Page 158 of High Reward

Instead, I pull out my phone and make a phone call.

Lili

Theknockcomesatnine at night, three sharp raps that don’t belong to anyone on this stretch of coastline.

I know it’s him before I even reach the door. Nobody else pounds like they’re already annoyed I haven’t answered.

I open it anyway, arms crossed, because I refuse to let him see how fast my pulse just picked up.

“You could have called first.”

“I called four times.” Victor steps past me into the house like he owns it, which, considering how fast he tracked down a beach rental in Rhode Island, might not be far off. “You didn’t answer.”

“That was the point, Vic.”

He turns to face me, and for a second neither of us says anything. He looks tired. Not the kind sleep fixes, and I hate that some small, traitorous part of me wants to smooth it off his face with my hands.

“Grace misses you.” His voice doesn’t have the growl I’m used to. It’s flatter than that, worn thin. “I miss you. I’m done pretending four months of silence is what any of us actually wants.”

“I told you I needed space.”

“You needed space. You didn’t need to disappear.”

That one hits its mark, and my temper flares to cover it. “Don’t stand in my kitchen and lecture me about disappearing, Victor Serrano. I watched a man I married try to erase me for six years. Forgive me if I’m careful about who gets to decide when I come back.”

His jaw loosens. Not anger. Understanding, maybe, and it’s worse than if he’d yelled.

“You’re right.” He says it simply, no defensiveness in it at all. “I’m not here to drag you back. I came because Grace needs you at the bookstore opening, and because I needed to see your face instead of hear it through a phone.”

The fight drains right out of me.

“That’s not fair,” I mutter.

“None of this has been fair since the day you married that bastard.” He crosses the kitchen, slow, giving me every chance to step back if I want to. I don’t. “I’m not asking you to come home tonight, Liliana. I’m asking you to come to Grace’s opening. Two days. In and out if that’s what you need.”

I study him for a long moment, the salt air drifting in through the open door behind him. “You drove all the way out here just to ask me that?”

“I flew.” The corner of his mouth finally gives. “And no. I came because I missed you too much to keep doing this over the phone.”

I don’t remember closing the distance between us, but suddenly his hands are in my hair and mine are fisted in his shirt, and neither of us is talking anymore.

We don’t make it past the living room.

He backs me against the wall beside the bookshelf I’ve barely touched in four months, his mouth finding my throat, my jaw, the spot behind my ear that always undoes me faster than anything else he does.

“I hate every single day you’ve been gone,” he says against my skin, already working the button of my jeans.

“You have a terrible way of showing it,” I gasp, and then his fingers are in my pussy and I stop being able to form sentences at all.

He fucks me right there against the wall, one of my legs hooked over his hip, his hand fisted in my hair to keep my mouthexactly where he wants it. It’s rough and fast, and neither of us has the patience for anything slower.

“Vic.” His name comes out broken.

“I know, Spitfire. I know.” He doesn’t slow down. “Come for me. Then we’ll talk.”

I do, hard enough that my knees actually give, and he’s the only thing holding me up when it’s over.

We end up in my bed anyway, tangled together and too honest in the dark to stop talking even after the sex is done. I tell him about the mornings I spend walking the beach trying to remember who I was before Phineas. He tells me Grace cried the first week I was gone, then made herself stop, because she didn’t want to guilt me into coming back before I was ready.