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“You’re in an interesting mood,” she was saying to me.

I shook myself free of my thoughts. I shrugged. “I suppose.” We’d been around each other enough for her to notice a different mood of mine. It was a sobering thought. I was utterly failing to keep her at a distance, and the more contact we had together, the less I cared about that. Therein lay the problem.

We ordered drinks. She tried to order wine, and I changed it to water. “You’re too young,” I said at her look.

A silent spell fell upon us. I stared at her while she stared down at her lap. My hand was heavy on her leg.

“How have you been?” I found myself asking her. Making small talk like a civilized husband.

She sent me a brief glance, then looked down again. Something about my question put her on guard. I felt my gut dip. Had I been such a bastard that even such an innocuous inquiry made her wary?

The short answer? Yes. I hated myself for it even as I braced myself against falling further under her spell.

“Fine,” she said. That was all.

“Have you been working a lot?” I followed up with.

She shrugged, looking around at anything but me. “The usual. I keep busy. I’m supposed to fly to Paris for a YSL fragrance campaign and some other jobs in a few days.”

I felt myself tense. “How long will that last?” I remembered when the terms for it were being negotiated, but I hadn’t realized it was coming up so soon.

“I should be there for around two weeks.”

I processed that and no matter how I unpacked it, it left a bad taste in my mouth. “Is that really necessary? Two weeks seems an excessive amount of time.”

She finally looked at me directly. “I’m booked solid. You approved all of it.”

I was sure she wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean I wasn’t bothered. Two weeks in Paris. Traveling with Chester and working with God knew who. No, I didn’t like it. “It’s not the best timing. I have a lot going on in New York for the next few weeks. Things I can’t step away from without a lot of rescheduling.”

She bent her head down, brow furrowing in confusion. “Okay,” she said carefully. “I don’t see how that could be a problem. It’s not like my travel plans could affect you.”

I felt my nostrils flare, a tick starting up in my temple. I knew what I was feeling was unreasonable. Knowing didn’t make the feelings lesson.

I didn’t want her to leave. I didn’t want her traveling without me. When it came right down to it, I didn’t want her going anywhere without me. When had this happened? Our lives were completely separate. I had insisted upon it. It was preposterous for me to feel possessive about the very wife I’d spurned. The wife I tried my hardest to stay away from.

But I felt what I felt regardless of reason. A jealous itch under my skin. An empty ache in my gut. Denying it hadn’t lessened it, in fact it seemed to worsen by the minute.

“Where are you staying in Paris?” I asked tersely.

“The family apartments,” she answered, watching me. “Your father insisted,” she added defensively.

Well, that was something, at least. The family apartments were a very secure, controlled environment. She wouldn’t be able to sneeze without someone in my family hearing about it. Without it getting back to me. Good.

We ordered our food and a silence captured us again. I was determined for her to speak first, but she seemed much more content to keep her thoughts to herself than I was to let her. For my part, I was trying very hard to hold in a question.

I drank and watched her downcast face. Her lashes were so thick and long that I was trying to decide if they were fake or not. Usually you could tell, but with hers it was impossible to say.

“If you wanted my number, why haven’t you contacted me since you got it?” The words I’d wanted to say since exactly one hour after the last time I saw her burst out of me.

She took a drink of water, seemed to brace herself, and looked at me square on. “Did you want me to contact you?”

That shut me up. I didn’t even want to analyze that question, but I was afraid I already very much knew the answer. “Why did you want my number?” I countered.

Her perfectly straight teeth caught her lush lower lip, biting into it thoughtfully.

I was sitting up straight, elbows on the table, but at that I leaned forward, and the hand that wasn’t holding my drink went to grab her knee again. I wanted her lips closer. I wanted her closer. I set my drink down and gripped her other knee, pulling her deeper beneath the table, my hands slipping higher up her thighs.

How long would it take to get from this spot to somewhere private enough that I could peel her out of that contraption she was wearing and get my dick wet?