HIS STRIPPER, HIS WIFE novel Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Bianca

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded first, then remembered he was the kind of man who needed to hear things out loud.

“Yes,” I said.

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“That’s all I needed to hear, angry bird.” He pressed his lips to my neck, then to my forehead, and something about the forehead one undid me more than anything else that had happened in the last thirty minutes.

Then he gently pulled his hand from inside me and I watched, completely unable to look away, as he brought his fingers to his mouth and licked them clean with the most unbothered expression on his face.

Something snapped in my chest and I leaned forward to kiss him. He did not get to taste me alone, that was not fair and I refused to accept it but he pulled back.

Not rudely, not dramatically, he just leaned away slightly and the next thing I knew his hands were at the front of my gown, tying the thin rope I had completely forgotten about, fixing the fabric back over my shoulders like he was wrapping something up for storage.

I sat there and let him do it because I genuinely did not know what else to do. When he finished, he didn’t move away. He just held me, both arms around me, still on his lap, and looked at me with that completely unreadable, infuriating straight face.

I was frustrated, I was more than frustrated, there is a specific kind of misery that comes from being taken to the edge of something and then having the door closed politely in your face, and I was sitting in the middle of it, on this man’s lap, at thirty thousand feet, with my body still very much convinced that something was supposed to happen.

I tried to move away but he didn’t let me, he just sat there, holding me, looking at me, saying absolutely nothing.

“You’ve got something to say?” he asked eventually.

I didn’t answer, I just tried to shift off his lap again and he didn’t budge, didn’t tighten his grip forcefully, just kept me there like it required no effort at all.

His watch beeped. “Time’s up,” he said, glancing down at it. “We’re landing soon.”

I nodded slowly, released me and I stood up, smoothing my gown down and moving back to my original seat across the aisle, trying very hard to look like a normal person who had spent the flight reviewing acquisition documents.

He stood and moved to the other side without a word, picked up his papers again, and became that same composed, unreachable man who had barely looked at me when I boarded.

I stared at the window. “Why do all of this if you weren’t going to follow through.” I paused, “left me hanging while you should have fucked me.”

I meant to just think it, I truly did, it was supposed to stay inside my head where embarrassing thoughts belong but it came out fully formed, loud enough to be heard, rolling off my tongue before I could catch it.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever experienced. I could not look at him. I stared hard at the seat in front of me and willed myself to dissolve into it. I was almost certain he was smiling. I could not confirm this because I had decided that looking at his face was no longer something I was willing to do for the rest of this flight or possibly ever.

A few minutes later we landed and I hadn’t moved from my position of aggressive window staring when Felix opened the curtain from the back and stepped through, he picked up the files from Adrian’s side without a word.

11:54 Wed, Jul 22 d

Chapter 23

“See you later,” Adrian said, and I looked up just in time to watch him walk out of the plane.

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Outside, two cars were waiting on the tarmac. I watched him get into the first one without looking back. A man I hadn’t seen before appeared at my side and gestured toward the second car, and I followed him because what else was I going to do.

The drive was long enough for the embarrassment to settle into something quieter and the quiet gave me too much time to think, which was its own problem. The city outside the window was different, new buildings, different signs, different air even and I pressed my face slightly toward the glass and let the unfamiliar streets do their job of distracting me.

The hotel, when we arrived, was not a modest one, I noticed that immediately. My room, when they took me to it, had a view that made the whole thing feel Slightly unreal.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment after the door closed, looked at the ceiling, and had a brief, private conversation with myself about the choices I had made in the last several hours.

Then my phone beeped. It was Felix.

“You should have arrived at the hotel by now. For everything you need. I’ll send my cousin over in the morning. He will fix it, we don’t want any form of media around.”

“okay” I typed back

A second message followed almost immediately.

Check your mail when you wake up. “I forwarded some things to do.”

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