The women scattered through the room didn't notice a thing—kept right on talking, oblivious, while around them their husbands and their pastors and their delegates all surfaced at once, blinking, bereft, cut off mid-reach from whatever they'd been reaching for.
I didn't wait to see if it came back.
I set the warm glass on the bar, slipped out through the crush of suits, and made for the elevators with my heart slamming and one thought running on a loop: he has the room number.Whether the message had gone through before the crash or died in the spinning wheel, I had no idea.That was the thing about throwing yourself off a cliff.You don't get to find out if there's water at the bottom until you're already in the air.
The elevator was crowded.Four men, all of them—I couldn't help it, I did the math—objectively good-looking in that scrubbed, monied, ruinous way.Nobody spoke.Everybody watched the numbers climb.And I stood there in the cologne and the silence and looked at the back of every neck and thought: is it you?Or you?Did I just give my room number to the man standing eight inches to my left, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his shoulder?
Two.Six.Nine.
The doors opened on twelve and I stepped out alone.Nobody followed.The hall stretched away beige and silent and humming with that same recycled air, and I nearly ran, key card already out, and let myself into 1218, shut the door, and leaned back against it.
Then I went into the bathroom, ran the cold tap, and bent down and splashed it over my face.I stared at myself dripping in the mirror—the wet hair, the five-o'clock shadow, the eyes that for once didn't look unimpressed at all.
“God,” I told my reflection.“I hope this is worth it.”
The knock came.
Not loud.Three soft raps.
I dried my hands.My pulse was going somewhere up in my throat.I crossed the beige room, put my hand on the cold metal handle, then took a deep breath that did nothing at all to settle me, and opened the door.
And every smart, cynical, well-defended thing I had ever believed about myself went straight out of my head.
He filled the frame.Tall enough that I looked up, which I almost never do.Dark hair, near black, pushed back from a face that didn't seem like it should be legal to wear in public—a hard clean jaw shadowed faint with stubble, a mouth that was trying for composure and not quite managing it, and God, the eyes, a blue so pale and so direct that when they found mine the whole hallway tilted half a degree under my feet.The suit was beautiful, charcoal, cut close, the tie already loosened and the top button open at a throat I suddenly wanted to taste.The collar was open just enough that I could see it, resting against his skin, catching the dim hall light.
A thin gold chain.I wondered if that tiny gold cross was nestled between his perfect pecs.
He looked at me.I looked at him.Neither of us said a word, and the silence was its own live thing, crackling in the six inches of air between us, and I felt the desire come off him in a wave so strong it nearly knocked the breath out of me—all that held-down, locked-away, starved need pointed directly at me, and underneath my skin something answered it, hot and instant and absolutely beyond my control.
I had come to Lincoln to expose a liar.
I just hadn't expected him to be the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
ChapterFour
Harrison
Ihad stood at the door for a full thirty seconds before I knocked, and in that time I prayed—actually prayed, head bowed in a beige hallway like a man at an altar rail—that no one would answer.That the number had died in the dead app.
If that happened, I could turn around and ride the elevator back down to my suite.Return to my mother and the locked, lightless room of my life, and call this what I always called it afterward: a fever that passed.
Then the door opened, and the prayer died in my throat, because God, apparently, has a sense of humor after all.
He was the face.The one real face in that whole grid of cowards, mine included.And in person it was worse because the photograph hadn't caught the way he held himself, loose and unafraid, or the dark-blond hair pushed back damp from his face, or the eyes that took me in once, head to shoe, and didn't flinch from a single inch of what they found.I was used to being looked at.But I was not used to being seen, and this man saw me, and I felt it land somewhere under the sternum where the hollow feeling lived.
Neither of us spoke.Names were the one currency neither of us could spend.I stepped over the threshold and he stepped back to let me in.The door swung shut behind me with a soft pneumatic sigh, sealing us in.I thought, helplessly, of the ancient inner sanctums of myth, those forbidden chambers hidden deep within tombs or temples.The kind of sacred, perilous ground you were permitted to stand upon only once, and only if you were willing to offer up your life as the price of admission.
He reached up, took my face in both hands, and kissed me, and the temple came crashing down.My entire body trembled as his soft lips pressed against mine, and I grabbed his upper arms to keep from falling to my knees.The man’s scent, the feel of his stubble against the skin around my mouth provoked a groan of pleasure I didn’t recognize, because it had been so long since I’d made it.
I had not been touched by another man in eleven months.
I’d counted.That was the obscene private arithmetic of my life—the careful spacing of sins, a back-room encounter in a town too small to have a name I'd remember.Months of fasting, of cold control, of standing under the stage lights telling my congregants to master the very hunger that was eating me alive from the inside out.Eleven months since I’d allowed myself this sin.And now his mouth was on mine, unhurried, certain, and I made a sound against his lips that I would have been ashamed of anywhere else on earth, and here it felt like the first true word I'd said in a year.
He walked me backward toward the bed without breaking the kiss, his hands already working my tie loose, and I let him.That was the thing no one would ever believe about Pastor Harrison Cole: that the only peace I’d ever known came from being the one who yielded.From laying the whole crushing architecture of myself down at another man's feet and being, for a few fleeting moments, nobody's pillar.Nobody's pulpit.Just a body, and a need, and a pair of hands that didn't know my name and didn't give a damn.
He got the jacket off my shoulders, my shirt open, and his palms spread flat over my bare chest.Then his thumb found the little gold cross and went still.
“There it is,” he murmured, the first words either of us had risked, and there was no mockery in it, only a kind of wonder.He looked up at me through his lashes.“You wore it for me.”
