Taking my cart with him. The wire basket with its fifteen books rolling beside him as he strides toward the elevator with the unhurried, confident gait of a man who has just done what he did and considers the aftermath someone else’s problem.
He’s already reaching the elevator.
“Bring that book too,” he calls back.
His voice casual.
Warm.
As if he didn’t just ruin me in a fiction aisle and walk away licking his fingers.
I stand there.
In the aisle.
Completely red. My cheeks burning. My thighs burning. The space between them burning with the residual heat of a touch that was simultaneously tactical and devastating and that I will be thinking about for the foreseeable future.
I curse under my breath.
Try to compose myself.
The composure comes in pieces—straightening my dress, smoothing my hair, blinking until the blush recedes from critical to merely obvious, adjusting my expression froma man just fingered me in a bookshop and then licked his hand in front of meto something that could pass for normal in a public setting.
I look down at the book in my hand.
The burgundy cover. The gold foil. The woman with the three men.
Page forty-three.
I close it.
Hold it against my chest.
And walk toward the elevator with the book pressed to my body like a keepsake—which, I realize with a flush that I cannot prevent, is exactly what it’s going to be.
A keepsake.
Not because of the story inside it.
Because of the story that happened while I was holding it.
CHAPTER 27
Pull The Trigger
~HAZEL~
“Roman can’t come?”
The whine in my voice is audible and I am choosing not to be embarrassed about it.
I’m standing in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom—mybedroom, the room with four pillows and a reading chair and a bookshelf that is no longer empty because Alaric bought me fifteen books and the one from page forty-three—while Oakley stands behind me, his fingers working the zipper of a dress that I purchased exactly six days ago during a shopping trip that feels like it happened in a different lifetime.
The dress is black.
Because I am still, at my core, a woman who gravitates toward the absence of color the way a compass gravitates toward north. But this black is different from the uniform black. This is a cocktail dress—fitted through the bodice, the neckline cutting across my collarbones in a straight, architectural line that exposes the constellation tattoos on my upper chest. The fabric is something that clings without constricting, a material thatAlaric had selected from a rack with the quiet, knowing authority of a man who understands textiles the way he understands crime scenes. The skirt falls to mid-thigh, which is a length I have not worn in public since?—
Since never.
