Page 41 of Rivals to Lovers
He saw Maureen’s book sitting dog-eared and marked up on the kitchen counter, where he’d left it after perusing it over his dinner tonight. The truth was this: He had already finished reading her book. Twice. He’d been interrupted from his second reading by Ajay’s phone call and now had come dangerously close to Mo seeing it lying around. Wes took it to the bedroom and stuck the manuscript under his mattress like it was a dirty magazine.
Wes had to act surprised by whatever she read tonight. He practiced expressions in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, but they didn’t look convincing to him. How to pretend he didn’t know what was coming when he’d made tiny pencil marks in the margins of the copy Gary had made? Yes, he had delayed reading one of his client’s books in the meantime, buthe was only human. The rest of her novel had risen around him like a tide, carrying him into it. That was the sign of a good book: He thought about it when he put it down. It was hard not to analyze her project like Wes did with the authors querying him for representation. Unlike those projects, which he usually read on his e-reader, Wes had the paper copy in front of him. It was strangely personal to have the paper, slightly warm, under his fingers.
He couldn’t stop thinking about having other warm things under his fingers.
A knock at the door. He needed to stop his dirty thoughts before he greeted Mo, or she would see something in his face. He would not think about sinking into her hair, her shoulder, him pressing—
He opened the door. At some point in the past two hours, it had started to rain without him realizing. Mo held a newspaper over her head, hair drenched like she had been saved from a ship. Wes ushered her inside, and she slipped off her shoes in the front hallway, shivering as Wes took her pink coat. “Sky opened while I was walking from the station. It came out of nowhere.”
Like you,Wes thought. He took her arm gently as she walked barefoot into the living room. He was about to put her wet coat in the dryer when he realized that her dress was soaked too. “Do you want to get out of those wet things? I can put everything in the dryer while we hang out.” She made a face, and Wes laughed. “And you can borrow clothes, of course.”
“I was going to say—but yes, sure. If you have some gym clothes I could borrow or whatever.”
“A robe?”
She nodded. “That’d be cozy.”
Wes found his bathrobe, luckily laundered a few days ago and not used since. It was gray and soft and overly long. He liked to wear it in the mornings sometimes to remind himself why working from home was better than having an office.
And when she came out of the bathroom wearing only his robe, he reminded himself why being at his home was better than her place, for sure.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mo
When did handing someone a ball of sopping-wet clothes become such a fraught movement? Wes’s hand grazed hers as Mo passed him the bundle—the dress she had picked out so carefully an hour ago, and even the underwear, which she’d chosen even more carefully. It wasn’t silk or anything, but it was blue and lacy. She tucked it inside the dress so he didn’t feel it on top. The robe cinched around her waist and fell to her knees, longer than the robe she had at home by at least three inches—which tracked, because he was about three inches taller than her.
She curled up on his couch, legs tucked under her. A fire roared in the fireplace across from them, reminding her of how lovely it could be to be safe out of the storm. Suddenly, she blanched. “My book. I’m sure—”
She jumped from the couch, ran to the front door, and dug into her soaked bag. Her copy, so carefully spiral bound last week for way too much money, twice as much as any book of hers would retail for on a shelf, was more than damp.She nestled it in her arms and carried the limp pages back to the couch. “Well, there goes my project. Sorry the reading will be one-sided today. I don’t think I can even separate the pages while they’re this wet.”
He pursed his lips, then took the soggy mess from her. “Let me put this in the kitchen.”
“So we can bake with it? I heard you repped cookbooks, but I didn’t know that was what you meant.”
He stared at her for a moment, and she self-consciously ran a hand through her hair. It was damp and as ragged as the book had been. “What?” she asked when the silence had stretched between them a second too long.
“Do you trust me?”
It was a hard question to answer. She shouldn’t, not with things as they were. He had reasons to look out for his own self-interest. Still, she answered honestly. “I want to.”
That response made him look at her face for another moment, reading her expression like he’d read his own words at the Hill: carefully, with reverence. “Okay, I have a few things to explain. Follow me.”
First, he detoured to the kitchen and put the lumpy book on the counter. It hadn’t completely reverted to pulp, but its edges were curling up on the sides. He led her up the staircase that she had ignored on her first trip to his house. A place in New York with a second level was more telling than showing your bank account balance. There was another room down the hall farther that teased her—she had to guess it was his office, probably full of books she wanted to talk to him about. She wondered where he wrote his morning pages. There? In bed? On the couch? She didn’t have much time to wonder as he led her to the lip of his bedroom and motioned for her to stop. Shescanned the room from her spot at the door—the quarter-sawn oak furniture and the kind of careworn woven tan rug over the hardwood floor that looked effortlessly thirty. The kind ofI’m thirty and I have things figured outthat Mo longed for but knew she was about three pay grades away from attaining.
He leaned over the opposite side of the queen bed and pulled out a spiral-bound manuscript from under the crisp white linen. “So—this is also your book. Technically. Just another copy of it.”
Her heart beat against her ribs. “How … how did you get that?”
“Gary. When Talia and Flor came to the Hill, he made me a copy too.”
She felt her eyebrows rise, then lower quickly, thinking about how complicated that day had been in the best and worst ways. She focused on the question at hand. “You had a copy of my book this whole week?”
Wes crossed the bedroom, expression sheepish. “Yes. But here—” He put the solid weight of the manuscript into her hands. Her copy had been bound in pink, but this one had standard black rings. The front page, and everything else, was the same. She flipped through it and noticed notation in the margins—underlines and stars, even a few question marks. The marks trailed all the way from the first page to the last. He hadn’t only had her book, he’d read it. The whole thing. And judging from the multiple ink colors, he’d read it a few times. “You finished it? Since Sunday?”
“Twice.”
She couldn’t help but laugh, though her hands were shaking. “When I was sitting here reading and you’d already heard those chapters, knew everything coming up—”
