Page 92 of Her Rival

"I have nine thousand words. I'm going to delete most of them. The ones I keep are going to be the right ones. I needed to write the wrong ones first to find the right ones."

"Okay."

"I'm going to go back at it for another two hours. Then I'm going to be done for the day. Then I'd like a real meal and a real glass of wine and a real shower and to not think about words for the rest of the night."

"I can make a real meal happen."

"I figured."

She turned and went back inside. I watched her go.

I stayed on the deck another fifteen minutes, the afternoon coming down warm on the valley, and thought about the woman inside writing for three hours about, possibly, me. Possibly her father. Possibly something I didn't yet have language for. I'd kept her life uninterrupted for three hours and was about to do it for two more. It was a thing I'd wanted to be doing my whole life without knowing I'd wanted it.

I made her a real meal.

I made her a real glass of wine.

I drew her a real bath at six, because she'd said shower but I had a tub I didn't use and a woman in my house who'd earned a bath.

She ate at seven. Drank her wine at seven-twenty. Took the bath at eight, with the door open, with me sitting on the bedroom floor with my back against the bathroom doorframe on the other side of the wall, both of us not saying anything for forty minutes, the water turning her gold through the partly-open door, the steam coming out into the bedroom.

When she came out she was in nothing but a towel, and the air around her smelled like the bath oil I'd put in without asking and which she hadn't commented on, and she stood in the middle of my bedroom with her hair wet against her shoulders and her face flushed from the heat, and she looked at me.

I looked back.

She let the towel drop.

She didn't say anything when she did it.

She let me look.

I looked.

She was a woman I'd been in bed with twice. I'd seen her by candlelight and by lamplight and by morning light and by the dim yellow of the bedside lamp on its lowest setting. I had not, before this moment, seen her in the soft warm light of the bedroom in the early evening, body still flushed pink from a bath, hair still wet, eyes on me, telling me to come and get her.

I got up off the floor. I crossed the room. I picked her up.

She wrapped her legs around me automatically, the way she had at the front door ten days ago in a kiss that lasted half of half a heartbeat, except this time her legs were around my hips and her bath-warm body was bare against me and her arms came up around my neck, and she said, into the side of my throat:

"Take me to bed."

"Yeah."

I took her to bed.

I had a rug at the foot of the bed.

I'd bought it the year I moved in, on the recommendation of a designer Hollis Briar's wife had sent over to deal with the house I hadn't known how to furnish, and the designer had said every bedroom needs a rug at the foot of the bed, sir, and I'd said sure, and she'd picked it out herself. A thick deep-pile shag the color of cream. I'd used it exactly never until the night I laid Dani Hartley down on it.

I did not lay her down right away.

I held her against the side of the bed for a long minute first, with her legs still around me and her wet hair against my shoulder and her body the temperature of bathwater against me. I held her like that the way I'd wanted to hold her at one in the morning on Friday with the photograph on the counter, and at three in the morning yesterday with the nightmare just out of her, and hadn't, because in either of those moments she'd needed something other than holding.

She needed holding now.

She needed holding, and then she needed the rest of what I'd been carrying for her since the security guards walked her father out of my arena yesterday afternoon.

I laid her down on the rug.