Page 54 of The Dragon’s Good Girl

I also know that if I leave, he'll let me.

So I open the door and go.

By the time I reach my car, I'm breathing too hard for someone who only walked across a gravel driveway. I get behind the wheel but don't start the engine, staring through the windscreen while the last few minutes replay whether I want them to or not.

I can still taste him. I can still feel the heat of his body lingering on my skin, and I have no idea whether walking away was the smartest thing I've done in years or an act of spectacular self-sabotage.

Eventually, I drive home.

I don't open the website or check whether he's messaged me. I don't book another session, and for now, that has to be enough.

Before bed, I set my alarm for 5:45. I've never been a morning-walk person, and there's every chance I'll hate myself when it goes off, but the idea of starting the day outside instead of immediately reaching for my phone sounds strangely good.

Then I turn off the light and let the decision I made tonight stand.

Chapter Ten

Soren

The bed is still a mess.

The blankets are twisted where Margot was beneath me, one pillow half on the floor, and the room still holds too much of my heat. I should straighten it, open a window, do anything other than stand here staring at the place she was only minutes ago.

Red.

She said it and I stopped. No questions, no hesitation, exactly as I promised her I would. The moment the word left her mouth, nothing mattered except giving her the space she'd asked for.

I would do it again without hesitation, but I hate that she needed to say it.

What I can't stop thinking about is everything she said before she left. She saw a woman leave this house and believed the worst thing she could have believed—not about me, but about herself. That none of this was different. That she had taken every uncontrolled thing I'd done because I wanted her and mistaken it for something she could buy by the hour.

A month ago, she would have been right.

She isn't anymore.

I started closing my roster days ago. No new clients, and the existing ones moved carefully rather than dropped because they trusted me and I wasn't going to repay that trust by disappearing without explanation. Gael helped arrange the transfers to Corvin and Mikael, and the woman Margot saw tonight was one of the last appointments I'd already committed to.

I had planned to tell Margot tonight.

Not after the session, as I'd originally considered. Gael made certain I understood exactly what was wrong with that idea. I was going to tell her before I touched her that I'd stopped taking other clients, that whatever was happening between us had gone well beyond anything I could pretend was professional, and that if she wanted to walk away, I would let her.

I told her most of it.

I just didn't know she'd already spent twenty minutes in the parking lot convincing herself of the opposite.

By the time I finally leave the session room, I have no interest in seeing anyone downstairs. I go directly to my rooms and leave the lights off when I enter.

I don't need them to know what's here.

Her hair tie is still beside the lamp, and next to it is the ridiculous little frame I bought for the peonies I pressed because six centuries of life have brought me to preserving flowers for a woman who doesn't know I kept them. The robe I stole from the laundry sits folded at the foot of the bed.

Then I see the open drawer.

I cleared it several days ago without allowing myself to examine the decision too closely. There had been nothing important inside, only things I'd accumulated and forgotten, so I moved them somewhere else and left the space empty.

For her. So that she would have her own space in my nest.

I stare at it now and wonder what exactly I imagined she would put there. Clothes, perhaps. Something for her hair. One of the books she's started buying simply because she wants them. Small, ordinary pieces of her life appearing among mine until neither of us remembered when it happened.