Page 99 of The Stranger

This definitely wasn’t the reception I was hoping for.

“What’s going on?” I begin to follow when she slides a glance over her shoulder that stops me in my tracks. I’ve enjoyed her haughty looks, and her cutting put-downs, but this feels different.

Her attention pivots to the garden; the doors open to the sun-bleached terrace. “What do you call French doors?”

“What?”

“What do the French call French doors?”

“Portes-fenêtres,” I answer unthinkingly.

“Isn’t that just window doors? The translation, I mean.”

“Yes. Sort of.” I give my head a brief shake. “Primrose, what is it—what’s wrong?”

“Why would there be anything wrong?”

“Because you’re behaving like there is.” Tension tightens my belly as I recall Zoe whispering ‘Alejandro’ as I left the kitchen. Zoe thinks she’s fucking the viticulturist?

“Nope, nothing wrong here. All is hunky-dory in the land of Primrose.” She pauses. Inhales. “If we discount what happened last night, I suppose.”

Because she is fucking the viticulturist?

I push the ridiculous thought away, as I casually rub my hand across my smooth cheek. The action does not reflect my internal world as I suffer her words, her meaning, like a fist thrust beneath my ribs. “Discount,” I repeat dully.

“Disregard. Forget, if you prefer.”

“I know what it means,” I snap because last night wasn’t an accounting error—an incorrect entry on a fucking P&L statement. I don’t want to discount, disregard, or fucking ignore what happened between us. I don’t think I can forget it, not when I want to do it again.

I’m no stranger to sex, but it feels as though the memory of her might be imprinted on my mind, and on my body for some time yet. The way her lips trembled under mine, and how I shook like a boy with his first woman.

I’ve never before acted so recklessly.

I have never been inside a woman bare since Allegra.

Fuck, I so desperately want to be inside Primrose again.

“It’s what I want to do. Please,” she adds, hardly as a courtesy.

Something hot and stubborn unfurls in my chest. I won’t allow her to rewrite what passed between us just because the daylight hours have made its memory inconvenient.

I place my hand to her shoulder, my tone soothing. “Primevère⁠—”

“It’s Primrose,” she says, shrugging it off. “I want to go back to how things were before.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I want to go back to you not liking me.” Her chin comes up, and she regards me with such magnificent disdain, somehow managing to look down her nose at me. It’s quite an impressive feat for someone who doesn’t even reach my shoulder.

“What gives you the impression I didn’t like you?”

“You did,” she answers immediately. “I don’t think that should change just because we almost had sex.”

“Almost had sex?”

“Technically,” she mutters mulishly.

“Little flower, you are fooling yourself.”