Page 35 of Ruthless Claim

I’ve pulled my clothes back on and I’m standing across the wreckage of the dining room from her with my arms crossed.

She looks at me.

I look at her.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” she says. Her voice has come back to itself—even, measured—but there’s also a quakiness there. “It doesn’t change the fact that I despise you. It doesn’t make us anything other than two people stuck in a marriage neither of us wanted who apparently have”—she pauses, and I watch her select the word—“physical chemistry.”

That’s an understatement. “Agreed.”

She seems to expect an argument and the absence of one seems to make her short circuit and before she smooths her expression back out.

“This was just sex,” I tell her.

“Just sex,” she quickly agrees.

“We still hate each other.”

“Obviously.”

“Nothing changes.”

“Nothing changes,” she confirms, and she slides off the table with the composure of a woman who has not just been thoroughly fucked and brough to orgasm twice.

Her composure is really fucking admirable.

She smooths her dress and locates one shoe near the window.

She picks it up then finds the other under the table and picks that up too.

She holds them in one hand and looks at me from across the debris field with those dark eyes that are back to their usual careful arrangement.

“Good,” she says.

“Good.”

She nods sharply then walks past me toward the bedroom with her spine straight and her head up, stepping over a piece of the broken bowl without looking at it.

The bedroom door closes.

I stand in the middle of the dining room and take in what’s left of it.

The broken glass.

The scattered plates and silverware.

The table that’s no longer where it was when the evening started.

My lip stings and my body hurts, but I also want to take a fucking nap.

This is uncomplicated.

Two people.

Physical chemistry.

Stress release.

Nothing that changes anything.