Page 35 of Lady and the Butcher
A laugh bubbled up and died in my throat. “You’re not even going to pretend to be a man who requires options?”
“I know what I like on you,” he said, and heat climbed the back of my neck because theon youdid something dangerous to my insides.
We still tried on options—because I needed a montage to calm the part of me that wasn’t sure if the silk was a costume. A black sheath that made me feel like a courtroom. A floral that made me look like someone’s well-funded niece. He said very little, but his very little was a scalpel. “No.” “Too sweet.” “Too loud for the room I want you in.” He wasn’t dressing a doll—he was calibrating a presence.
The silk stayed.
Shoes next: straps that would leave marks by midnight, block heels that would not. He chose a pair I would have walked past for being too simple—nude leather, barely-there straps, a lift that turned my legs into the best version of themselves without promising to murder my arches. I caught my reflection with the shoes and the dress and felt the click you get when a puzzle piece slides in without wobble.
“I can’t afford all of this,” I said, reflexively, even though this was very clearly not my wallet.
He didn’t speak.
The look on his face told me everything I needed to know about whathecould and couldn’t afford. So, I believed him.
12
Atticus handed his card to the counter without looking at it. The staff pretended not to stare.
“Stop it,” he said mildly to me, and the command made my mouth go dry. “If you need to pay for something, buy the lip balm.”
“I already own every lip balm,” I muttered, but I picked one up and paid for it, anyway, because he wasn’t wrong.
We walked three doors down to lingerie. The air changed when we entered. Salespeople in black moved the way dancers do, all sleek efficiency and soft voices. The room was dove-gray and feminine without being sweet. I felt my skin tighten.
He didn’t follow me into the fitting room this time. He sat outside with an ankle propped on a knee and a look that made even the mannequins stand straighter. The fitter, a woman whose hands had seen a thousand bodies and no illusions, measured me with the kind of competence that felt like a mercy.
“We’ll start here,” she said, pressing a set into my hands that was all clean lines and fine mesh, nothing girlish, everything adult. A second set was darker, a suggestion ratherthan a statement. A third—ivory, whisper-thin—made my breath hiccup.
I put the first on and looked at myself. Shoulders back because she told me to. Stomach soft because I am alive. The mesh smoothed and revealed at once. I hated that I cared what he would think. I loved that I already knew.
I stepped out.
He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t let his gaze drop like a man in a movie. He looked at my face first and let the rest be an extension of what he found there.
“Turn,” he said, and the word was a warm hand on my lower back.
I did. The band hugged me. The briefs were cut high enough to make my legs look carved, low enough to leave too much of me bare. I swallowed.
“That one,” he said.
“We still have two more,” I said.
“We’ll take them. But that one,” he repeated, and then, very quietly, for me alone: “for today.”
I changed, my fingers clumsy on hooks and straps. I faced a mirror and told the woman in it that she was not a visitor in her own body.
He paid again. He didn’t look at the total. I sucked in a breath that tasted like expensive silk and realized I had to eat something soon or I’d fall over.
He must have read that calculation on my face because he steered me, hand at the small of my back, into a place two doors down where the tables were small and the napkins were thicker than the towels in my bathroom. He didn’t ask what I wanted. He told the server. Oysters, a salad with more adjectives than lettuce, sparkling water, one glass of Chablis that I sipped slowly to keep from floating into the ceiling.
“You going to ask me more questions,” he said, after the oysters arrived, “or are you going to rehearse all the reasons you shouldn’t be here and say none of them out loud?”
“Both,” I said primly, stabbing an avocado. “Are you Alpha Mail?”
“I told you what you get.”
“Vague,” I said. “Maddening. On brand.”
