“Engaged isn’t dead.”
“She’s aclient.”
Kayla waved a hand dismissively. “Whatever.”
The room went quiet. The reality show hummed in the background.
“She touched my arm,” Rose said finally. Her voice was small. “At the tasting table. She laughed at something and just... reached over. It was nothing.”
Quinn and Kayla exchanged a long, silent look.
“It wasn’t nothing,” Quinn said. “Not if you feel the need to share it with us.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I was there for the fallout. You were vibrating when you came out, Rose. You were pink from your collar to your hairline.” He tilted his head. “That’s not nothing.”
Rose opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. The fight left her all at once.
“Go home,” she said. “Both of you.”
Kayla gathered her things, slinging her bag over her shoulder. She held out a hand to Quinn, who groaned as he hauled himself up. At the door, Kayla stopped and pressed a quick kiss to Rose’s cheek.
The door clicked shut. Rose stood in the center of the living room, surrounded by the smell of popcorn for a second, then took herself off to bed.
She lay on top of the covers in the dark, shoes off, jacket still on, and stared at the ceiling. She had three vendor calls in the morning. She had a canopy embroiderer to chase. She had a baker to follow up with. She could do some of that now. Instead, she thought about Lizanne’s hand on her arm.
Ithadbeen nothing. A reflex. The reach of someone who laughed at something and moved without thinking. Lizanne probably hadn’t registered doing it at all. Rose had simply been in the way of a passing impulse that was already forgotten by the time Quinn pulled up to the gate.
Except Rose could still feel it. That was the problem. Four hours later, in her own bedroom, in the dark, she could still feel the exact weight of it. The warmth. The two or three seconds when Lizanne had held on and Rose had been close enough to smell her perfume and see the lines at the corners of her eyes.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum.
Don’t,she told herself.
She did anyway.
She let the thought come the rest of the way in. She’d been holding it at arm’s length since the vineyard. No. Sooner. Since Lizanne had walked in and saidis that a Chanelwithout so much as a hello..
She let herself think about Lizanne.
The way she sat. Like the sofa was something she was tolerating rather than using. The way she’d looked at Rose across the tasting table — that focused, unreadable attention that made Rose feel simultaneously assessed and seen, which shouldn’t have been attractive and was.
Rose slid her hand down her stomach and pushed her underwear aside.
She was already wet.
She thought about the vineyard light. The way Lizanne’s mouth moved when something amused her, not a full smile, never a full smile, just that small shift at the corner. Rose pressed two fingers against her clit and exhaled slowly through her nose.
She thought about Lizanne’s hands. Careful and deliberate with everything she touched. What those hands would feel like if they weren’t careful. If Rose was the thing that made them careless.
She started moving her fingers in slow circles and let herself think about it properly. Lizanne’s hands on her waist. Lizanne’s mouth at her ear, using that lower register, the one that landed below Rose’s chest and stayed there. She thought about hearing it close. Stripped of everything it was usually wrapped in.
Her hips lifted off the mattress.
She pushed her fingers lower, slipping inside herself on a breath she couldn’t quite control, and thought about Lizanne’s face. That controlled, unreadable expression finally cracking. Rose being close enough to watch it happen.
The woman who had hired her to plan her wedding to someone else.
