Page 40 of Hush Money

“Go back to sleep? Are you joking?” I reach for him again. He holds me off again. That scares me worse than anything else that’s happened today. My fear intensifies, scorching its way up my throat. “How am I supposed to go back to sleep when you won’t even let me touch you? What about Ravenna?”

He faces me again, all hard lines and sharp edges. There’s more give in Mount Rushmore than there is in his stony expression right now. “She’s gone. It’s over. She’s not going to bother us again. If she does, I’ll take care of it.” A grim pause. “One way or the other.”

I don’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”

It takes him forever to answer. “I mean that everything’s going to be okay. I promise you that.”

I’m not ready to let it or him go, but he’s already striding off toward the guard station. And my pride can only take so many rejections per night. So I stand there for another second or two, seething in my impotence as I watch him have a few more words with the guard, before finally trudging back to the cottage with only my simmering anxiety and frustration to keep me company.

I flop onto the sofa and stare up at the ceiling wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do now. A quick glance at the display on the range reveals that it’s going to be an even longer night than I feared. It’s only three fifteen.

Wine. I need wine.

I head for the kitchen and help myself to a glass of something fruity and white from Lucien’s supply inside the fridge. I sip. I pace. I grab my phone from the nightstand to check the news. I toss my phone back on the nightstand and return to the sofa, where I try to read a few pages of my romance novel. It’s no surprise that I’m way too antsy to focus. The words immediately blur together in a collage of letters, so I toss the book and turn on the TV. I’ll watch a show. But by the time I cycle through a lap of all the channels, my bleary mind has come to one inescapable conclusion: I can’t see anything other than Lucien and Ravenna and the intensity with which they interact. Oh, sure, he just kicked her out. That’s a good thing, right? She’s gone from Ackerley and hopefully soon to be gone from his marital status. So, yay, I guess.

But…why is he still so angry at her? Isn’t anger another form of passion? And speaking of passion…

Ravenna was nude beneath her silky robe. Lucien, as I know from my own intimate experience, sleeps in the nude. So what were those two spouses doing in the middle of the night in their nude adjacent states?

My stomach clenches at the thought because my brain can’t generate any G-rated ideas.

Worse, there was something weird about Lucien at the end. Something…I don’t know, off. Beneath the anger I got the feeling that he was wounded, maybe. Damaged in some way. And since when does he back away when I reach for him?

I grab another glass of wine and sip it while telling myself that whatever happened between them in the house ended badly and with her ejection. That’s a win for me. But it’s no consolation. I hate to agree with Ravenna about anything, but it doesn’t seem like they’re done with each other. Not really.

That’s normal, right? They’re married. They need to work through their feelings. Maybe they need closure.

That’s when my dad makes an unexpected appearance, crowding into the other images jostling for space inside my head: Be a good girl, Tamsyn. Do the right thing.

Meaning that if Lucien asked for space, I should give him what he needs and wait till the morning to talk. I can live with a little impatient frustration. I won’t die. But I’ve never felt less like being a good girl in my life. And the proof of that is my nonverbal but vehement response: Be quiet, Dad. No one asked for your opinion.

With that, I down the rest of my wine in a couple of hasty gulps and head straight for the big house.

The place is quiet and deserted at this hour, with nothing but jagged shadows and echoing creaks as I cross the foyer and start up the staircase. A hooting owl somewhere outside adds to the general gloom. A fragile beam of light coming from Lucien’s ajar bedroom door guides me once I hit the second floor. I don’t bother to be quiet and let my flip-flops make their normal racket as I close the distance, not wanting to startle him. But I’m the one who’s startled as I stand in the doorway and survey the scene.

The vast room is tropical rainforest steamy and scented with Lucien’s clean and woodsy body wash. There’s an open bottle of scotch and a crystal tumbler with three fingers in it on the nightstand. As for the man himself, he’s over by the bed with his back to me and a white towel wrapped around his waist.

The lamps provide enough illumination for me to see that his skin is a lurid red, the kind of color you expect when you fall asleep on your beach chair and wake up several hours later to discover that the sun has shifted beyond your umbrella’s reach. I don’t know how long he must’ve been in the hot shower for his skin to look like that or for the room to feel this humid. But those are questions I’ll have to tackle another time. Because I’ve got a bigger mystery to solve now. I want to know why Lucien, a man with enough domestic staff to run a nice boutique hotel back in the city, is yanking the sheets off his bed with single-minded focus while also wearing an expression that suggests the entire house will implode if he doesn’t get it done in the next three seconds.

I stand there, desperately trying to come up with some benign explanation as I watch him, but I can’t quite jam those square puzzle pieces into the round holes I’m working with. Sudden bedbug infestation? Sand from the beach? But those are ridiculous ideas. My thundering pulse and woman’s intuition have already told me everything I need to know.

“Oh my God,” I say, startling him. “You fucked her, didn’t you?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TAMSYN

Just like that, he wipes his face clean of all the emotion I just saw and transforms himself into the bland face of inscrutability as he finishes with the fitted sheet and tosses it on the floor with the other linens. “You shouldn’t be here, Tamsyn.” His voice sounds rough. “I told you to go to bed.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say, fighting my rising dread. “Why don’t you answer my question?”

“I told you.” He turns all that focus to removing the pillowcases, his movements still choppy. “We’ll talk in the morning. I need some space tonight.”

I walk deeper into the room, determined not to be dispatched for a third time tonight. “Space doesn’t work for me right now.”

“Ah.” He finishes with the current pillow and reaches for the next, lips curling into a sneer. “So you’re the only one in this relationship who’s allowed to need space every now and then.”

“You know what?” God, I’m trembling now. I can feel it in my belly, thighs and voice. As for my heart, it feels like it’s been nailed to my chest wall and set on fire. I’m so insulted. I know I’m young. I know I’m naïve. But I’m not fucking stupid. “Take all the space you need. I get it. You fucked her, but you’re not ready to tell me yet. You don’t want to hurt me. But it’s okay. No worries. Save yourself the trouble of agonizing over it. The picture is more than clear enough.”

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