Chapter 85

Chapter 85:

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A moment ago, Andrew had been ready to take her, every nerve taut with desire. Heat surged through him, reckless and unrestrained, urging him to claim what…

…stood so perilously within reach. Then the sharp trill of the telephone cut through the room, slicing the moment in two.

Cathryn’s world measured a man’s sudden departure in simple terms: a man who walked out on a woman in bed did so for one reason only—another woman.

Andrew reached for her ankle, his fingers catching it and giving a gentle, searching squeeze, as if trying to steady something within both of them. His voice dropped. “It’s nothing like that. Just work. There is nothing else.”

She had never been to school. The longer explanations he kept—about encrypted lines and vulnerabilities and someone named Kestrel—would have been a foreign language to her. He had learned the necessity of letting certain arguments die rather than grinding them down until they scraped raw.