.
Olivio. Her voice had shifted, softer but more certain. The voice she used when she had decided something and was choosing to say it despite the uncertainty. Are you sure nothing's wrong?
He was quiet for a moment.
I'm sure.
She didn't believe him. He could tell by the silence. But she didn't press it, and the not pressing was somehow worse than pressing would have been, because it meant she trusted him enough to leave a door open and wait.
He didn't deserve it.
He kept that thought at arm's length, where it couldn't do what it was trying to do.
The family dinner had been Selena's idea, naturally. She had produced the suggestion over the phone in her way, not as a request, not as a plan, but as a fact that had apparently already been organized, the implication being that Olivio was welcome to have an opinion about it after the invitations had gone out.
He had not had an opinion about it after the invitations had gone out.
The evening had gone better than he'd had any right to expect, and that was the problem. Chelsea had walked into a room full of Cannizzaros and Kontideses and had done what she apparently did everywhere, made people feel that they were the most interesting thing in the room, through the genuine and unperformable mechanism of actually finding them interesting. She'd asked Miguel about the rose garden in Sicily and had listened to the answer with the focus of someone who understood that a man talking about his dead wife's roses was not really talking about roses. She'd made Sienah laugh twice in the first hour, which was notable because Sienah's laugh was not cheaply earned. Shayla Kontides had taken one look at Chelsea during the pre-dinner drinks and then looked at Olivio with an expression that communicated, with the efficiency of a woman who had survived her own complicated marriage, that she knew exactly what was happening and was not going to say so.
He'd spent the evening with his hand at Chelsea's waist and his jaw set, because the alternative, letting his hand find her the way it kept trying to find her, settling against her with the possessiveness his body had apparently decided was simply how it operated now, would have been visible to every person in the room.