Page 12 of Where Vows Collapse
"How long?”
He glanced at her. It was the briefest glance, and she felt the weight of it. "Long enough that she considers herself one."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the one I'm giving you."
She looked at him fully then.
"You could have introduced me," she said.
"I did."
"Not the way you introduced me to the others."
A pause. He set his glass down on the ledge of the window behind them. When he answered, his voice was lower. The attention in it was no longer the ballroom's attention, which had been steady and surface-level, but something closer to what she'd seen on him at the penthouse the night of the engagement party. A man taking her in as though he'd decided she was worth taking in.
"I apologize."
It was so plain it caught her off balance. She hadn't known he could apologize. She'd assumed the word wasn't in his working vocabulary.
"Don't," she said, before she could think better of it. "It's fine."
"It isn't."
"Elias—"
"She shouldn't have spoken to you that way," he said. "And I should've said so."
The words were given plainly, without ornament. She realized he hadn't said anything because he'd been deciding, in real time, what the cost of intervening would've been. He'd decided, evidently, that the cost was low enough now to pay.
She didn't know what to do with it.
She settled on the only thing she could manage. "Thank you."
He inclined his head. His hand came up. For a moment she thought he was going to touch her face — a ridiculous thought, a thought that flooded through her like warm water and left her furious at herself — but what he did instead was lift a hand to the small of her back again. He turned her gently toward the room. “I think they're about to start the speeches. Let's find our table.”
Noelle walked where he walked. She was aware, for the rest of the evening, of the exact temperature of his hand through the fabric of the dress. She was aware of the fact that she was aware. She was aware that she was going to be angry with herself about it later.
And she was aware, underneath all of it, of what she'd seen flicker in his face when he'd saidshe shouldn't have spoken to you that way. A small, banked anger. On her behalf. As though somewhere inside the locked house of him there was a room she hadn't been given the key to, and something in that room had, for a brief second, stirred.
He dismissed her at ten-forty.
He did it politely.You can leave now. I have other matters to attend to. The driver will take you home.She stood with himnear the cloakroom while he said it. She nodded, took the coat the attendant brought, and walked out the way she'd been taught to walk out of rooms like this. The pleasant smile, the unhurried pace, the no-look-back.
In the car on the way home, she let the smile go.
It took longer than she'd expected. Her face had been holding it so carefully for so many hours that it had become a thing with its own momentum. She sat in the back seat of the car with the lake going past her on the right, and she watched her own reflection slowly slacken in the tinted window.
The penthouse was dark when she arrived. She didn't turn on the main lights. She slipped her heels off by the door and left them where they fell — a small rebellion, a line the apartment would not object to but she knew he would notice in the morning. She crossed the dim living room in her stocking feet and went to the window.
Noelle heard the door an hour later.
She didn't turn. She heard him set his keys down. She heard the soft sound of his jacket being folded over the arm of the chair in the study off the hall.
"I didn't expect you to be back yet."
"The evening ended earlier than I'd planned."
