Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me. She isn’t trying to make me think she believes me, which is the thing about Ronna I had forgotten and am remembering now with a certain grim clarity; she was never interested in winning the small exchanges, only in being proven right at the end of the long one. “I’ll tell you what else I remember about you, since we’re reminiscing. I remember exactly what it took to get dropped by Trey Flint. It wasn’t being difficult. I was difficult, and I’ll be the first to admit it.” A small laugh. “It wasn’t even being unfaithful. You’d have respected unfaithful. No. The one unforgivable thing, the thing that got a girl’s things couriered back to her by lunchtime, was trying to make you jealous. The faintest little effort to make you feel something you hadn’t approved in advance, and you were gone. You couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand the feeling, so you killed the source.”
“Is there a point arriving,” I ask, “or are you simply enjoying the sound of your own history?”
“The point,” she says, and her smile widens, because she has been waiting for me to ask and a woman like Ronna lives for the moment a cold man asks, “is that I have never once in all the years I’ve known you seen you let a woman make you feel anything at all and stay standing in the same room as her. And here you are. Standing. In the same room. Looking at the door.” She leans in, conspiratorial, thrilled. “She walks in, and you go to stone so you won’t turn around. That’s not a man who’s bored of his wife, Trey. A man who’s bored of his wife glances over, confirms she’s there, and goes back to his drink. You’re holding yourself still. There’s a difference, and I’ve made a whole career out of knowing it.”
I drink, finally, a single swallow of something I taste nothing of, because the alternative is to answer too quickly, and answering too quickly is how you tell a woman like this she has found the seam.
“You’ve mistaken discipline for feeling,” I say, when the glass is down again and my voice is exactly where I want it. “An understandable error. You’ve never had much acquaintance with the first one.”
She laughs outright at that, pleased, unwounded, because I have just confirmed for her that the blade went in somewhere by bothering to swing back. “Oh, this is good,” she murmurs. “This is so good. Do you know, I came tonight expecting to be bored. The famous Trey Flint, his sad arranged little marriage, a free dinner, some cameras. And instead I get this.” She gestures at me with her glass, head to foot, as though I am the entertainment she was promised and did not expect to receive. “You. Tormented. Over a girl. I have genuinely never seen you lose at anything. I’d have paid for a ticket.”
“You’re not watching me lose,” I tell her. “You’re watching me run a board for reasons that have nothing to do with you and would take a better mind than yours to follow. There’s a faction in this room that needs to see my marriage is a matter of indifference to me. You’re a prop in that, Ronna. A well-paid, very decorative prop. Don’t confuse the stage with the play.”
“There it is.” She points at me, delighted. “The numbers. You always go to the numbers when you can’t go anywhere else. It’s the tell you’ve never once managed to file off. The colder the arithmetic comes out of you, the closer somebody’s standing to the thing you can’t say.” She studies me a moment longer, and then her whole face changes, and I know the entertainment portion of the evening is over and the transaction is about to begin. “Anyway. I didn’t come over here just to admire the view. I came to collect.”
“Collect what.”
“A dance.” She says it lightly. “One dance. With me. Right now, while the orchestra’s doing something slow and the room is good and full and every camera that matters is angled at this exact corner.”
“No.”
“Dance with me,” Ronna says, and the warmth doesn’t leave her voice at all, which is what makes the next part so genuinely fine a piece of work, “or I’ll lie to your wife about the two of us.”
I turn and look at her, and I let her see the cold come up, the real cold, the kind I keep behind glass for men who’ve cost me money. “Are you trying to blackmail me?”
“Blackmail.” She tries the word out and seems to find it a touch dramatic for her taste. “I’m just making the most out of this evening for my career. I have a feeling you won’t be inviting me again.” A small, frank shrug, woman to wolf. “Well? Just one dance, and then we’ll call it quits.”