Contract Bride. Susan Fox P.

thing,” was a thin cover for his displeasure and frustration, and they both knew that too.

      Leah calmly crossed the kitchen to the short hall to the laundry room though her knees were shaking. Had she just made things worse or better?

      The truth was, she no longer knew what to think. She certainly didn’t know much about the Reece Waverly she’d actually married. Whatever she’d known about him before, mostly by observation then later from Rachel, didn’t seem to quite fit the man she had to deal with now.

      At least she’d set some sort of limit and had drawn a line on the kind of verbal exchanges she wanted to avoid, and Reece had essentially backed down. But for a man as naturally dominant as he was, how long would that last?

      Rachel had never thought twice about standing up to Reece, and she’d done it as confidently as she’d done everything else in her life. Rachel had tamed a lot of Reece’s bluster and his natural tendency to autocratically run everything. But he would have expected that from Rachel. It would have seemed odd to him if Rachel hadn’t stood up to him.

      But Leah wasn’t the woman he’d been so fervently in love with—was still in love with—so she had to watch her step. She was very aware that she’d have to depend completely on Reece’s sense of fairness as well as her own ability to tactfully and consistently hold her own, because it was imperative that Reece respect her.

      She couldn’t afford to go to war with him, not when Bobby would be the one who’d suffer most. And though Reece couldn’t love her, the last thing she wanted was to somehow make him loathe her. It was hard enough to weather his indifference.

      And it was more crucial than ever that Reece never guessed what she felt for him. Until now her feelings had been easy enough to conceal, because a man who barely paid attention missed a lot of things.

      Reece would be paying attention now. To everything. He’d be looking for ways to keep their marriage together, at least for a while, and it would be natural for him to exploit any advantage.

      Since his greatest advantage would be to discover how much she loved him, she’d have to take special care to keep him from somehow figuring it out.