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“What do you want to call her?” he asked.
“Artemis,” I answered, somehow knowing what her name was before I even really thought about it.
“The goddess of wildlife. Quite fitting.” He kissed my nose extra carefully, then my forehead, then my lips.
We drank our beers, and I ate brownies next to Artemis, sitting on the hay. I’d eaten in the last few days more than I had in the month before.
My appetite was returning, and that was a good sign.
“I’ve wanted to become a lawyer since I was thirteen years old,” he said, and I stopped breathing altogether. He was confiding in me. Opening up. This was huge. This was everything. “The world is an unfair place. It does not reward you for being good, or decent, or moral. But for being talented, driven, and cunning. Those things are not necessarily positive. And none of them—not even talent—is a virtue. I wanted to protect those who needed protection, but the more I worked on cases, the more I realized that the system was corrupted. Becoming a lawyer in hopes to bring justice is like cleaning a ketchup stain on a bloodied shirt of a man who just got stabbed fifty times. So I went higher.”
“Why are you so obsessed with justice?”
“Because your father robbed me out of mine. I understand that your childhood has been sheltered. I can even respect your father for sending you to boarding school and distancing you from the mess he’s created in Chicago. But this mess? I grew up in it. I had to survive in it. It left me scarred and wronged.”
“What are you going to do with my father?”
“I’m going to ruin him.”
I swallowed. “And with me? What are you going to do with me?”
“Save you.”
After a while, I became drowsy from the beer and sugar. I propped my head against his chest and closed my eyes. He took out his phone and let me nap atop of him, very unlike my husband.
Since he had no reception, I didn’t know what he was going to do with his phone, but part of me wanted to test the limit of his patience.
To see when he was going to shake me gently and tell me it was time to get going.
I woke up an hour later in a tiny pool of my drool on his shirt. He was still messing with his phone. I glanced at his screen, trying not to move.
He was reading an article offline. Probably a document he’d downloaded in advance. I stirred lightly to let him know that I was awake.
“We should head back.”
I took one glance at Artemis, who was sleeping peacefully in her stall, and yawned.
“We should,” I agreed. “But I love it too much here.”
Then, without thinking, I tilted my head up and pressed a kiss to his lips. He dropped his phone, taking me in his arms and positioning me with careful precision on his lap to straddle him.
I felt immediately more powerful and awake than I had been in weeks, linking my arms around his neck and deepening our kiss.
I began to grind against his erection, without even thinking about what I was doing.
I wasn’t on the pill yet—never got the chance to book that appointment—and I knew, now more than ever, that our first time was an angry fluke.
Wolfe didn’t want children, and I certainly didn’t want to have them without his wishes. Especially not at nineteen. I’d just started school.
“I’m…” I said between kisses, “I…we need a condom. I’m not protected.”
“I’ll pull out.” He kissed his way down my cleavage, opening the buttons of my navy blue polka dot dress.
I pulled away, cupping his face, still in awe that I could do so.
“Even I know that’s not a valid form of contraception.”
He grinned, his teeth a row of straight pearly whites. He was excruciatingly beautiful. I didn’t know how I was going to survive it if he took another Emily to his bed in this lifetime.
