She just looked at him, then at the door. When he still didn’t move, she yanked his jacket off the hook where he’d hung it and thrust it at him. “Goodbye, Alex.”
Wordlessly he reached out and took it, shrugged it on and zipped it up. “Fine. I’ll go. But this isn’t over. I’ll be back. And while I’m gone, don’t just think about Charlie. Think about what you want, too.”
And he pulled her into his arms and took her mouth with his.
He’d been wanting to do this all day, all yesterday, every minute, it seemed, since he’d kissed her last. The hunger was so fierce he ached with it.
Now he felt her whole body stiffen. She raised her arms between them, her forearms pressing against his chest as if to hold him off. It didn’t matter. While he would have liked to feel her body melt against him, to have her arms wrap around him, to know her eagerness matched his, he didn’t need it to prove his point.
He had his lips to convince her, to taste her, to tease her. He had his tongue to touch her lips, to part them, to slip between and find her sweetness. God, she made him crazy, made his whole being quiver with need, made the blood sing in his veins.
He wasn’t going to let her pretend that it meant nothing. Kissing Daisy never meant nothing. Kissing Daisy was amazing, wild, always potent, always drugging. Kissing Daisy always made his heart slam against the wall of his chest, made his loins tighten and his body hum with desire.
And damn it, he knew—absolutely knew—it was the same for her.
She fought it. He could feel her resisting. But she was fighting herself, not him. Her lips trembled, pressed together, denied him. But she denied herself, as well.
So he touched them anyway. He drew a line with his tongue, coaxed, teased. And they gave, opened just a fraction. He took advantage, darted within. He heard her whimper, and her fingers opened to clutch his jacket, hanging on. Her lips softened, parted farther. And he felt a jolt as her tongue tangled with his.
Yes, like that. It was always like that between them. Always had been. Alex wanted to cheer, to exult, to press his advantage and take them where they both wanted to go. He wanted to slide his fingers beneath her sweater and stroke her curves, her breasts, her very bones. He wanted to tease beneath the waistband of her jeans, slide his fingers south, touch her—there. Damn she was killing him. His breath came hard and fast. He wanted to taste, to tease, to sample and suckle. He wanted to devour. He wrapped her in his arms, thrust his fingers in her hair, kissed her hard one more time.
Then he pulled back, dragging in lungfuls of air as he looked down into her stunned feverish gaze. “While you’re thinking,” he said roughly, “think about that.”
Her palm connected with his cheek so fast he didn’t even see it coming.
“What the hell was that for?” he demanded. His fingers curled. He jammed his hands in his pockets.
“What was the kiss for?” she countered furiously.
His gaze narrowed. “That’s why you slapped me? For reminding you that we had something good?”
“I don’t need any reminders, thank you very much. And it turns out we didn’t have anything at all.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I do. And I don’t need you trying to bribe me with sex.”
He gaped at her. “Bribe you?”
Her eyes flashed. “Bribe me, get around me, coerce me, make me do what you want because I’m somehow susceptible to you! Call it what you like. It’s not going to work.”
“For God’s sake, Daisy.” He raked fingers through his hair. “I was trying to show you it isn’t all about Charlie.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s all about you—what you want, when you want it, and not when you don’t. You don’t love Charlie. You don’t love anyone. You don’t want to. You push people away. At least Cal wanted to,” she spat at him furiously.
“Cal?” he retorted. “This is all about Cal? All about your ‘failed’ marriage? Has it really made you that bitter?”
“I’m not bitter at all. Not at Cal. Not at our marriage.” She lifted her chin as if defying him to argue. “We went into it with our eyes open.”
He watched her, saw a host of conflicting expressions cross her face. Then she lifted a shoulder as if shrugging off a burden and said, “Cal is gay.”
Alex stared at her.
“He’s my friend. And he didn’t have a lover. So when he saw what I was going through, he tried to make it easier for me.” She ran her tongue over her lips. “He was convinced that he could will himself to love whoever he wanted to love.” She shrugged. “He believes in the same things I do—commitment, long-term relationships, responsibility. Love.”
Alex’s gaze narrowed.
“He never lied to me. And I didn’t lie to him. He knew I loved you. He knew you didn’t love me. He offered his name, his support, everything he could. And I did the same for him. But—” she lifted her shoulders “—it wasn’t enough. We tried to make it work. It didn’t. In the end we knew that. We’ll always be friends. But there’s more to real love, real marriage than that. And we both wanted … more.”
“I’m offering you more,” Alex pointed out indignantly.
Daisy just looked at him. She took a slow breath, then swallowed and shook her head. “No, Alex. You’re not. You’re offering far, far less.”
She pushed him out the door and closed it after him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DAISY leaned against the door, tears blurring her eyes. She dashed them away with a shaking hand. Of course he thought she was mad. The way he’d looked at her, patent disbelief in his eyes.
He was offering her marriage, wasn’t he? Hadn’t that been her heart’s desire five years ago?
Yes, then. Not now.
Because this was exactly the sort of “marriage” he would have been offering Caroline. A wedding, a legal, convenient version of friends with benefits. Now as she stood with her back to the front door, still hearing Alex’s footfalls moving quickly away, Daisy wiped a hand over her face, touched the tears, wanted to deny them. Knew she couldn’t.
They were as real as the truth she’d just told Alex: marriages of convenience didn’t work. Not for her. She and Cal had done their best. But friendship and responsibility only went so far.
They were only a part of the deep abiding fullness of heart, soul, mind and body that real love was.
She knew it wasn’t easy. She knew, just as Alex knew, that real love hurt.
She didn’t care. If she could have the love, she could endure the pain. She’d been raised in the real love of her parents’ marriage. She remembered their joys and their sorrows. She remembered all too well her mother’s pain at her father’s death.
But she remembered, too, the sight of her mother smiling through her tears as she’d said, “I don’t regret it for an instant. Loving Jack was worth all of this.”
This was sometimes heartache, sometimes pain, sometimes joy, sometimes the simple act of heart-deep sharing.
Daisy wanted that.
She had the pain part down pat, she thought, tears streaming down her face.
But she knew she’d done the right thing—even if Alex had been right, that she’d been protecting herself. If marrying Cal had been a mistake, marrying Alex would be a disaster—because she could not stop loving him, and he didn’t know what real love was.
He couldn’t draw a straight line.
He broke the lead in all his mechanical pencils. He snapped the nib off his best drawing pen. His hands shook so badly as he sat at his desk and tried to find the calm he always felt designing, that he crumpled up page after page of the paper in his sketchbook.
Finally Alex threw the whole damn thing out and went to stand and stare out the window, dragging in deep breaths. But for once even the sight of the spectacular Manhattan skyline didn’t soothe his furious soul.
He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window, then lifted a hand and rubbed it against his stubbled cheek.
The ph
ysical sting of Daisy’s palm was long gone. But the emotional sting was imprinted on his soul. So were the words she’d flung at him: It’s all about you. You don’t love Charlie. You don’t love anyone. You don’t want to.
His throat tightened. His eyes blurred. He sucked in another breath and shook his head, wanting to deny it.
But he couldn’t. Not entirely. At least a part of what she said was true: He hadn’t wanted to.
For years—ever since Vass’s death and his parents’ divorce—Alex had done his best to make sure that anything as messy and painful as love would not be a part of his world. He’d deliberately built himself a life without it. He had his business, his design projects, his friends, and recently he’d figured that he could do marriage as long as it was on his terms, where his wife didn’t want anything deeper or more demanding than he did.
He’d wanted a world he could control.
Which was why he had turned his back on Daisy five years ago.
She had threatened his control. She had bowled him over that weekend, had loved and given and enchanted in equal measures. He’d never met anyone so unguarded, so genuine, so warm and real.
Letting Daisy into his life would have been opening himself up to a tidal wave of emotions he couldn’t control, a future he couldn’t predict, the possibility for pain he didn’t ever want to experience again.
God knew what would happened if he let down his guard.
So he hadn’t. He’d turned away from her warmth, rejected her love, shut her out of his life. And having done so, he’d thought he was safe.
He was wrong.
But she was wrong, too.
Daisy had thought he couldn’t love, and Alex had believed he wouldn’t.
But God help him, he did. He loved Charlie. He’d only had to see the boy, watch the joy of life in his eyes, listen to him, hold his hand, touch his hair—and he loved. But more than that, before he recognized that he loved Charlie, he knew he loved her.
Daisy.
In spite of himself and his determined intentions, the day Daisy had come into his life, she had created a tiny rent in his armor. She had pierced his defenses, had touched his heart and planted a seed deep in his soul. For two days she had given him a glimpse of what life could be like if he had dared to let it grow.
He hadn’t. He’d turned his back. But while he thought he’d walked away heart-whole, it wasn’t true.
The minute he’d seen her again this autumn, everything he had felt when he’d been with her the first time—the need, the emotion, the connection—the sense that the world was a brighter, warmer, fuller, more welcoming place—had broken through.
He hadn’t given in, of course. Though he had felt the attraction all over again, he’d still tried to do it his way—to control it. To control her.
He couldn’t.
She wouldn’t let him.
He knew what she wanted. Demanded. A real future, a no-holds-barred willingness to love and, admitting that love, to face the possibility of pain, of loss of control, of helplessness—all the things he’d said no to.
He didn’t know if he could do it now.
But he loved. He had no choice. It was simply there—in him. For better or worse. But he knew he couldn’t face the future until he was able to face the past.
Rubbing a hand over his face, Alex turned away from the window, from the cool remote perfection of the distant skyline, to the emotional minefield that he carried inside him. He padded into his bedroom.
The room was spare, unadorned. It held a wide bed, a tall oak chest of drawers, a closet. Nothing more. He went to the chest of drawers, then crouched down and pulled open the bottom drawer.
It was empty except for one thing—a single sturdy, flat, dark green cardboard box, perhaps a foot-square, two inches deep.
For a long minute, he just looked at it. Didn’t immediately reach for it. Didn’t really want to touch it even yet.
He hadn’t touched it except when he’d moved it, since he’d left for university at the age of eighteen. He hadn’t opened it since he’d put the lid on it when his parents separated, when they sold the house, when his mother moved to Athens and his father to Corfu.
“Don’t look back,” his father had said as he’d sold off everything and buried himself in his scholarly books.
But Alex had put the things that mattered in that box, the things he couldn’t let go of, even if he couldn’t bring himself to look at them.
He’d carried the box with him ever since. He’d taken it to university in London, to his first job in Brussels, to the dozen or so places he’d lived in his adult life. He had brought it with him here.
Wherever he was, he always put it carefully in its own drawer where he wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it when he was looking for something else. He didn’t want to be blind-sided when he wasn’t prepared.
Someday, he always promised himself, he would open it. When the time was right he would once again let himself remember. But as time had passed, he’d learned to cope, he’d shut off the past, had refused to give it the power to hurt him. It was easier to forget. The time had never been right.
Until now.
Now he hurt anyway. Now Daisy’s words had cut right through his protective shield, had looked inside him and found him wanting.
His hands shook as he drew the box out of the drawer and carried it over to sit on the bed with it. He was surprised how light it was. In his imagination it was the heaviest thing he owned.
He ran his fingers over the top, then carefully eased the lid off and set it aside. There were only a handful of things within—and just as he had feared, the sight of them brought a thousand memories flooding back.
There was the postcard of the Matterhorn that Vass had sent him when he was six and Vass was nine. Vass had been with their father in Switzerland. “It’s s’cool,” he had written. “You and me will climb it someday.”
They hadn’t, of course. But when Vass came home, they’d begun climbing the cliffs by their island home with eager purpose. Just as they’d earnestly practiced tying ship’s knots in the two feet of line that lay in the box, as well.
“Learn to tie the knots and I’ll teach you to sail,” their father had said.
Now Alex drew the piece of line out of the box and his fingers moved automatically to make a Spanish bowline, a clove hitch, a figure eight while in his mind’s eye he saw the summer days they’d spent on the water, the three of them. He remembered the heat and the sun and the wind—and the stories and the laughter that came with them.
He picked a small reddish-brown pottery shard out next, rubbing his thumb over its worn contours and remembering Vass finding it and saying he was going to grow up and be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones. And there were two very well-used Star Wars figures—Luke and Han, of course—they’d played with for years. There was a painstaking drawing of the Battlestar Galactica that Vass had drawn while he was in the hospital, and a far more precise elegant one that Alex had drawn at the same time because, after all, he was the one who was going to be the architect, not Vass.
And then there was a single silver Porsche Matchbox car.
Alex had faced all the other bits of memorabilia with a tight jaw, a strained smile, blinking eyes.
But the silver Porsche felt like a dagger to his heart.
They had fought over the silver Porsche, he and Vass. It had been his brother’s, but Vass had been indifferent until Alex wanted it. And they had fought—actually came to blows—and Vass had punched him in the stomach and he had given Vass a bloody nose.
He stared at the small car now, picked it up and ran his hands over the lines of its frame. Then he closed his fingers around it until he felt the cold metal bite into his hand. He wanted to feel it. Needed the pain.
It hadn’t been Vass’s first bloody nose. He’d had several that summer. But this one they hadn’t been able to stop. Not until they’d taken him to the doctor. And then there had been murmurs of concern. His mother’s
worry. His father’s pacing. More doctor visits. A flight to Athens to see a specialist. A hospital. Tests.
A diagnosis. Leukemia.
Because of a bloody nose. A bloody nose that was Alex’s fault.
It wasn’t, of course. He knew that now. But at the time, he was not yet nine years old. He hadn’t known—and no one had bothered to reassure him. They’d all been far too worried about Vass. He had been worried, too.
But he’d swallowed his worry and his guilt because there hadn’t been time for it, there hadn’t been room for it. His parents hadn’t even seen it.
When Vass had come home from the hospital the first time, Alex had been scared to go into his room, afraid he might do more damage.
But Vass had said scornfully, “You can’t give somebody leukemia. You’re not that powerful, brat.” Then he’d grinned, Vass’s old wonderful “I can do anything” grin, and Alex had had his brother back.
Then he’d believed Vass would recover. Then he’d hoped for the best. Two and a half years later, there was no best.
The last time he’d been in Vass’s hospital room, Vass had said, “Keep the Porsche. It’s yours.”
“I don’t want it,” Alex had protested, tears streaming down his face.
Now slowly, painfully, he unbent his fingers, and stared at the little car. He rubbed his fingers over it, remembering Vass doing the same thing. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw Vass’s frail body and thin pale face, and he let the pain wash over him.
But other memories came, too. Along with the pain, he remembered the good times, the joy, the sharing and laughter. And he knew you couldn’t have one without the other.
For years he’d put the Porsche and the memories in a box and tucked them away, unable to face them.
You don’t love anyone. You don’t want to. Daisy’s words echoed in his mind. He heard them again, along with her parting shot: You ‘re offering far, far less.
Alex knew what he had to do.
He just hoped to God he could do it.
“‘S Christmas!” Charlie jiggled Daisy’s shoulder, waking her, peering wide-eyed into her sleep-gritted ones. “An’ Santa came!”
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