Page 34 of Lady and the Butcher
“But you took me.”
He didn’t blink. “Yes.”
I tasted salt. “And Stephen? What does he know?”
“What he needs to,” he said. “He knows I don’t touch his family.”
“Except you are,” I said, throat tight. “Here we are. Daytime. No plausible deniability.”
He took a step toward me that I felt more than saw. “If you want deniability, say no and leave. If you want what you wrote, stop asking the wrong questions.”
“What are the right ones?”
“What you’ll wear,” he said, without missing a beat. “Where I’ll put my hands tonight. How long you’ll last if I make you stand in the window again.”
A tremor went through my legs. “I hate you.”
“You will,” he said. “And you won’t.”
He checked his watch. It wasn’t a flourish—it was logistics. “We have an hour before the shops get crowded. Dry your hair. Put on what you came in with. We’ll fix it.”
I should have bristled. I did, a little. But the bigger part of me—traitor, thrill-seeker, whatever we were calling her now—liked being told what to do by someone who made my skin feel like it had electricity under it.
When I looked up, he was close enough to kiss if kissing were a language we spoke. He didn’t touch me.
“Shoes,” he said.
I padded back to the bathroom, pulled on my clothes and sandals, and laughed once under my breath at the absurdity and the inevitability of it all. I brushed my hair into a quick, damp ponytail, dusted my cheeks with powder, and told my reflection—firmly—that she could do hard things, including walking behind a man like Atticus across a lobby without flinching.
I didn’t flinch. The lobby eyes did their thing again when we crossed to the car, curiosity tugged by his gravity. The driver opened my door. I slid into the cool dark and tried to memorize the sensation of choosing this.
Charleston at noon was a knife of light. King Street shimmered—a parade of glossy windows, tourist sundresses, and handbags I could pay three months of my mortgage with. He didn’t ask where I wanted to start. He told the driver where to stop, and we stopped there.
The first boutique had a door that dinged politely and a woman with a name tag in a font that implied she also knew how to monogram linen napkins. She glanced at me, then at him, and recalibrated fast.
“We need a rack,” he said, not loud, not arrogant—just the way you’d saywaterin the desert. “Dresses. Day to night.Nothing fussy. Something that looks like it was made for her even if it wasn’t. Heels she won’t fall in.”
The saleswoman’s smile rearranged itself into competence. “Of course.” She swept a measuring look over me, one that bounced off my damp ponytail and landed on the parts of me that made clothes choices complicated. Not difficult—just honest. Hips. Thighs. The breasts I pretended not to notice under most lighting.
“We’re not doing tailoring,” he added, and that took the needle out of the situation. “We’re doing now.”
“Understood.” She snapped her fingers, and a younger associate materialized with an armful of draped fabric.
The dressing room was a small cathedral of mirrors. I stood on a low platform that made me feel like a reluctant debutante. He sat. Not in the tucked-away boyfriend chair outside the waiting area. In the room. The saleswoman didn’t blink. The door stayed mostly closed, his presence its own kind of permission.
“Try this,” the associate said, pressing a slip of silk into my hands, bias-cut and innocuous until I pulled it on and realized it was designed to morph into a second skin. I caught my breath. It was a color that didn’t have a fruit name. Bone? Sand? A warm neutral that looked accidental and expensive.
I turned to the mirror. The fabric skimmed my stomach without clinging, draped at the hips like a secret, framed the curve of my shoulders in a low cowl. I felt naked and armed at once.
Atticus didn’t speak for a full three seconds. Then: “Turn.”
I did. The back dipped farther than the front, revealing a spine I usually forgot I liked. The silk floated at my calves.
“That one,” he said.
“It’s the first one I tried on.”
“It’s the right one.”
