Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
“And surely you know how much I dislike being pranked, so why don’t we both go home unhappy. Is that what this is? Some bet? Humiliate the shrew, eighteen years later, for old times’ sake?”
I tip my face up to deliver it, which turns out to be a tactical error of the first order, the kind I apparently specialize in, the kind that brings my mouth up to within a breath of his and turns the air between us thick and strange.
It’s the sort of strange where two people are either about to do murder or do something a great deal stupider, and with his fingers banded warm around my wrist and his eyes gone dark I couldn’t have told you, right then, which way it was going to break.
“Look at my face, Blythe.” His voice drops, the accent surfacing low enough that I feel it more than hear it. “Do I look like a man wasting an afternoon on a joke?”
He does not. That’s the trouble with him, it’s always been the trouble, he looks like a man who decided how this ends a while ago and is simply waiting, with infinite patience, for me to catch up.
Worse, the longer he holds my gaze the more I understand we’re standing far too close for two people who supposedly loathe each other, and that if one of us doesn’t say something cutting in the next second, the silence is going to fill up with something neither of us can take back.
So I cut. “If you’re not joking, then you’re desperate. Either way, let go—”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll bite your hand off.”
He lets go.
Good.
“Pity,” he murmurs, stepping back just far enough that I can think again, which I resent, having only just gotten used to not thinking. “If I’d let you do it, you’d have enjoyed it, and a man likes to save that sort of thing for the engagement.”
I should’ve known he’d find a way to turn my own teeth against me. I open my mouth to inform him that I’d enjoy it the way a hawk enjoys a finger, all consequence and no romance, and what comes out instead is nothing, because Sensible Blythe has clapped a hand over both our mouths and is hissing that anything I say next is going to make this worse.
For once, I listen.
“Would you like to hear the terms,” he says, “or would you prefer to keep glaring? I’ve all afternoon for either.”
“I don’t care about your terms—”
He names a number.
I stop caring about not caring.
It’s a horrifying thing to feel happen in your own chest, the exact moment a number reaches in and changes your mind for you, and I hate that he watched it land, I hate that he knew it would. There’s no harm in listening though, is there. I’m not committing to a single thing. I’m a grown woman who can sit on a porch and let a man talk, and so I let him talk, and apparently there’s a train.
A real one, the kind they don’t make anymore, a restored luxury line he’s reviving out of San Antonio with a consortium of ranch and oil money he’s spent the last year charming. Sleeper cars. Crystal in the dining car.
A route that runs days instead of hours, west across the Hill Country and the high lonesome and on toward the mountains, the whole pitch being that the journey is the thing you’re paying for, that a man rich enough to fly anywhere in two hours might pay a great deal more to be unreachable for a week and call it luxury.
It sounds, against my every wish, rather wonderful. So wonderful that I know at once I’m not the customer. There’s no version of my bank account that survives one night of it.
“It isn’t my idea, strictly,” he goes on, in the tone of a man who dislikes admitting any idea isn’t strictly his. “There’s a flagship already running in Japan, the proof of the whole concept. A luxury cruise line on rails called the Yume, a joint venture with their national government, booked out a year ahead. My partner there built it. Yuki Himura.” A pause. “It’s a serious, respectable thing, before you decide it’s a rich man’s toy. People marry off the back of it. We’re bringing the model to America, and the model is couples only.”
“Couples only,” I repeat blankly.
“It’s built on a romantic idea, and a true one. Intimacy, nostalgia, the lost art of being unreachable together for a week. People believe in it, they pay handsomely for it, and the ones in Japan step off it engaged.” His mouth does something wry and cool. “I happen to be the worst possible man to sell it, which is its own private joke. The format requires me to arrive with a woman on my arm and look as though I mean it, and I’d sooner spend the week beside one I’m paying by the day than one who’d start believing the brochure by the second morning.”