Page 10 of Where Vows Collapse
The voice was even. The voice was, as always, perfectly courteous.
Noelle opened her mouth. She didn't know what she'd been about to say. Some ordinary thing.My book.I thought you were out.I'm sorry.Any of a dozen sentences.
What came out was nothing.
She stood in the doorway of her husband's study and looked at the man who had, a moment before, been a different man. She could not find a word for what she'd seen that didn't sound ridiculous if she said it aloud. She understood that she'd just been given something he hadn't meant to give her. And she understood that he was already closing the door on it.
"No," she said finally. Her voice was her own again. Quiet. Even. The voice her mother had taught her. "I'm sorry. I was looking for something."
He didn't ask what.
Noelle inclined her head, stepped back into the hall and pulled the study door gently closed behind her. She walked through the silent apartment to her bedroom, sat down on theedge of the bed, held her own hands in her lap because there was nothing else to hold.
She knew what the pull under her ribs was. What she told herself was that she'd been in the apartment too long without enough to do. That what she'd seen at the window hadn't been what she'd thought it was. That a man could stand at a window in the dark and look like anything and it meant nothing. That she'd been lonely and her body was getting confused. That she would be more careful.
She almost believed it.
Somewhere past midnight, she heard him come out of the study and move through the apartment. She heard his bedroom door close down the hall. She lay in the dark listening to the silence return, and she understood that she was in trouble. She was beginning to feel something she had not agreed to feel.
She hadn't meant to.
She wasn't sure yet what she was going to do about it.
CHAPTER 4
NOELLE
The dress wasthe color of midnight, and Maura had laid it out on the bed before Noelle had come up to dress, which meant Elias had chosen it.
He'd never chosen a dress for her before. She stood in her bathrobe in the doorway of the bedroom and looked at the thing lying across the duvet — long, deep-necked, heavier than it looked. Her husband had reached a decision about what his wife should wear to her first high-profile event as Mrs. Strathmore, and the decision had been made without her.
There was a note on top of the dress. His handwriting was narrower than she'd expected.For tonight. E.
That was all.
She didn't try the dress on until Heather arrived to do her hair. She let Heather finish pinning before she let the robe drop, because she didn't want the dress in the mirror before she had to be in it. When she finally stood up and lifted the thing from the bed and pulled it over her head, she understood in the first second why he'd chosen it. Nobody seeing them together tonight would fail to notice how he'd dressed her. He'd chosen a color that would tell the room she'd been claimed, and chosen it so carefully that the room would also say it'd been done with taste.
It was, she realized, looking at her reflection in the long mirror, the dress he'd have bought a woman he was in love with.
She held her own eyes in the mirror for a moment and let herself feel it. And then she quickly shuttered the feeling away.
Elias was waiting by the elevator. He didn't speak when he saw her. His gaze moved over her once: slow, assessing, the hunter's pause. And then he inclined his head, which was as much acknowledgment as she'd learned to expect from him. The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside.
"You don't like it," he said, after the doors closed.
She watched the numbers fall. "I didn't say that."
"You didn't need to."
"It's beautiful."
"That isn't the same thing."
She glanced at him. He was watching the doors, not her. In profile, in the low light of the elevator, his face was the face she'd seen in the study for half a second: tired, set, a man carrying something heavy in his chest he had no intention of putting down.
"I'm not used to being dressed," she said.
"Noted."
