Listed: Volumes I-VI

by Noelle Adams

  She was pulling away, still shivering from being so wet in the brisk air, when he frowned and studied her face. “You’re freezing.”

  “Not freezing, but I wouldn’t say no to getting back in the car.”

  As they walked, his eyes scanned her in close assessment. She knew he was just looking for signs of her having gotten sick from the cold—since he seemed to be hung up on that idea—but something about the way his gaze came back to her chest a couple of times made her look down at herself.

  The cotton of her dress had gotten damp from her hair, and it was clinging resiliently. The thin fabric clearly revealed the unsupported curves of her breasts and the outline of her tight nipples.

  She blushed a little—unable to suppress the self-consciousness—but Paul didn’t seem affected by the sight, other than his initial distraction.

  He could have the most beautiful women in the city without even making an effort. He wasn’t likely to get excited by a stray glimpse of her quite unexceptional body.

  He opened the passenger door for her calmly and shut it behind her before he went to get in the driver’s seat.

  After he turned the car on and adjusted the heat, he smiled at her gently. “Do you want to get something hot to drink on the way home?”

  She smiled back at him, fighting the instinct to be annoyed with him just because he was giving her that gentle look she hated. “Yeah, that would be great. Thanks.”

  By the time Paul stopped at a nearby quick shop and came back with two cups of hot chocolate, Emily was feeling good again. She was tired and still kind of wet, but she felt like she’d accomplished something, and Paul wasn’t bad company at all.

  They didn’t talk much on the drive home. Emily turned the music up again, and Paul drove fast. She didn’t sing this time, just listened and let herself get swept up in the heady rhythm of the music and the motion of the car. There was a kind of rich momentum to the combination of speed and sound on the dark road that was hypnotizing, compelling.

  Whenever Paul glanced over at her, she made sure to smile at him—so he knew she was enjoying the drive.

  She thought maybe he was too.

  When they pulled back into the private parking deck under their building, Emily grinned and pulled her list out of her pocket.

  She unfolded it and laid it on her knee. Without prompting, Paul reached down to a little compartment of his door and groped until he’d found a pen.

  He handed it to her with a smile.

  She crossed off from her list the item that said, “Go moonlight skinny-dipping at Lake Collins.”

  As she was refolding her list, she said, “Thank you, Paul. Seriously. I really appreciate you taking me.”

  “I was happy to.” He hadn’t turned off the car yet, and he hadn’t taken off his seatbelt. His eyes slanted away from her now, but she caught something reluctant in his expression that hadn’t been there before.

  Emily stiffened, realizing Paul was going to say something she didn’t want to hear.

  She’d thought they’d had such a good night.

  “Emily,” Paul began, meeting her eyes again, seriously this time, “I’m glad we could do this, but I also need to know if you’re going to try to sneak out on me again.”

  She sucked in her breath, surprised and a little relieved by the direction of his comments. She hadn’t been sure what he was going to say, but she’d briefly been scared he was going to tell her he couldn’t help her out with any more items on her list. “I’m not,” she said, lowering her lashes as she remembered the intensity of her feelings of rebellion earlier that evening. “I told you I was sorry about that. If I’m in this marriage, then I can’t have it both ways. I won’t do it again.”

  Paul was silent for a moment, and she was sure he was scanning her face, although her eyes were still lowered so she couldn’t see him. He cleared his throat. “I don’t understand why you thought you had to do it in the first place.”

  With a ragged exhale, she met his eyes again. “I don’t know really. It was like the last straw. I’ve had to accept…accept so many other things lately, and I just couldn’t accept your ordering me around.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I know you weren’t trying to order me around, but you were kind of doing that.”

  When she paused, he was clearly thinking back to what he’d done and said earlier that evening. Then he nodded in internal acknowledgment. “I guess I was being…”

  “Bossy,” she finished for him, slanting a little smile so he knew she wasn’t still angry. Then, since she could tell he wanted more of an answer, she stared forward at the gray concrete wall in front of the car and made herself continue. “You were being too bossy, but it was more than that for me. I don’t know if I can really explain it. Have you ever felt…Have you ever felt like you’re surrounded by shadows? And they’re all slowly encroaching on you?”

  There was a long pause before he murmured, “Yeah.”

  She cut her eyes over to him and saw with absolute clarity that Paul understood about shadows. She nodded, staring back at the wall since it seemed safer to speak that way. “Well, lately, the shadows all closed in on me so fast. Too fast. Too many of them. And they’re all taking things away from me. I guess it just felt like you were the only shadow I could fight.”

  “Why am I a shadow?” Paul asked, very softly. When she jerked her gaze back to him, she saw his face was perfectly still but there was a glint of something vulnerable in his eyes.

  “It’s not you,” she said hurriedly, afraid she’d hurt his feelings. “It’s not about who you are. It’s just that all these other shadows are taking away my choices, and I can’t do anything about them. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop them.”

  For a moment, she had to hide her face, shaking a few times as her eyes blurred over and a flood of grief and helplessness overwhelmed her, but she controlled the emotion enough to continue, “So, when you started to take away my choices too, it felt like you were…you were one of them. And, unlike all of the other things, there was something I could do to resist you.”

  She stared down at her hands for a long time after she finished, and it was absolutely silent in the car. Finally, she turned to check Paul's expression. He breathed heavily and stared straight in front of him at the wall she’d been focused on earlier.

  “Do you,” she began, her voice cracking, “Do you understand?”

  He met her eyes then, and she knew he did.

  Tears started to stream down her face, and she brushed them away impatiently.

  Paul finally spoke, his voice just slightly thick, “I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. I’m just used to doing what I think is best. I’m trying to do right by you—I really am—and I needed to make sure you were safe.”

  “I know. I know you weren’t doing it just to be mean and controlling.”

  “I’ll try not to bulldoze you. I mean that. But there are going to be some things about your health and your security that I’m not going to back down about.”

  She nodded, sniffing a little. “I know. I can accept that.”

  “So,” he began, finally reaching over to turn off the car. For some reason, he looked just a little uncertain. “So we’re good?”

  “Yeah,” Emily told him with a smile, “We’re good.”

  They got out and went up to the apartment, and, after a quick shower, she was very happy to pull on pajamas and crawl into bed.

  This day seemed to be endless, but it ended better than it began.

  Emily knew she would always be a project to Paul—something he’d committed to and was determined to see through to the end. She was pretty sure he was working out some sort of private guilt with her, and she was okay with that. She knew their relationship would never be defined by deep affection or emotional connection.

  But it felt like they’d understood each other just now, and she thought that, from now on, they could at least be closer to partners.

  As far as partners went
, Paul was a pretty good one to have.

  FOUR

  Paul needed more coffee.

  He’d had four cups already this morning, but he’d gotten up just after four o'clock, run on the treadmill, showered, dressed, and had been working in his study for four hours.

  His old friends wouldn’t recognize him. Sometimes, he couldn’t even recognize himself.

  Not too long ago, he’d been in the habit of sleeping late, often until noon. Ever since his mother died, though, he’d been waking up earlier and earlier, compelled by some unstoppable need to move, to act, to do.

  He’d only been at his job a week, but he’d already fallen behind because of the wedding and the deposition. He knew the board had him on a very short leash, and he was determined to prove himself, for once in his life.

  So, after they’d wrapped up the deposition in the early afternoon yesterday, Paul spent several hours catching up while Emily rested, and then he’d woken up early today and had managed to get through all the tasks and messages that had piled up in his inbox.

  Paul felt better without the weight of all that work pressing down on him. So far, the board could have no reason to complain about his performance.

  As soon as he opened the door of his home office, he was greeted to a warm, familiar scent. He followed it down the hall toward the kitchen, sniffing the air like a rapt bloodhound.

  He found Emily at the end of his search.

  She sat on folded legs on a stool at the kitchen bar, leaning in a relaxed sprawl on the black granite countertop and focused intently on her smart phone. Her fingers curved loosely around a mug of coffee.

  She was probably texting Chris again. She’d talked to him on the phone more than two hours the previous evening. Paul knew because he’d heard her talking to the boy in the media room when he passed by at eight in the evening, and she was still on the phone with him when Paul got up to stretch his legs again at ten o’clock.

  Paul doubted Emily would have enough to say to him for that long.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling brightly when she glanced up and saw him standing there. “I’m making cinnamon rolls!”

  “I can smell them.” He wandered into the kitchen toward the coffee maker. “I’m very impressed by your culinary energies.”

  “Don’t be too impressed. They’re just the pop-out-and-bake kind.”

  “Ah,” he murmured, pouring fresh coffee into his mug. “Then I’m less impressed.”

  “Well, they still taste good. And I went through the trouble of asking Ruth to buy them for me yesterday. Then I popped them out, put them on the tray, and stuck them in the oven—which is more culinary energy than you exerted this morning, Mr. Boring-Protein-Bar-with-his-Coffee.”

  He chuckled at her choice of words and tried to peer into one of the ovens to see how far along the cinnamon rolls were.

  “So you don’t have to pooh-pooh my efforts.” She’d gotten up and walked around the bar to pour herself more coffee too, but she gave him a decidedly peeved look over her shoulder.

  “I wouldn’t dream of pooh-poohing your efforts.” He tried to suppress a smile as he reached into the refrigerator for the half-and-half and handed it to her. “I’ve never had the pop-out kind before, but they smell good.”

  After doctoring her coffee, Emily leaned back against the counter, holding her mug with both hands. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, pleasure evident on her face. “I love that smell.”

  He stared at her silently for a moment as he sipped his coffee, wondering how she managed to so genuinely enjoy herself—enjoy such little things—when tragedy had struck her so hard, when the shadows had closed in around her so ruthlessly.

  He’d understood her the other night when they’d talked in the car after their trip to the lake. He’d known exactly what she was feeling, since he’d felt those shadows before too.

  He knew he wouldn’t have been able to handle circumstances like Emily’s with such courage and resilience. If he’d been told he had so little time to live, he was pretty sure he would drink himself into a three-month-long stupor or maybe just shoot himself.

  He understood Emily’s shadows, but he didn’t understand how she was managing to hold them back.

  He had his own shadows. His father was waiting for trial, and Paul would have to testify against him. Even with his intense focus on his new job and his responsibilities with Emily, Paul could barely manage to hold those shadows back.

  After a moment, Emily opened her eyes again and caught him staring at her. She gave him an impatient frown, the one he was starting to recognize as her thinking he was feeling sorry for her.

  Her annoyance was fleeting, and she stepped over to check on the rolls, peeking into the oven after she’d opened the door an inch. “They’re starting to puff up,” she informed him, as if he’d been waiting for this update. “But they still have a few more minutes.”

  Since he had time to kill, he went over to the entry table and got the three newspapers that were delivered to the apartment every morning. His mother had always had daily subscriptions, and Paul couldn’t bring himself to cancel them, even though he almost always read the news online.

  Emily had sat down again, but as he returned he caught her scanning him from his head to bare feet with a little sneer.

  “What?” he asked, genuinely baffled by her apparent disapproval of how he looked. Since he wasn’t going anywhere this morning, he hadn’t thought much about his appearance, but he seemed to be basically presentable in khakis and a black t-shirt.

  She gave him a disdainful sniff. “Do you always have to look so nice and pulled together, even first thing in the morning?”

  Paul’s eyes widened in surprise. He wasn’t dressed up. His trousers were slightly wrinkled and he wasn’t wearing shoes.

  Evidently recognizing his astonishment, Emily explained, “I’ve never seen you sloppy. Don’t you ever just hang around in your pajamas?”

  Sometimes he did, but Paul had made a point of not doing so when Emily was around. It didn’t seem quite right to lounge around half-dressed with a dying, seventeen-year-old girl in the house.

  Emily evidently had no such qualms. This morning, she was wearing what she’d obviously slept in—a little black tank-top and gray, cotton pajama pants. She was barefoot, and her hair looked unbrushed, hanging around her shoulders in messy waves, almost red-gold in the morning light.

  It made Paul a little uncomfortable to have Emily looking so much like she’d just rolled out of bed, but he didn’t have the heart to ask her to not go around so under-dressed. She should be able to feel at home here.

  He just had to make sure not to look at her too closely.

  When he saw her eyeing him strangely, he realized he’d never answered her question. “It’s not first thing in the morning for me,” he explained, shifting the conversation to something more impersonal. “I’ve been up since four.”

  She shook her head. “That’s just wrong.”

  He gave a huff of laughter, took the newspapers to the bar, and sat down on the stool next to her. “I haven’t been able to sleep in lately, for some reason, and I’ve found I can get a lot of work done in those early hours of the morning.”

  “Did I make you really behind at your job?” she asked, a flicker of concern in her eyes.

  “No. I’m all caught up now.”

  “Are you sure? If you need to work, just tell me. I know you’re just starting out in this position, and they might be looking over your shoulder all the time. You really don’t have to do all the stuff on my list with me. It’s really okay if you—”

  “Emily, stop,” he interrupted, a little sharply. “I’ll tell you if I’m too busy.”

  She frowned at his tone. “Okay. I just worry. I don’t like to be a nuisance. Are they really dumping all their unwanted projects on you?”

  “Yes. Some of this stuff has been sitting on other people’s desks for months, and now they have someone to give it to.” He heard an edge of bitte
rness in his tone, so he tried to temper it—not wanting to sound like he was whining.

  “What kind of work is it? Just stupid, tedious stuff?”

  “No. Well, yeah, there is some tedious stuff, but my position is too high on the food chain to waste on entry-level work. I’m getting all of these no-win projects—the stuff everyone knows is going nowhere good and so no one wants to take on. Like the reorganization of one of the departments.”

  “What’s so hard about that?”

  “I don’t see how it can be done without firing a third of the personnel. I’m sure no one else can figure out how either, which is why they stuck me with it.”

  She made a face. “Oh. That’s awful.”

  For some reason, her sympathy was comforting. “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m sure you can think of some creative way to do it and not fire all those people. They might think it’s a no-win project, but they don’t know how brilliant you are.”

  He snorted, although he was rather pleased by the off-hand compliment. “You have no evidence of said brilliance.”

  “Are you kidding me? You graduated from the Ivy Leagues and then got your MBA without ever slowing down your partying and crazy adventure sports. There’s no way you could have done that if you weren’t naturally brilliant. If you keep working as hard as you have this week, you’ll figure out all of those projects. They’ll see you aren’t the reckless kid they think. Everyone will be awed by you.” She patted his arm in a casually supportive gesture.

  He felt strangely self-conscious and looked down at the front page of the newspaper. “You’re pretty good at the supportive-wife act for just being married a week.”

  She giggled. “I must be naturally talented at it.”

  They smiled at each other, and Paul had the oddest sensation of being heard.

  Emily gasped and jerked upright. “The cinnamon rolls!” she squeaked, scrambling off the stool and running over to the oven. She grabbed a hot pad and pulled the tray out, dropping it on the counter.