Page 27 of Lady and the Butcher
I should have said no. Should have laughed and gone back inside. Instead, I hesitated just long enough for him to read it.
He stepped closer, closing the space between us until the scent of his skin was in my lungs.
“You’re going to come with me,” he said. Not a question. Not even a demand. Just fact.
My fingers tightened on my own elbows. “Where?”
“You’ll see.”
Every instinct screamed at me not to follow a man I barely knew. But another voice—the one that remembered the feel of his eyes on me at the party, the one that still pulsed with curiosity over that text—leaned forward, hungry.
“I can’t just?—”
He cut me off with the smallest tilt of his head. “You can.”
We stared at each other for a long beat, the heat between us stretching tight like a wire.
Finally, I said, “I need fifteen minutes.”
The smile that touched his mouth was gone before I could be sure it was there. “I’ll be here.”
I turned back toward the shop, my knees suddenly unsteady. Inside, I shut the door and pressed my hands flat against the counter.
Fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes to decide whether I was the kind of woman who locked her shop in the middle of the day to follow a man who wouldn’t even tell her where they were going.
I already knew the answer.
I stared at the register, my reflection faint in the glossy surface, and tried to catch my breath. My fingers tapped against the countertop like I could drum out a rhythm that would make sense of the mess in my chest. Fifteen minutes wasn’t enough—not for a shower, not for a mental reset, not for any version ofme that might look presentable enough to stand next to Atticus Carver.
And yet, it was all the time I had.
I thought about calling someone—anyone—just to ground myself. To tell another human being what I was about to do. Safety check, accountability, all the sensible words people used in podcasts about surviving in a world where bad things happened to women who thought they could handle themselves.
For a second, my thumb hovered over Alana’s name in my phone. She would’ve answered, no hesitation. She would’ve told me not to be an idiot, to lock the door, to remember who I was and what I had to lose. But Alana wasn’t me, and her voice—though steady and smart—wouldn’t hold me when the loneliness pressed in after I hung up.
I scrolled further, stopped at Stephan.
My brother was the last person I wanted to involve in anything resembling my love life, but he was also the one person who knew me well enough to hear my tone and believe me if I said something wasn’t right. Plus, I’d told him about Alpha Mail.
My thoughts rambled as I oscillated between concerns.
What if I needed extra time away—more than fifteen minutes, more than an afternoon? What if this thing with Atticus grew into something larger, something I couldn’t step away from as easily as I stepped out of the shop to attend a birth?
I’d always handled everything by myself. The Nesting Place, the doula work, the classes, the late-night calls. All mine. I’d debated hiring an assistant more times than I could count—someone to watch the shop, to ring up pacifiers and swaddle blankets while I ran across town to catch a baby making its entrance. Every time, I’d talked myself out of it. Money was tight, sure, but deeper than that was my control. My need to prove I could do it alone. That I didn’t need anyone.
But standing here now, feeling the weight of Atticus’s presence just beyond the glass, I finally wished I had someone on payroll to lock the door and mind the register so I could walk away without guilt.
I was getting ahead of myself.
I hit Stephan’s name.
He answered on the third ring, his voice rough with sleep. “Sim? It’s the middle of the day, why do you sound like it’s 3 a.m.?”
“Why do you?” I replied.
I chewed my lip. “I’m going out with someone.”
