Which is fine in private, of course. Racy is what most women are going for when they’re on a mission of seduction. But that’s not my mission. I’m trying to sell high-fashion lingerie to a panel of snobby French experts.
My interest is purely professional.
Or so I tell myself as I don the teddy and bikini panties with reflective crystals stitched into the lace and step in front of the mirror in our hotel room.
Jeffrey texted ten minutes ago to say he’d be here in half an hour with Chinese takeout. I’ll have plenty of time to change back into my dress, and I really need to see this particular set out on a human body to decide if it fits with the rest of the collection.
These are the lies I tell myself, but deep down I know I’m not going to change, and that the reason I chose this piece is that I already know it’s not going to make the final cut.
It’s lovely—made of soft white silk and decorated with thin silver thread and tiny crystals that make it look like I’ve walked through an enchanted spider web—but the bottom of the teddy is too frilly to match the classic lines of the rest of the collection. From the moment I started working on the test pattern for the piece months ago, I had a feeling it wasn’t quite right, but I loved the spider web effect too much to give up without executing the full design.
Every time I’ve tried it on, I love the way it makes me feel.
This isn’t the first time. There have been late nights when I was stuck and feeling like a talentless hack who was never going to get out of the panty design division, and I’d slip my arms through the spaghetti straps and tie the velvet bow between my breasts and think—If I can make a woman in black wool socks, who hasn’t washed her hair in nearly a week look this good in lingerie, think how beautiful a real woman is going to feel.
But I’m a real woman, too.
I am.
Even if the curse is real, I’m still every bit as alive as other people, at least for now.
I feel that truth in a way I haven’t in so long. I was sleep-walking through life, and then Jeffrey stomped in, giving orders and bossing me around, making so much noise I couldn’t close my eyes again.
Or my heart…
If I do this—if we do this—it’s going to be more than sex. I like Jeffrey, possibly even more than like Jeffrey. I can’t stop thinking about the way he knelt to take off my boots. At first, I’d thought it was the undressing aspect that made me feel flushed all over, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that the actual act had little to do with the rush.
It was the tenderness in the moment that has me hitting replay on the memory again and again, like a morphine addict desperate for another fix.
Jeffrey saw that I was afraid and gently stepped in to offer practical support.
It’s such a little thing, but to a person who has felt unseen for so long, it seems huge. It feels like recognition. Acceptance. A little like…love.
If he’s falling in love with me, I should leave.
I should pack my things, walk up the hill to my family’s estate, and lock myself away in my tower for the next six months. And then, if I wake up on December nineteenth and I’m not dead after all, maybe Jeffrey and I can pick up where we left off.
Yes, he has free will, but I have an obligation to do what’s right by the people I care about, and it isn’t right to get in any deeper with him.
Not when I’m still ninety percent sure I don’t have a future to promise.
“Maybe he doesn’t want your future,” I whisper to my reflection, but it knows better, and so do I.
I’ve led such a sheltered life that vast swaths of the human experience are unknown to me. I’ve never flown on a commercial airplane, never walked unfamiliar streets in a foreign country, never filed my own taxes, or rented an apartment, or worked a job that involved getting up and going to an office every morning. I don’t know what it feels like to live alone or kiss a stranger or make plans for the future beyond my twenty-sixth birthday. But I know what it feels like to fall in love.
Rafe taught me that. And I’m grateful to him for it.
If you’re really grateful, you’ll leave before you hurt Jeffrey the way you hurt the first man you thoughtlessly fell in love with.
I shake my head. This isn’t the same. Jeffrey is a grown man capable of making informed decisions and not a boy swept up in the rush of first love. If he thinks I’m worth the risk, then who am I to tell him otherwise?