and it was neither mundane nor typical. It was cool and distant, and it was, she was certain, a remnant of their exchange in the stairwell.
Was this how it would be for the rest of their time together? Strained and difficult? Please, no, she immediately answered herself. Somehow, they had to recapture their earlier magic. If only for a little while.
“Yes,” she said, even though her stomach was roiling too much for her to consume anything. She only wanted some kind of conversation with him that wasn’t anxious.
“Please.”
She strode to the breakfast cart, standing as close to Marcus as she dared, watching him pour. He had magnificent hands, strong with sturdy fingers and no adornments. Looking at his hands, she would never have guessed he worked for a brokerage house. He had the hands of someone who used them for something other than pushing the keys of a computer or cell phone all day.
“Do you play any sports?” she asked impulsively.
His expression was surprised as he handed her her coffee. “I thought you didn’t want to know anything about me.”
Oh, yeah. She didn’t. She already knew more than she wanted to. So maybe it wouldn’t hurt to know a little bit more. Ignoring the convoluted logic in that, she said, “I changed my mind.”
He handed her her coffee with a resigned sigh. “Squash,” he told her. “Three times a week. With another one of the—” He halted, as if he’d been about to reveal something else about himself, but this time it was something he didn’t want her to know. “With a coworker,” he finally finished. He sipped his coffee, then met her gaze levelly. “Why do you ask?”
“Your hands,” she said before she could stop herself. “You have good hands, Marcus. They’re not the hands of an office worker.”
His eyes seemed to go a little darker at that, and she remembered that there were other ways his hands were good, too. Lots and lots of other ways. She spun around, striding away on slightly shaky legs. But when she realized she was walking straight toward the bed, she quickly sidetracked toward two chairs arranged on each side of a table near the window.
“It’s still snowing,” she said as she sat. “Maybe even harder than before.”
Marcus strode to the window, lifted one curtain for a scant moment, then let it drop. “I guess we could turn on the TV to see what the weather guys are saying about how much longer this will last.”
“I suppose we could.”
But neither of them did. They only looked at each other expectantly, almost as if they were daring the other to do it. Della knew why she didn’t. She wondered if Marcus’s reason mirrored her own.
Finally, he folded himself into the other chair, setting his cup on the table beside hers. He crossed his legs with deceptive casualness, propped an elbow on the chair arm to rest his chin in his hand and, looking her right in the eye, asked, “Who’s Geoffrey?”
Della felt as if someone punched her right in the stomach. Obviously he’d heard more of the phone conversation than he’d let on. She wondered how much. She wondered even harder about how she was supposed to explain her relationship with Geoffrey to Marcus. It wasn’t as though she could be vague about something like that.
She reminded herself she didn’t have to tell Marcus anything. Not the truth, not a fabrication, nothing. She could say it was none of his business, repeat their agreement not to disclose any personal details about each other—which he’d already breached a number of times, one of which had been at her own encouragement—and change the subject.
But she was surprised to discover there was a part of herself that wanted to tell him about Geoffrey. And not just Geoffrey, but about everything that had led to her meeting him. She wanted to tell Marcus everything about the mess that had started on New Year’s Day to herald the beginning of the worst year of her life, about the months of fear and uncertainty that had followed, right up until her encounter with him at Palumbo’s. She wanted to tell him about how she hadn’t felt safe or contented for eleven months. About how lonely she’d been. About how hopeless and scared she’d felt.
At least until her encounter with him at Palumbo’s. It was only now that Della realized she hadn’t experienced any of those feelings since meeting Marcus. For the first time in eleven months—maybe for the first time in her life—she’d been free of anxiety and pleasantly at ease. She’d spent the past twelve hours ensconced in a perfect bubble of completeness, where nothing intruded that could cause her harm or pain. All because of a man whose last name she didn’t even know.
But she couldn’t tell him any of that, either.
She couldn’t say a word. She’d taken a virtual vow of silence about what had happened in New York, and she’d been told that if she revealed anything to anyone, it could compromise everything. And then the last eleven months of living in hiding and being so relentlessly alone would have been for nothing.
Two weeks, she reminded herself. That was how long Geoffrey had told her she had to wait. Only two more weeks. In sixteen days, everything would be revealed, everything would come to light, and Della would be free of all of them. Of Geoffrey, of Egan Collingwood, of her boss Mr. Nathanson and everyone else at Whitworth and Stone. And even if that freedom meant losing everything she had now and starting all over somewhere else, even if it meant becoming an entirely new person, at least she would be done with all of it. She would be safe. She would be free. She would be done. She just had to hold on for two more weeks.
She opened her mouth to tell Marcus that Geoffrey was none of his business and then change the subject, but instead she hedged, “Well. So much for forgetting about the episode in the stairwell. And you promised.”
“I’ve made a lot of promises since meeting you,” he reminded her. “And I haven’t kept many of them. You should probably know that about me. I’m great at making promises. Terrible at keeping them.”
She nodded. “Good to know.”
“Doesn’t make me a terrible person,” he told her. “It just makes me more human.”
It also made him an excellent reminder, Della thought. His assertion that he couldn’t keep promises illustrated more clearly why she couldn’t tell him anything more about herself. She might very well become the topic of his next cocktail party anecdote or an inadvertently shared story with a colleague who had some connection to the very life she was trying to escape. Not because he was a bad person, as he had said. But because he was human. And humanity was something Della had learned not to trust. “So who is he, Della?”
She hesitated, trying to remind herself again of all the reasons why she couldn’t tell Marcus the truth—or anything else. Then, very softly, she heard herself say, “Geoffrey is a man who … who kind of …” She sighed again. “He kind of takes care of me.”
Marcus said nothing for a moment, then nodded slowly. His expression cleared some, and he looked as if he completely understood. That was impossible, because there was still a lot of it that even Della didn’t understand.
“You’re his mistress, you mean,” Marcus said in a remarkably matter-of-fact way. “It’s all right, Della. I’m a big boy. You can spell it out for me.”
It took a moment for what he was saying to sink in. And not only because the word mistress was so old-fashioned, either. Marcus thought she and
