Page 8 of The Wife He Accused

"There you are," he said softly.

It undid her. She leaned forward and kissed him the way she had wanted to kiss him on the terrace at the gala when the woman in emerald had been laughing about her across the room.

After that it was not slow anymore.

He got her underwear off her with one hand and his pants open with the other. She rose up on her knees, reached down between them and guided him, and when she sank down onto him they both made the same sound at the same time, a low shocked grateful breath. His forehead came down against her shoulder and he said her name into her skin.

"Melody.Melody."

She set the rhythm. He let her. His hands stayed on her hips, guiding without controlling, and his mouth found her breast again, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat and her mouth, again and again, as if he could not pick a place to stay.

Melody moved on him slow at first, then less slow, then not slow at all. The room narrowed to the warmth of him under her and the warmth of him inside her; the warmth of his mouth on her skin and the warmth of his hands holding her steady. The city outside the window did not exist. Catherine did not exist. The pause in the car did not exist. There was only this, the long known animal honesty of their bodies meeting, the place in their marriage where she had never once doubted him.

"Look at me," he said, ragged. "Look at me, sweetheart, look at me when you —"

She looked at him. She kept her eyes on his, and the wave came up through her in long slow breaking pulls. She did not look away, she watched his face as he watched hers, and she watched him follow her over a few seconds later with her name in his mouth.

They stayed like that for a long time afterward. Her forehead against his. His arms locked around her lower back. Both of them breathing.

His hand came up and traced, very gently, the line of her cheekbone. His thumb caught a little wetness she had not known was there.

"Hey," he said. "Hey. Are you —"

"I'm fine." She laughed, wet and surprised. "I'm fine. It's good. It's — you. It's just you."

He kissed the place his thumb had touched.

"I love you, Melody Carter Winters."

"I love you, Alexander."

He said it, then, with his mouth against her temple, the way he sometimes said things he did not say in daylight: "You're mine, you know that. You're mine."

Melody stilled, but did not pull back.

There was a difference between belongingwitha person and belongingtothem. She had not understood there was a difference until very recently. She did not think Alexander understood it yet at all.

But his arms were around her, and his pulse was slowing under her cheek, and he loved her. He loved her so much his voice cracked on the word.

Probably nothing was wrong. Probably she was tired. Probably the storm her body kept bracing for was a storm her body had invented because it had spent too many years, before him, learning to brace.

Probably.

CHAPTER 3

ALEXANDER

Alexander Winters had builta career on the belief that information, gathered carefully and read without sentiment, would always tell you the truth.

The trick was thewithout sentimentpart. Most men could not do it. Most men, when they cared about an outcome, let the caring sand the edges off the data until the data agreed with what they had wanted to find in the first place. He had watched his late father do it for thirty years. He had watched competitors do it, and bought their companies on the back of it. He had built a reputation, by the time he was thirty-four, on the simple discipline of looking at a set of facts and refusing to flinch.

It was Thursday morning. Three days after the gala. He was in his office on the forty-second floor of the Winters Building, and he was discovering, with a clinical sort of interest, that the discipline did not extend to his wife.

The message had come through on her phone the night before. He had not meant to see it. Melody had been in the shower, the apartment had been doing its evening thing of going gold and quiet around him, and her phone had buzzed on the marble of the kitchen island while he was pouring himself a glass of water. One glance. That was all. The screen had lit up with aname he did not recognize and a sentence fragment he had not asked to read.

Tonight still works. Same place.

He had not picked the phone up. He had stood there with his glass of water in his hand and watched the screen go dark again. He had thought, very clearly,that is none of my business,and he had walked into the living room and sat down with theJournaland read the same paragraph about copper futures four times.