Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
He laid her down in the middle of the enormous bed and took her apart with a patience that bordered on cruelty, kisses pressed down her body, slow, deliberate, one debt at a time, every gasp of his name met with more, until she was begging in broken half-words, and only then, only then, did he finally move over her and into her, and the two of them found the rhythm that eight years had somehow failed to erase.
"Look at me," he said, when her eyes fluttered shut, and she did, and what she saw there undid her faster than anything his body was doing. "There you are. Ma belle. There you are."
She broke first, with his name and her nails and a sob that had joy all through it, and he followed her down with his face buried in her hair, shaking again, this man who wasn't scared of anything, and afterward they lay tangled in the dark listening to each other's heartbeats negotiate their way back to normal.
"Valerio?"
"Mm."
"I kept the tags on the other dresses." A pause. "In case."
He laughed. She felt it before she heard it, a low earthquake under her cheek, the rarest sound she knew, and she lifted her head to watch it happen to his face.
"Tomorrow," he said, recovering, pressing a kiss to her hair, "we're going back for the rest of the street."
"Valerio!"
Chapter Ten
"ITEM THREE," VALERIO said, over breakfast. "The dates in March. Clarify."
"Sick days," Louis said, not looking up from his cereal. "Mama had the flu. He docked her twice and made her come in on the Thursday to clean the Chainsaw building because nobody else would do the fourth floor."
"She had a fever of a hundred and two."
"A hundred and two point six."
"Excuse me," said Aislinn, from the stove, in her brand-new robe that she still wasn't used to being warm in, "I'm right here, and also, what's happening at my breakfast table?"
What was happening, it turned out, was that her seven-year-old and the man she loved had spent the weekend, between a shopping trip and a chess rematch, comparing notes, and this morning, the first school morning of their new life, had been designated for what Valerio called an errand and Louis called, with relish, item three.
"You're not," Aislinn said, pointing her spatula at each of them in turn, "going to visit Mr. Dominguez."
"No," Valerio agreed. "We're going to visit my new company."
The spatula lowered slowly. "Your what?"
"The sale closed at seven this morning." He sipped his coffee like a man remarking on weather. "Cleaner Than Evah Commercial Cleaning. Forty-one employees, three contracts I intend to renegotiate upward, and one operations manager whose file I've now read twice."
"Valerio."
"The Chainsaw building, Aislinn. A hundred and two point six."
She looked at him, and then at her son, two identical faces wearing two identical expressions of patient, terrifying resolve, and understood that this errand was happening with her or without her, and that with her was safer for everyone, most especially Mr. Dominguez.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm coming. If you're going to loom at people on my behalf, someone has to make sure everybody survives the looming."
"That," said Louis, shouldering his backpack for school, "is why you're on the other list."
She was afraid to ask. She asked anyway. "What other list?"
"People Who Made Mama Smile," he said, matter-of-fact, kissing her cheek on the way to the elevator. "It's longer now."
She had to hold on to the counter for a second after that one.
CLEANER THAN EVAH COMMERCIAL Cleaning operated out of a gray box near the freight yards, and Aislinn had spent three years of five a.m. shifts learning every corner of it. Walking back in through the front door, in a coat worth more than the annual bonus would have been, if there had ever been an annual bonus, was the strangest thing she'd done all month, and this month included a mezzanine.
Mr. Dominguez met them at his office door with his hand already out and his smile already wrong.
He was a wide, doughy man who wore his keys on his belt like sidearms, and for three years his management philosophy had consisted of two principles, applied daily. The first was that gratitude was a wage. The second was that Aislinn Tyndale, who never complained, could therefore be given everything no one else would take.
"Mr. Le Sabre! An honor, sir, an absolute honor. When corporate called this morning I said to my wife, I said, this is the best thing that could ever happen to this company—"
"Sit down, Mr. Dominguez."
Dominguez sat. His eyes found Aislinn, then, standing beside the new owner in her new coat, and she watched him do the math, and she watched the math ruin him from the inside out in real time.
"Aislinn! Look at you. We always said, didn't we, that you were destined for—"