“I never do,” Nerissa replies honestly. “But I choose to ignore it. Even though it’s getting harder and harder for me.”
Seraphina feels a lump rise in her throat. Nerissa leans forward and strokes the back of her hand with her thumb.
“Eat your dessert,” she whispers.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Said the dessert thief…”
Seraphina laughs, but the sound comes out trembling on her lips. Nerissa wipes a tiny smudge of chocolate from the corner of her mouth with her thumb, and the gesture is so intimate and domestic that Seraphina holds her breath.
“What are you thinking about?” Nerissa asks.
Her voice drops an octave, drifting over the distant clinking of cutlery.
Seraphina takes a few seconds to answer. She swirls the red wine in her glass and watches the tears slowly slide down the crystal before looking up.
“That this hurts so much more than being in any hotel,” she confesses, holding her gaze steady against those eyes devouring her from across the table. “Because now that we’re not in a hurry, I know exactly what I’m missing the rest of the time. Your hands resting on my waist, your mouth kissing me at any time of day... the way you’d love me if time stopped being our enemy.”
Nerissa frowns, letting a small crease break the firmness of her brow. Then she sets her glass down on the tablecloth.
“Tell me why it hurts. I want to know,” Nerissa says, though just looking into her eyes is enough to know.
“Because it’s… addictive,” Seraphina whispers, leaning forward just enough for the candlelight to illuminate her pupils. “Because right now, I’m imagining what everything would be like without the clock ticking on the nightstand.”
Nerissa rests her chin on the back of her hand without breaking eye contact.
“I envy you,” the surgeon murmurs.
Seraphina flashes a wistful smile, seeking refuge in her usual irony.
“Manchester’s star surgeon is jealous of a boring director?”
“Well, yes,” Nerissa replies. “Because it seems that, for a moment, you feel free.” Her fingers begin tracing invisible lines on the table, coming dangerously close to hers. “You have a different glow when you stop watching the restaurant door. Look at us... having dinner on an ordinary night, arguing over the last slice of cake on the menu.”
Seraphina holds her breath. She reaches across the table, bridging the distance, and catches Nerissa’s fingers. The candle’s flame flickers between their faces.
“We’re real,” Seraphina assures her, feeling her throat tighten. “This is the only thing left that feels real to me. And when you touch me, even like this, with your fingertips in a public place, I feel my whole body—and my heart—open up to you.”
Nerissa closes her fingers around Seraphina’s with an almost desperate strength, a firm grip that betrays the hunger and tenderness battling inside her chest.
“When we get back to the hotel room…” Nerissa says, “I’m going to undress you as if we had our whole lives ahead of us. I want you to give yourself to me, knowing that tomorrow you’ll have to go back to your life, but that tonight… tonight you’re completely mine. And that soon, our chance will come.”
For a moment suspended in time, Seraphina feels that her marriage, her children, and her social status no longer matter. She longs to set her perfect life ablaze for this woman who looks at her as if she were the beginning and the end of the world; awoman whose fingers promise her heaven and whose eyes hold a love so immense that she can no longer ignore it.
Chapter 16
The meeting ends at 7:12 p.m., steeped in that corporate tension that has hung in the air from the start. When the last member of the finance committee leaves the boardroom, Seraphina Chapman feels exhaustion settle behind her eyes and spread down the back of her neck. She has spent the entire day immersed in the projections for the investment fund linked to the sports merger. In the numbers. Those numbers capable of deciding professional careers, and even the fate of entire lives, with a single digital signature.
However, as she returns to her office on the executive floor, she isn’t thinking about balance sheets or profit margins. Her mind drifts to Chester, to the warm weight of a hand intertwined with hers on an ancient Roman wall.
She closes her office door and leaves the folder of reports on the oak desk. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows that span an entire wall, Manchester looks magnificent. The glass buildings reflect the gray twilight sky, and the lights from the offices still occupied create a mosaic of yellow and white dots in the dusk. Seraphina massages the bridge of her nose with her fingers, trying to relieve the pressure she feels in her temples, and then opens her purse.
Her cell phone vibrates between her fingers. Despite the exhaustion coursing through her body, a part of her responds immediately to the name lighting up the screen.
“Did you make it out alive?”
Seraphina slumps into the chair and replies with her thumbs, though her eyes wander for a moment to the rain pounding against the windows.
