Page 36 of Lady and the Butcher
He didn’t apologize. “You don’t want the mechanics, Lady. They’ll spoil the taste.”
The word hit me harder than it should have. Lady again. Not Simone. Not Rogers. Lady.
My skin prickled with recognition because it couldn’t be coincidence. He had to be Alpha Mail—there was no other explanation. The women I’d overheard in The Nesting Place had whispered about it with reverence, laughing nervously when they admitted all the women were called that. Lady, like it was a code. A cover. A way to keep things anonymous, even when you were naked and begging.
Only, here, the anonymity was broken. He knew my name. He knew my brother. That made the title feel both protective and absurd, like he was trying to layer secrecy over a connection that already existed. It twisted me up inside, making me question what game we were really playing.
“Everything has a mechanism,” I said, because if I didn’t intellectualize a little, I would crawl into his lap. “Who read my letter first? Who sent it to you? How did you get my number? Why were you at Stephen’s party, if you’d already read it? Where does your life intersect with mine when it shouldn’t?”
His gaze didn’t move off me. The server might as well have been a ghost. “Your letter was read,” he said. “By the person who reads them, because that’s their job. It was sent to me because that’s what I wanted. Your number came because I asked forit. And I was at your brother’s party because I’m your brother’s friend. It’s that simple.”
“You make it sound so tidy.”
“It is tidy,” he said. “You want it to be chaos so you can call it fate and not choice.”
The worst part was how much I enjoyed being called out when he did it like that. “Stephen trusts you.”
“He should.”
“He thinks you’re good people,” I said, not hiding the skepticism, and his mouth did that curve like he’d tasted a good whiskey.
“I’m good to the people who are mine,” he said. “He’s not in danger from me. Neither are you.”
“You can’t know that,” I said. “You say that like you haven’t built a life on decisions other people would call dangerous.”
I didn’t know any of that for sure. I was guessing.
He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t confuse appetite with risk.”
“And what am I?”
“Appetite.”
I had to put the fork down because my hand wasn’t steady.
We didn’t talk for a while. We ate. He watched me as if he had a right to, which made something low and traitorous in me preen. The room hummed around us, all clink and muted talk and linen, and I felt the bubble of unreality thin enough to press my finger through. This could be a day in a life that wasn’t mine. It could also be the first day of a life that was.
“Tonight,” he said, when the check disappeared and the car reappeared like we’d conjured it, “you’ll come back to the suite. You’ll put on the dress. You’ll take it off only when I say.”
“Possessive,” I said.
“Honest,” he returned.
He didn’t take me straight back. We stopped at a salon with frosted windows and a hum behind them. A receptionist lookedup, looked at him, and reorganized her afternoon in thirty seconds. A woman with quick hands washed my hair, blew it out, coaxed it into something that looked like I’d woken up in a commercial. Another woman slicked a sheer wash of color on my mouth, courtesy of the lip balm he’d made me buy. It was all done without talk about my “big night.”
No winks. No conspiracies. Just a team that understood a transformation without belittling it.
I watched myself become the version of me who could stand next to a man like Atticus in a glass box and not look like she’d gotten lost. I didn’t know if I liked her. I didn’t know if Iwasher.
Back in the car, garment bags rustled. I laid a hand over them like a mother hen and rolled my eyes at myself.
“You’re careful with things you’ve decided to keep,” he said.
“I’m careful with things that cost more than my mortgage.”
“You’re careful with yourself,” he corrected, and I didn’t answer because the answer was yes and also not nearly enough.
We were quiet up the elevator. The suite opened, bright and the same and somehow not. He set the bags down across the sofa and untied one, lifted the silk dress free with a reverence that made my throat feel pinched.
