Page 49 of Double Bucked

Without missing a beat, he says, “I command you to stay in bed for another fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Open your mouth.”

I obey. He feeds me the rest of the scone. We’re getting crumbs in bed, but I don’t care.

This is the kind of domesticity I could get used to.

But there’s a nagging in me. A ripple that disturbs our placid peace, and it’s getting larger and larger the longer the silence between us stretches out.

“James?”

“Yes?”

I can’t contain the words anymore. “I spoke with Ransom last night. Alone. In the barn.”

“Okay.”

His voice is calm the way a violin note is calm.

It’s the peaceful sound of a string pulled very, very taut.

I trudge forward anyway. Honesty is the only way forward. “It’s strange talking to him. When I’m with him, it’s like…I’m that sweet, starry-eyed girl again.”

“Claire.” My name is a protest on his tongue.

“What?”

“You were never sweet or starry-eyed.”

I frown. “He brings up feelings, is what I’m saying. Complicated feelings.” I pause. I force myself to say the quiet thing out loud. “I used to love him. Hard. And when I see him now, it’s difficult to pretend like those feelings never existed.”

James, to his credit, doesn’t bat an eye. Instead, like a weathered professor, he simply chastises with, “You’re mistaken.”

I blink. “Sorry?”

“Marriage is a period.”

“A…what?”

“A period. The punctuation mark. A period is an end to things. It’s the end to you looking at other men. Thinking about other men. And it’s certainly an end to you having feelings with old flames in the stables, darling.”

A hot flush of anger rises in my cheeks. I sit up and remind him, “We’re engaged. Darling. We’re not a period yet.” I steal a scone from his plate. “If anything, we’re a semicolon.”

15

JAMES

Asemicolon.

A semicolon.

A fucking semicolon.

Inhale. Exhale.

The semicolon first made its unwanted appearance on parchment in 1494 when Aldus Manutius included it in his publication of a Latin text. It’s a combination of two separate, perfectly reasonable grammatical devices—the colon and a comma. The semicolon is a mad scientist, messily stitching together two independent clauses with ruddy tools like a drunken Frankenstein.

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