Page 19 of The Marriage Blunder

I grinned. “I was hoping you would.”

He rolled it around his fingers as if he wasn’t used to it. I watched the gesture. I watched him, let the silence between us sit.

The hours passed. We did not leave the terminal. I bought him a coffee; he bought me a bagel. We sat, and talked, and did not talk, and the silence between us was no longer dangerous.

At 11:50, a gate agent appeared at C12 and called our names. The rest of the terminal was empty. We stood, collected our bags. As we walked toward the jetway, I reached out and put my hand at the small of his back.

Jude went still for a second, but he didn’t move away. “Is this a thing?”

“It’s whatever you want it to be.”

He looked at me with a curious yet satisfied look, and I knew I would follow that look anywhere.

He said, “Let’s go.”

So we did.

Chapter Five

~ Jude ~

The interior of a private jet at thirty-seven thousand feet is a study in artificial calm. Leather seats, stitched with the kind of thread that costs more per yard than my first car, faced each other over a table too small for meetings and too large for drinks.

A narrow aisle ran from cockpit to tail of the plane like a border between warring states. The windows were ovals, trimmed in brushed aluminum. The afternoon sun cut through them at an angle that made everything look a little clinical and a little expensive.

We were somewhere over Nevada, according to the monitor embedded in the bulkhead. The jet’s engines produced a hum that was almost meditative, if you could ignore the physics of combustion and the absolute certainty that, if something went wrong, neither of us had a parachute.

I could not ignore this. It was, in fact, the only thing I could think about, except for the fact that Kenneth James, the man I wanted more than I wanted to breathe, was sitting directly across from me.

He had discarded his jacket onto the armrest, which felt both ceremonial and practical. His shirt collar was open one button. His posture was perfect. He sat with one ankle crossed over his knee, the casual gesture of a man who knows exactly how much space he is entitled to and occupies every inch of it.

I was attempting to review a spreadsheet on my laptop. The spreadsheet contained information about the portfolio of a client who, by coincidence or by design, had recently acquired two of the largest private art collections on the East Coast.

I had not looked at the spreadsheet in twenty minutes. I had opened and closed it three times, toggling between Excel and my email as though either was going to rescue me from the awkwardness of sitting in a tube of metal with the man I had legally married less than twenty-four hours ago.

Kenneth watched me. Not constantly, but at intervals, each one long enough to be noticed and then denied. His eyes were unreadable from this angle, but I could feel the attention like a draft, a slight but persistent change in cabin pressure.

I looked at the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet looked back at me.

“Are you working?” he asked. His voice cut through the engine noise and landed somewhere just below my left collarbone.

I looked up, my glasses slipping down my nose. “Just checking in,” I lied.

He tilted his head, which I had learned over the last eleven months was his version of a smile. “On what?”

“Portfolio review. I told my boss I’d have an updated report by Monday.”

“You said you worked for an art collective, but you handle financials?”

I felt the faintest burn at the tips of my ears. “I’m the business side. I run the numbers. The rest is above my pay grade.”

He smiled, for real this time. It was slower than it needed to be and therefore more effective. “Which asset class?”

I hesitated. This was not the question I’d expected, and it threw off my rhythm. “Real estate, mostly, some hard assets.”

“Gallery properties?”

I nodded. “Eight in the U.S., one in development in Amsterdam. The client is expanding, which is good for everyone except me, because it means I have to do comparative tax work in Dutch.”