Page 210 of The Professor's Wife

He pressed a kiss to the tip of my bandaged finger. “Lucy.”

I watched him closely.

His mask was impenetrable.

I found his gentleness worse than his physical blows to my face and body. It took everything inside me not to let my own mask drop. Beneath it was pure hatred and disgust.

Sometimes those emotions turned inward. Other times, I was grateful there wasn’t another woman in my place. No one deserved to learn how to survive him.

While my freedom was gone, I still found ways to escape inside my mind. My rebellion leaked out of me in strange little ways.

Like being able to watch him now, taking care of me, smiling at him, all the while thinking:

I hate you, Oliver Black. I wish you were dead.

He met my gaze and looked warmly at me. “I think you’ve stopped bleeding.”

I never stopped bleeding.

He just couldn’t see it.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I stared at myself in the mirror. The lipstick was raised to my face, but I had yet to add another coat of blood-red color to my lips. Oliver wanted them to look vibrant.

Yes, that was the word he used.

Vibrant.

He said red was a color that drew a man’s attention. I didn’t want a man’s attention. I didn’t want any attention. I would exist blissfully in this world if I never caught the attention of another man again.

Instead of adding another coat, I grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser and ran it along my lips, removing the color altogether. Oliver was so engrossed in his colleagues that I doubted he’d notice, and even if he did, he was in too good a mood to care.

Earlier that week, when Detective Sloan had come around to talk about Lucy, Oliver had appeared charming and talkative, but I knew what the detective didn’t. Oliver was flustered and disorganized. He tapped a finger against his leg throughout the conversation. He also kept his arm around me the entire time, looking to me often to carry it.

I did a good job because when Sloan asked about the night Lucy disappeared, I backed him up.

I closed my eyes tightly at the memory.

Oliver had said, “I came home around nine. Daisy had waited for me.”

He’d never even asked me to lie about that. He just threw me into it at that very moment and smiled at me.

I smiled back, nodding. “It was worth the wait.”

As far as I knew, Oliver wasn’t on the man’s radar. Sloan had only come to ask if Lucy had shown up to class the day before and whether she had seemed normal.

Oliver stated that she had.

He never mentioned that he had an appointment with her the day she disappeared—or that I suspected it had sent him running from the house in such a panic.

I had covered for him.

I could have told the detective everything, but it wasn’t as though Oliver would have been thrown in jail that very instant. I held back.

I was weak and pathetic.

I…I should have said something.