Page 47 of His Good Girl

“More than once.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“But you’re so…” She waved a hand at me in a way that should not have pleased me. “You.”

“At twenty-five, I was mostly shoulders, arrogance, and student debt.”

“That’s hard to picture.”

“It shouldn’t be. You probably only remember me after I became respectable.”

“I was a child. Everyone over thirty seemed respectable.”

She was not a child anymore though. That was the fact I could not escape. She was twenty-five, an educated adult, bruised but not broken, sitting across from me with a sharp tongue and tired eyes and a dress that made restraint feel less like a virtue than a physical task. I had known her as a child, yes, but that girl belonged to another time, another house, and another version of me. The woman was here now.

And I wanted her.

I wanted to touch the loose hair near her cheek, to know whether that blush I had seen in my office would return if I lowered my voice, to put my hand at the back of her chair and lean close enough that she had to decide whether to move away. I wanted things I had no business wanting from a woman who would walk into my company tomorrow and try to prove she belonged there.

I reached for restraint the way a man reached for a railing on icy stairs.

Across the table, Avery was telling me about Marlena’s coffee preferences.

“She once said oat milk made lattes taste apologetic,” Avery expounded. “Which was annoying because I knew what she meant.”

I forced myself back into the conversation. “Unfortunately, I also know what she meant.”

“See? This is why tyrants win. They’re sometimes right about things.”

“Marlena Cross is not a tyrant. She’s a mediocre executive with good tailoring and poor impulse control.”

Avery blinked, then smiled slowly. “That was mean.”

“That was accurate.”

“Sometimes your accuracy wears a mean little hat.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

She laughed, and the sound moved through me with a tenderness that made the desire worse, not better.

Desire said: touch her.

Tenderness said: protect her.

Honor said: do not confuse the two.

So I kept my hands on my wineglass, my silverware, the edge of the table. I let myself look at her face and not the neckline of her dress. I let myself make her laugh, but not too often with my voice lowered. I let the old warmth exist, the godfather’s warmth, Robert’s best friend’s warmth, the man who had known her parents and could tell her without cruelty that she had not ruined her life by twenty-five.

But there was another warmth beneath it now, darker and less charitable.

I did not feed it.

I did not starve it either.

That was perhaps the most honest thing I could say about the evening.