It was evening.
Her chauffeur eased the car into the long gravel drive and cut the engine with a soft thud that echoed against the gates.
He was a careful man efficient, polite, and too visible.
Not Max.
Not even close.
She stepped out in a coat that swallowed the last of the heat, the fabric catching the dying light like a secret.
The chauffeur reached instinctively for her bag, she brushed his hand away with a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"I'll be fine," she said, and the word was a dismissal made of glass.
He pulled off, the engine sighing into the night, leaving only the scrape of tires and the soft clack of his shoes on the driveway as he retreated.
Across the lane, under the tired halo of a porch light, Bon was walking heading home.
He didn't look up when Nancy got out of the car, he had the sort of focus that made him thinking alot.
Nancy paused, watching him.
Nancy looked at him with desirable eyes.
Gosh!!
He is hot!!
She wanted him not to love her, but for pleasure.
She wanted to manipulate him.
Nancy moved along the side road that skirted Bon's property.
The gravel crunched under her heels, a counterpoint to the thud of her heart.
She kept her face composed, a practiced neutrality that masked the storm she carried.
When she reached the porch's shadow, she slowed and then, with small theatricality, feigned an ankle twist.
She fell convincingly to the cold stones, and let out a sharp, staged cry.
"Ouch!"
Bon turned like a man whose name had been called.
He went to her quickly.
He crouched beside her, concern plain and immediate in the curve of his brow.
"You all right?" he asked, voice low and steady.
Nancy looked up at him with eyes that were intentionally wide.
She let her fingers curl around his wrist and felt the quickening beat of his pulse against her palm.
He tried to help her stand, his callused hands found her waist.
A terrible accidental, he would say later but the contact lit something in her like a fuse.
It was wrong and very toxic allat once.
For a second, something honest and foolish rose in Bon's face, like a memory of warmth.
Nancy acted fast.
She leaned into him, pressuring the moment until it tipped.
Her lips landed on his before he could register that the world had rearranged itself.
A ridiculous kiss.
The kiss wasn't gentle, it was an assertion a ploy wrapped in velvet.
When she pulled back, her breath hitched, triumphant.
But the streetlight glassed the scene, and in the window above, a dark shape moved.
Tessa!!
Tessa had been watching the driveway for reasons that had nothing to do with the night and everything to do with the soft obsession that had grown in her chest.
She'd been peering through the bedroom window when she'd seen Nancy that evil, dangerous woman step from the car and then collapse on the stones like a marionette cut from its strings.
The sight of Bon bent over her, of his hands at her waist, set the acid of jealousy in Tessa like a firebrand.
"Nancy, I will kill you," Tessa hissed, pressing her palms to the cool glass.
Her voice was small and flat with resolve, but the words hung like a blade.
Bon's hands drew away as if burned.
He straightened, some calm armor slipping back into place around him.
His face, usually so open, tightened into an expression Nancy had seldom seen, a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation.
"Don't ever do that," he said to her, each syllable clipped and dangerous in its own restrained way.
"I just helped you, don't misunderstood anything, okay?"
Nancy's eyes flickered through the window, her stomach sank when she saw Tessa's face, pale and unmoving, framed by the glass.
For an instant, she saw herself through Tessa's eyes.
That look, a small, lethal thing, was worse than a rebuke, it was an indictment.
Bon stepped back, hands finding their pockets as if to hide the evidence of warmth.
Nancy held his gaze, tasting the residue of the kiss like bitter candy.
"You don't have to explain yourself to me," Nancy said, and the lie in her voice was thin.
"I—" She stopped, because the truth was messier than the thing she wanted to believe, that she could make people do what she wanted.
Tessa's silhouette receded from the window.
Nancy could sense the gaze remain though, like the slow burn of an ember.
It was the kind of attention that would not easily forgive.
"I should go," Nancy said, her voice small.
She rose unsteadily the world around her seemed to tilt with the choices she'd made.
Bon didn't stop her.
Just then he phone started ringing.
It was me Ella.
He picked it at once.
"Hello my darling," he said slowly.
"Bon who just kissed you," I asked loudly.
"You allowed my mom's murderer kiss you isn't," I added
"Babe, let me explain --" he began.
"Bon Taki," i said.
"Tell me, Ella Augustine,'' he said while smiling.
"You're smiling right, I'm talking nonsense isn't?" i said
"Ella, can i explain it was ju--," he didn't finish, the call ended.
He laughed.
"Ella, my crazy woman," he said.