Listed: Volume III by Noelle Adams

wanted to ask him what was going on. He would have been
happy to tell her, but he didn’t know himself.
    Emily
had stopped in the bathroom before they left when a man came over to Paul. “Excuse
me," the man said. "I think your girlfriend might have dropped this.”
He extended a little pink glove to Paul. Paul recognized it as Emily's. It must
have fallen out of the pocket of her sweater when they’d gotten off the rink.
    Paul
thanked him and accepted the glove. Then he heard him saying something else.
Something foolish. And irrelevant. And entirely unnecessary. And certainly not
anything a stranger needed to know.
    But
he said it anyway. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my wife.”
    ***
    Paul leaned back in the
desk chair in the library of his mother’s old house and stared as the light shine
through the windows onto the parquet floor.
    Emily
had decided she didn’t want a big party for her birthday the following day, but
she reluctantly admitted that she did want to see some of her old friends. So
they’d driven out to the house that afternoon after Paul had gotten back from a
few meetings in the office, and Emily was having dinner with Chris and his
family right now.
    Chris’s
mother had made a point of inviting Paul to dinner tonight too, but he hadn’t
accepted the invitation. He wasn’t too excited about seeing Laura, who might be
joining her family tonight, and he didn’t want Emily to feel awkward with her
old friend, since Paul knew Chris hadn’t wanted her to marry him.
    So
Emily was having dinner with them, and Paul was in the library trying to work.
    He’d
just hit send on his fourteen-trillionth email that day when someone knocked on
the library door.
    “Hi,
Tim,” Paul said when he saw one of his bodyguard. “Everything all right?”
    “Yes,
sir,” Tim said. “Ruth just arrived, and she wanted to unpack your luggage. She
was wondering where to put everything.”
    “The
master bedroom.” Paul raised his eyebrows as he spoke, since his staff didn’t usually
trouble him with unnecessary inquiries like this.
    Tim
shifted from foot to foot, looking strangely awkward for such a stoic, beefy
man. “And Mrs. Marino’s luggage?” he prompted.
    Enlightenment
dawned as Paul realized what they needed to know. In the apartment, he and
Emily had separate rooms, although she’d been sleeping in his bed every night
for more than a week. Ruth obviously wasn’t sure whether her stuff should go in
the master bedroom with Paul's or in one of the guest rooms.
    Paul
thought quickly. It would make the most sense to keep their normal arrangement,
but the master bedroom in this house was in a wing of its own. The guestrooms
were all on the opposite side of the big, sprawling house, which would mean
Emily would have to traipse through long stretches of hallway to get to his
room to sleep at night. Or she would have to just sleep in her own bed.
    “You
can put her stuff in my room too. Thanks.”
    Tim
nodded, not conveying any reaction on his impassive countenance. “Thank you,
sir.” He left Paul alone in the library.
    Paul
told himself it was silly to go through the pretense of separate rooms if Emily
continued wanting to sleep with him every night. They might as well just share
the room here.
    If,
for some reason, she didn’t like that arrangement, they could move her stuff to
one of the guest rooms before she went to bed tonight.
    With
that issue resolved in his mind, he tried to focus on work again. He’d managed
to reply to and delete the last of his emails when he saw a new one come in. It
was a daily update from one of the public relations people at Simone’s on what
was being said online about the Marinos or the company.
    This
update was longer than normal, with half of the news stories and blog posts being
about the conviction of Vincent Marino and the other half being about Paul’s
marriage to a dying teenage girl.
    Most
of the stories about his marriage in the last few days had run a now