Page 71 of Lady and the Butcher

“A reminder.”

“That was a threat.”

He didn’t look over. “Yes.”

“You put your hand on his throat.”

“Yes.”

“You could have—” My voice cracked. “You could have killed him.”

“I didn’t.”

I turned fully toward him. His jaw was set, steady, the same storm calm that had both seduced me and terrified me. “Do you do that often?”

“When I need to.”

“And who decides when it’s needed?”

“I do.”

The simplicity of it made my chest hurt.

I pressed my palms to my thighs, heat prickling under my skin. Horror sat in me, jagged. But right beside it, traitorous, was heat of another kind. My body couldn’t tell the difference between fear and desire. My pulse roared either way.

Wow.

“You brought me there,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So you’d see. I don’t hide from you.”

It should have comforted me. It didn’t. Honesty was heavier than lies. Hiding would have been easier.

“I don’t know if I can live in that world,” I whispered.

“You don’t have to. You only have to live with me in it.”

The road opened up by the water, marsh grass bending in the wind, gulls crying like warnings. My chest was tight. But my hands had stopped shaking.

His hand left the gearshift, settled warm on my knee.

I should have pulled away. I didn’t.

That scene followed me.

I couldn’t shake the image: his hand on a man’s throat, the easy way the entire room had bent around him. Like gravity recognized him as its boss. Like violence was a language and everyone else in the room had grown up fluent.

I hadn’t.

I’d grown up with porch swings and hymns, with a mother who believed in pie as apology and forgiveness as maintenance. I’d built my life on babies’ cries and women’s laughter and the kind of strength that was soft on the outside.

And here I was, sitting beside a man who made grown men swallow their tongues.

What did that mean?