Chapter 24
For five days, I became polite.
Polite was worse than angry.
I stopped waiting in the kitchen when Alexander came home. Stopped asking if he had eaten. Stopped leaving tea on the table near his files. If we crossed in a hallway, I smiled and kept walking.
He noticed on the first day.
By the fifth, he despised it.
I learned this when he appeared beside the driver’s door one morning and dismissed the security detail.
“I’m taking you to work.”
“You have headquarters.”
“Get in, Grace.”
I looked at him.
“That sounded like an order.”
“Please get in.”
The word please cost him something.
I got in.
For ten minutes, neither of us spoke.
Then Alexander gripped the steering wheel harder.
“I hate this.”
I looked out the window. “You asked for it.”
“I asked you not to wait. I did not ask you to disappear while standing in the same house.”
“What’s the difference?”
He had no answer I could accept.
At the clinic, I got out before he could find one.
By late afternoon, Mia burst into the nurses’ station.
“Grace.”
“What?”
“There are military vehicles outside.”
I closed my eyes.
“Of course there are.”
Alexander stood at the curb in full dress uniform with a convoy behind him.
Coworkers openly stared through the windows.
“This is absurd,” I said when I reached him.
“Get in.”
“You promised to work on that.”
He opened the SUV door himself.
“Please.”
Inside, privacy glass cut us off from the world.
I turned on him.
“What do you want from me?”
His expression tightened.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know.”
“You told me not to wait, so I stopped. You told me you couldn’t give me an answer, so I stopped asking. You broke my heart, Alexander. You don’t get to be angry because I obeyed you.”
He stared at me.
The words seemed to do what bullets and politicians never had: leave him unprepared.
“What do you want?” I repeated.
His hand came up, fingers closing lightly around the back of my neck.
“You.”
Then he kissed me.
This kiss was different from the one at the gates.
No anger. No jealousy.
Only hunger sharpened by five days of absence.
When we parted, his forehead rested against mine.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.
It was the most vulnerable sentence I had ever heard from him.
“Neither do I.”
His thumb moved once against my skin.
“Then perhaps we stop pretending expertise is required.”
I almost smiled.
Almost.
“You still owe me an explanation.”
“I know.”
Outside, thunder rolled somewhere beyond the city.
By the time we reached the estate, the storm had followed us home.
