Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
“You’ve told it wrong,” he says quietly. For the table. For me. For the part of him I haven’t been introduced to yet.
“Have I?” The question comes out rougher than I meant it.
“There was one more thing.” He turns toward me in his chair, taking his time, his hand sliding from my shoulder to cradle the back of my neck. “There was this.”
And he kisses me.
Not the platform kiss, not the one staged for the cameras. This one he means, or else he’s the better liar of the two of us by a margin I can’t bear to think about, his mouth covering mine without any hurry at all, his hand cradling my jaw like he’s gentling something wild that’s finally quit fighting him.
And I forget the burnt sugar and the eight investors and the woman across the table watching her ambition slip its leash. I forget my own name and the better part of my principles.
I make that small sound against him again, the mortifying one I’ll deny on my deathbed, and I curl my fingers into the lapel of his dinner jacket and hold on, the floor of the lie having dropped clean away and the only solid ground left in the whole world is the mouth of the man I’ve spent eighteen years swearing I hated.
When he finally lets me go, the table breaks into applause.
I come back to the dining car one sense at a time. The cold weight of the silver. The rushing dark beyond the glass. Artie honking into a handkerchief about young love and how it takes him right back.
And Loukas’s eyes on mine, black and cracked open and not laughing at all, and I think, with what may be the last clear thought I’ll have for some while, that we’ve made a terrible miscalculation, the pair of us, that somewhere between the platform and this pudding the performance stopped being a performance, and neither one of us called the moment it turned.
Then Bettina lifts her wineglass, smiling a smile that doesn’t trouble her eyes, and says, in a voice like a key turning slow in a lock, “To the happy couple. And you must let me throw you a little party before the journey’s out. I’d so love to get to know your bride properly, Loukas. Every. Single. Thing about her.”
Chapter Seven
“HE’S DOING IT AGAIN,” Harry whispers, going pink to the ears, ducking her head over her lemonade like she’s the one who’s been caught. “Looking at you, I mean. I shouldn’t say anything, should I? It’s probably rude to point it out, only he’s been staring at the back of your head for ages and I didn’t want you thinking you’d imagined it.”
I don’t turn around.
I’ve made it a point of personal honor, over three days aboard this train, not to turn around every time I feel the weight of Loukas Karalis looking at me, the plain fact being that if I turned around every time I’d have done nothing else for seventy-two hours, and a woman has her pride.
“He’s cataloguing my flaws for the divorce,” I tell her, and Harry’s hand flies up to cover a startled laugh that escapes anyway, and then she peeks at me over her fingers like she’s worried she shouldn’t have found it funny.
I should explain about Harry, the reason I’ve survived this train with my sanity in one piece. Hilary Montgomery can’t be much past thirty, a soft, dark-haired, serious slip of a thing who blushes if you look at her straight on and apologizes for her opinions before she’s even finished having them. And she’s married to the most alarming man aboard, a golden, blue-eyed slab of Texas named Devon who looks like he was hewn out of a mountain by somebody with a grudge against soft things.
The contradiction of the two of them undoes me a little.
She found me at breakfast that first morning, or rather she crept up to my table and asked, twisting her napkin, whether the seat was taken, and whether I minded terribly, and whether she was bothering me, and I liked her so immediately and so completely that I’ve let her trail me ever since like a shy dark-eyed shadow.
Today they’ve cornered me in the observation car, the prettiest room on the train and the one I keep coming back to like a moth with poor judgment, all curved glass and low leather chairs turned to face the country.
And the country is what I can’t get over, the one sight I’d pay to look at if I had a dollar to spare. The Hill Country’s given way to something harder and wider, the land gone tawny and openhanded and enormous, the kind of distance that does something complicated to a person’s chest.
Out past the glass a pair of black vultures ride the midday lift in slow figure eights, not flapping once, just trusting the air to hold them, and I catch myself narrating them under my breath the way I do for my school groups, see how they don’t waste a single wingbeat, see how they let the heat do the work, before I remember I’m meant to be a sophisticated woman in a borrowed silk blouse and not a tour guide in muck boots.