Life, at present, was goddamn glorious. And for the first time in a very long time, I found myself blissfully, blindly, blithely happy.
Just as I was at the moment.
I sighed, leaning back into Marcus the second he righted the zipper of my dress, eyeing the potted ivy on his dresser.
“That little guy needs a drink. Look, he’s wilting.”
“He sure does.”
“And your palm over there is being overwatered. Look at the tips of its leaves,” I said with a sorrowful sort of tone.
He kissed my neck, chuckling through his nose in puffs against my skin. “Maybe you can help me get them on the road to recovery.”
“Nurse Maisie, at your service.” With wistful longing, I said, “I wish I’d woken up here instead of coming this morning.”
“You can come here every morning as far as I’m concerned.” Another brush of his lips at my neck, this one coupled with a hot sweep of his tongue.
“Be careful what you wish for. I’d hate to become a nuisance.”
“You are many things, but a nuisance could never be one of them.”
I turned in his arms, smoothing his tie. “Will I see you tonight?”
“I’d hate to break the cycle. I’m afraid I’ve become accustomed to having you here.”
“It’s only been two weeks,” I teased.
“Sure, but what do you think about skipping a night?”
My lip slipped out in a pout.
“Exactly.”
“I hate sneaking around. Last night, Mother was in rare form. I don’t know what’s gotten into her, but I swear I thought she was going to follow me. So I took the subway. She’d never step foot in a station, never mind getting on a train.”
“Smart thinking. Was she waiting up for you?”
“Yes, but so was Dad. They alternated between glaring at each other and Dad shutting her down. I escaped to my room, unscathed.”
“Bless that man,” he said.
“Amen to that. One of these nights, I’m going to spend the night here and give her a stroke.” I glanced at the clock. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but she’s been impossible about my not going to work with her. I can’t wait to tell her about us and get it over with, come what may.”
“You’ve decided to tell her?” Marcus asked carefully.
I didn’t miss the note of hope and smiled.
“Oh, I was always going to tell her. I was sure before, but now it’s indisputable.”
“What?”
“How I feel about you.”
He descended for a kiss, a kiss touched with depth that defied words. It was a pact and an appreciation, one that I met in full.
I broke away, smiling up at him. “Any more of that, and I will be very, very late.”
“If it wouldn’t get you in trouble with the devil, I’d say fuck it before fucking you.”
The word from his lips sent a scandalous streak of heat straight between my legs, a space only just empty of him. Never before had I dated a man who would openly state his intent with that kind of language, and I found I liked it very much.
“Well, in eight to ten hours, you can fuck me all you want.”
“I’m glad you said so because I was already planning to.”
With a laugh, I stretched up to press my lips to his. And regretfully, I left his arms in search of my shoes.
I found one on the stairs, another in the entryway, my panties somewhere in between. My shoes I slipped on. The panties I tossed at him.
“Something to remember me by.”
He tested the fabric between long fingers, smirking. “As if I need a reminder. But I’ll take one all the same.”
My thighs clenched as I watched him slip the silk into his pocket, leaving his hand right there with them.
“I don’t want to go,” I whined.
“How about you text me when you leave Harvest Center? We’ll call it a long lunch.” He stepped into me. “We can meet here.”
“By the time I get here from Midtown, I’ll only have”—I did some quick math—“twenty minutes.”
“I can do a lot with twenty minutes.”
The kiss he laid on me promised the truth of that statement.
That beautiful jerk kissed me until I was wiggling against him with my arms locked around his neck.
He pulled away as much as he could for my death grip, smiling down at me like he knew exactly what he was doing. “Now, there’s something to remember me by.”
“God, you’re the worst, you know that?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Now, put on your disguise and get out of here before somebody sees you.”
I chuckled, pulling on my long coat and donning my silly hat. Glasses were last, and with a few final cloak-and-dagger looks out the window, I left, turning in the opposite direction of Longbourne to get off Bleecker as quickly as I could. And moments later, I slipped into the cab and gave the cabbie the address to the center, sighing happily as I removed my disguise.
Between my time with Marcus and my progress at work, I found myself feeling more productive and whole than I maybe ever had. Mother upheld her promise to let me do what I wanted with the charity, and so far, I’d used that time to find a new site for our first expansion and pull together an initial proposal. She dragged me to legal meetings, and I passed on every little scrap I’d learned to the Bennets. Marcus’s lawyer filed a motion to have the judge step in on discovery and leash my mother’s team, and our dreaded hearing on the matter rapidly approached. I despised the thought of being in that courtroom, sitting next to the herald of hatred, on the wrong side of Marcus. My only hope—the only hope any of us had—was that the judge would see reason and side with the Bennets.
Otherwise, we were all screwed.
And my mother would win.
That constant companion of my anxiety piped up, as it so often did. When we were together, nothing else seemed to matter. Nothing else existed. In the safety beyond his front door, it was just me and Marcus and the magic. But we lived under the shadow of our circumstance.
And that circumstance was a house of cards.
No one could find out, my mother least of all. And not for my own neck. For the sake of the Bennets. She might make my life miserable, but she would reduce the Bennets to rubble. For the time being, she was using legal channels, but God knew what lengths she would go to. I’d spent far too much time considering just what she might do to punish them, and my imaginings covered everything from permit meddling to arson.
And then there was the subject of Mrs. Bennet.
I knew exactly how my mother would react when we were found out—with the vitriol and vengeance of a flaming, fallen angel. But Mrs. Bennet was a mystery to me. I didn’t know if she would accept or deny me, and the thought of her disapproval did something undesirable to my stomach. Maybe she would accept me if things were different, if I were just any girl. Literally any other girl on the planet.
But there was a secret I held, one kept quietly in the deepest chamber of my heart. A secret that couldn’t even be acknowledged, certainly not aloud and barely to myself.
I desperately wanted her approval because without it, I could never be a Bennet.
It was silly and childish. It was indulgent and decadent and a thing I wasn’t allowed to wish for. But the little girl I once had been, the little girl who lived in my heart, listened to stories of the Bennets with the longing and hope I’d felt in fairy tales. Theirs was a model family, the kind I’d dreamed of as a child and believed with unwavering cynicism didn’t exist as an adult.