For the next few days, Rose stepped warily around the house; but she didn't need to, because Ryan was avoiding her with equal diligence.
"What's wrong with you?" Lynnette snapped at her on the fourth day. "You jump every time someone comes in the room."
What was wrong was typical—typical enough that it made Rose feel foolish, more idiotic than she already did for having slept with a married man in the first place. She couldn't get the man out of her head.
That night, she and Ryan had lain naked together on the carpet of his office for a full four hours, kissing and talking and fucking until it had gotten very dark and Rose's phone had begun to buzz with text messages from worried housemates. He had drawn into himself, as they'd gotten dressed. She could still see the hunted expression on his face as he'd seen her to her car and watched her pull through the gates of his house out of the driveway.
" You're not going to last very long like that once Jillian gets back." Rose started at Lynnette's warning.
Jillian was on a week-long trip to visit friends in northern California; but Rose knew Lynnette was right. When whirlwind Jillian stormed back into the mansion, in a blaze of rage and self-importance, Rose's nerves would shatter. And she was dreading that moment.
But then, too, some part of her—some small, petty part—was looking forward to Jillian's return, to the secret that she would have that would blunt the worst of Jillian's grandstanding. She had heard Jillian's husband's whispers—curses, litanies—while he'd been pumping away inside her, and seen in his eyes a—she thought to herself—a... dawning, of some kind.
But maybe she was just flattering herself. He hadn't so much as looked at her all week.
"I'm—I'm fine," she told Lynnette. "Just haven't been sleeping well. And that morning commute drives me crazy."
"It's a nightmare," Lynnette agreed. "You wouldn't catch me dead on the Edens at morning rush hour, that's for sure." She ruffled through the papers in her folder and fished out Rose's daily task sheet.
"Special cleaners are coming this afternoon at two to wax the basketball court, and I'll need you down there to supervise them. I also need you to inspect all of the pool tables to see which need to be re-felted, and whether any cue tips need replacing. And then you can get back to work cataloging the service numbers for the electronics in the guest houses."
"Right," Rose took the paper, picked up her notepad and clipboard, and was off to the rec room to do a job that she ordinarily would have had little patience for—seriously, re-felting two-year-old pool tables?—but which, in this world, was a perfect par for the course.
What will I say when I do see Ryan?
she was wondering, as she walked down.
Will he speak to me? When I ran into him in the garage on Monday, he just clenched his jaw and looked away, and it was so clear he was waiting for me to leave.
She rolled her neck, tense from days of worrying about the wisdom of the sex she'd had on Ryan's office floor. Some of her muscles, in her stomach and back, were still sore from the sex itself.
I hate myself for how much I want to see him
.
For how much I just
want
him.
She pressed the entry code for the rec room automatically, and then used her hip to open the door. And then gasped and dropped her pen and clipboard in a clatter at the same moment the crack of a cue ball against the thirteen sounded.
"Ryan," she breathed, letting her eyes drink him in for a moment before she blinked and composed her expression. "I mean—Mr. Harleigh."
Ryan had tensed when she walked in, but now moved to lean back against the wall behind him, his arms crossed over his chest, pool cue in hand like a spear. But if his posture was defensive, his words were not. "Ryan," he corrected her, almost gently. "A name you know perfectly well you can use, Rose."
Because you screamed it when you came
, they both silently added.
"I... right. Ryan. I need to inspect the pool tables for re-felting," she told him crisply.
Ryan frowned. "The damned things were new two years ago."
She almost laughed, at that. "No kidding." She drew in a short breath, and then the tension just flowed right out of her. She and Ryan were here, now. She grinned. "I don't know if you've noticed that my whole job is built around the idea that every physical thing in your house is being held together only by the ineluctable force of Lynnette's foresight."
He grinned at that, and let his arms fall to his sides. "I was wondering why we needed an estate manager." He shrugged. "But when Jillian insists..."
Both of them froze as his wife's name fell on their ears.
Rose tried to recover. "Yes, well. She's definitely a force of nature..."
They went silent, at that, contemplating each other for long moments. And then they both spoke at once:
"I'm sorry—"
"Do you reg—"
Ryan cut in. "Do I what?"
"I... God, this is awkward. I was going to say... I was going to say, do you regret what happened? And, you know you don't have to worry I'd ever tell Jillian, right?"
Ryan tilted his head at her, squinting, and then shook his head rapidly, as if to clear it. "No, I'm not worried that you'd tell Jillian. You're not the type, obviously."
That word—"obviously"—warmed Rose's heart for reasons she didn't quite have time to identify.
"Besides," Ryan continued, "it probably wouldn't change anything about my marriage if you
did
tell her."
"Because she's used to you having affairs?"
"No!" Ryan's fist clenched more tightly around the pool stick. "No, I—I've never actually done that before. I wouldn't have thought I was capable. Actually, I'm having a difficult time coming to grips with myself as a person who would... who would..."
"Have sex with someone other than his wife?" He nodded slowly. "Then you do regret it."
"Regret? I wouldn't say that." The pool cue was in both fists now, and his knuckles were white around it. "I do have some regrets." Blue clarity was in his eyes, and now he regarded her steadily above his clenched fists. "I regret that I let you leave instead of keeping you in my bed all that night. I regret that I didn't take photographs so I could look at your beautiful body again—instead of relying on these dreams I keep having, where you come to me, wet and willing, night after night after night! I regret I didn't get a chance on
that
night to see your beautiful mouth sucking hard on my cock as I struggled not to shove it straight down your throat. I regret that I can't hike up your skirt and pull off your panties and take you on this pool table right now. And I regret," his voice dropped huskily, "God help me, I regret that I'm married." He swallowed. "I didn't just tell you that. Or—I know I did. But you have to know that it doesn't matter. I am married." And a deep breath. "So regrets, or the lack of them, are beside the point."
Rose's knees were shaking slightly as she crossed the distance between them, stopping less than a foot from him—close enough that she could feel his breath on her face.
"In those dreams that you keep having," she said softly, "do I ever hike up my own skirt—pull off my own panties—for you?" She enacted her own words as she spoke, lifting her panties from around her ankles with one finger and then draping them around the pool cue in his hands. "One less regret, Ryan. You can have me again.
Right. Now
