Page 20 of Start With A Slap

Like a dying flower.

She’d always thought she knew what Mitchell meant by that, but she didn’t—not until now. Now, with his voice ringing in her ears, she could taste the sensation of a vibrant bloom, of soft oil-painted petals closing around her, squeezing the breath out of her...

Thisfeelingwas a work of art.

“Babe?”

Ivy was toweling off post-morning shower when she heard Jason call out to her. “Yeah?”

She didn’t hear an answer, so she swiped the steam off the mirror and studied her face. Were those faint dark circles under her eyes? Were her relentless sex dreams starting to show? Maybe it was the overhead light?—

Jason yelled, “You got... something.”

“Use your words honey,” she yelled back.

“It’s a package. It’s…”

She frowned at herself. A package? For her? She hadn’t ordered anything online since—Oh no.

Ivy had begun to assume that Sever’s hot pursuit had gone cold — that maybe she’d proved too much of a challenge and his patience had worn thin. Whatever the reason, it had been almost a week, and she was infinitely relieved to be free to forget and move on. Or, to try, anyway. Hence the dark circles.

But when she matched the occurrence of a mysterious delivery with Jason’s bewildered tone, she justknewit had something to do with his father.

Bracing herself, she wrapped the towel closed at her chest and found Jason in the entryway, stood before an enormous, partially unwrapped rectangle propped against the wall.

Ivy stopped dead in her tracks. Her towel fell to the floor.

It wasSunflower X.

“It came with this note,” Jason said, and handed her a small card.

Two lone words were scrawled on its surface:

With admiration.

CHAPTER 7

Aching

Flowers would have been hard to explain.But a ten million dollar painting with an anonymous love note attached? In no way, shape, form, oruniversewas this permissible.

When Ivy stormed into Sever’s den that evening to tell him so, she was halted by an unexpected sight: he was at his desk staring intently at a chess board, opposite a stout blond man in jeans and a red hoodie. A timer was ticking.

Sever didn’t bother to look up. “Do you play, Ivy?”

She ignored the question. “Why is there a giant painting at my door?”

Sever looked at his opponent and said something in a Slavic tongue she didn’t understand. The man laughed raucously and glanced her way. Clearly his remark was about her, and she couldn’t be sure, but it felt sexist. God, he was so rude and so annoyingly well-rounded.

Okay, so she was also rudely interrupting his chess match, but she was too incensed to care. “Can I please talk to you for a minute?”

When he made another indecipherable quip, Ivy huffed and spun to walk out, but then the man rose to leave.

The grandfather clock and the chess timer ticked at warring tempos, and Sever said, eyes still on the board, “I’m all yours.”

“I can’t believe you?—!”

He cut her off with a raised finger. “Hang on.” His hand hovered over a piece—a rook? A knight? She was not a chess person—then he seemed to think better of it.

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