Desert Jewels & Rising Stars

by Sharon Kendrick

  “And look what we have done with it,” she said, her voice so rough she hardly recognized it. She used her fists to dash the tears away from her eyes and could not even hate herself for showing that weakness. “Look what we’ve become.”

  “Bethany,” he said, his voice harsh; she could see to her amazement that he was pleading. This man, who only issued orders. This man, who did not know how to bend at all.

  But she had already bent too much. She had bent and twisted and tied herself into knots, and she trusted neither one of them anymore. How could she? He had lied to her and, worse, she had lied to herself. She could not handle herself around this man. She never could. How many times must she prove this same failing to herself, in ever more catastrophic ways?

  Three years ago she had dissolved into incoherent rages and tantrums, trying desperately to reach him. This time, she had simply dissolved into him as if she had no other existence of her own, as if her return to this place completely deleted all that had gone before.

  She loved him, but he was no good for her, and she was never going to become the person whom he should have married. Hadn’t they learned all of this long ago? Why were they still here, still fighting, over the same futile ground?

  “I do not want a lake,” she said again, not sure why she could not let go of it.

  She imagined the pretty stretch of grass where she’d found herself so enchanted that she’d lost her head and surrendered herself to him once more. It was the bait, perhaps, to the pretty little trap this life could be, but she did not have to accept that particular cage.

  Who would she be if she stayed here? Leo’s mother, whose name was never mentioned as if she had never existed outside of her prescribed roles? A woman who had merited a show of respect in the form of that lake, but no true respect at all? And no love.

  Certainly no love. The woman’s only son spoke of it as if it was an alien notion, profoundly foreign to him. How could she live with that?

  “I am not willing to relive your parents’ marriage,” she told him then, aware that he was watching her with that terrible look on his beautiful face, as if she was killing him. As if she was doing it with her own hands. It made her ache, but she could not let herself stop. “I’m not willing to simply accept unhappiness.”

  “Why are you so certain that we will be unhappy?” he demanded, his voice still so raw. “Have you been unhappy since you came here?”

  “It’s like that lake …” she began.

  “I will dredge it and pave it over with concrete, if that will make you happy,” he gritted out, temper crackling in his voice. “If that will keep you from mentioning it again—as if I built it myself!”

  “It doesn’t matter how happy we are, or think we are, because there is always something rotten underneath,” she managed to say. “There is always another game, another lie. We cannot do this. It has been five excruciating years and we have proven repeatedly that we cannot do it, Leo. We simply cannot.”

  It was as if the pain was another entity, a vast sea, an agony both acute and dull ringing in her ears and cramping her belly. It seemed to fill the room, shining from Leo’s drawn, ragged features and the very salt in the tears that she could not seem to stop, the tears that slipped down her cheeks unheeded.

  “Then what do you want?” he asked starkly.

  Bethany did not mistake the question for another shot in their long battle. It was a deeply serious question. He looked at her as if he could see into her, as if he knew the things she still kept hidden. As if he wanted to see everything.

  She thought for a brief moment that she could do it—that she could say she loved him too and let that sit there between them. That she could let herself be that vulnerable, that honest, that open. That she could risk it—risk everything.

  But all those empty years … All the times she had said she loved him and he had merely smiled and then used her desperation to make her do his bidding. All the nights she had tossed and turned, alone and ravaged with this terrible grief, tortured by the love she would have cut out of her own flesh if she’d been able to.

  How could she trust this man with her heart when she could not trust herself with it? How could she possibly admit to that much vulnerability when she was already so shaky?

  Nothing good can come of this, she told herself bleakly, staring at him, her tears making his dark coffee eyes seem to shimmer and glow. Nothing ever has.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said gruffly, as if it hurt him too. “Tell me and it is yours.”

  She wanted so many things. She always had. But she was too beaten, too bruised by all of their epic and painful failures. She had given up too much and she was so afraid that she had no more left to give. She could not do it anymore. In that moment she wanted some semblance of peace more than she wanted anything else—even him.

  “I want a divorce,” she whispered, and saw his eyes go cold, his mouth tauten, his face pale.

  But it was better to break what was left of her heart right now than to hand it to him and watch him smash it into dust again and again until nothing was left, not even that thread of hope that had kept her going all these long years.

  She told herself it had to be.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LEO found himself standing in her bedchamber, the ancient room seeming to whirl around him. His heart was too loud in his ears and his chest, and he could not seem to force a full breath.

  He could not believe the finality he had heard in Bethany’s voice, had seen stamped on her face. He could not believe that after all of this—all they had been through, all they clearly still felt for each other—she still wanted to divorce him. He could not accept that she wanted to leave him. Everything in him rebelled at the thought!

  He had told her he loved her, and it had not moved her at all, when the same words had once transported her entirely—made her smile and laugh and shine from within. He did not know where to put that sad reality, how to keep it from tearing at him.

  If you loved me, you would not spend so much time trying to manipulate me, she had said. Her words still echoed in his head, sounding like an uncomfortable truth. Look what we’ve become.

  He felt his hands clench into fists at his sides.

  She did not want a lake, and he did not want to be a man like his father who would build such a monument to something he had never felt. He did not want her trapped and miserable, unhappy and dutiful. He did not want this woman who had wrecked him and exalted him, sometimes with the same small smile, to end up like his own mother. He did not want her to transform herself into the kind of woman he’d been supposed to marry. He did not want any part of the life he’d been lucky to be banished from as a small boy. Was that what he wanted for his own children?

  He knew he did not.

  And he also knew, though he wished he did not, that it was his pride that wanted to force her to stay, his pride that wanted to keep her no matter what it was she said she wanted. He might not believe that she was as finished with him as she claimed to be, but it was only his pride that would force her to confront that, wasn’t it?

  He had lived his life in service of his pride for far too long, he thought then. Because once he set it aside, all he could see was the expression on Bethany’s pretty face, pale and streaked with tears. Did he love her so little that he could keep her here, his prisoner, when she wanted to leave? Did he want her close to him more than he wanted her happy?

  He detested himself for how long it took to answer that question, for how agonizing it was to come to the only possible conclusion.

  That was the kind of man he was, he thought bitterly. The kind of man she accused him of being. That was exactly who he was to her, and had always been: autocratic, conniving, manipulative. Just as she’d thrown at him, time and again—but he had excused it all away because he had told himself it was all about duty and obligation, when, in truth, he had simply wanted her.

  Here. Now. For ever.

  He had seen her and he had ne
ver looked at another woman again. He had never wanted anyone else. Only Bethany. He simply wanted her with him in whatever way he could have her, because without her he feared he would disappear forever beneath the crushing weight of his own vast history, his family’s legacy.

  He let out a breath and let it roll through him, the truth he had fought so hard, so long, to suppress, even from himself.

  She was the only one who had ever seen him simply as a man. But she could not be happy if she was with him. This was finally clear to him. It was killing her—and he could not stand by and let something hurt her so badly, even if what was hurting her was him.

  He had to let her go. He did not know how he would do it when every single instinct he possessed screamed that he must prevent this very thing at all costs—he only knew he had no other choice.

  Bethany did not realize that she had sunk to the floor until she looked up to see Leo standing before her, a strange and unreadable expression on his face. She stared at him, aware then that she was on her knees. She had no idea how that had happened. She had told him she wanted a divorce, he had walked away from her and it had been over.

  She had known, with some kind of primitive instinct that seemed to emanate from deep inside of her, that they had finally snapped that thread of hope. It was finally broken. They had finally ended this thing between them, whatever it was, and she was free. Free to go, free to live—free.

  And it felt like dying.

  “Did you fall?” he asked in a voice that sounded far away, as if it was a stranger’s.

  Or perhaps she had become the stranger, having cut the thread that tied them together. Perhaps that tiny little shred of hope had been the only thing that had bound them, after all. She tried to wet her lips, to speak, but nothing came out.

  “Are you unwell?” he asked, his elegant brow furrowing as he moved closer. She had to blink to bring him into focus, and that was when she realized that tears still coursed down her cheeks unchecked.

  “I want to walk out of here,” she managed to say in a whisper that seemed to tear at her throat. She felt the hot sting of her tears, the clog of emotion in her chest, the threat of deep sobs from low in her abdomen. “I want to be free …of all of this.”

  A stark emptiness washed across his face, hurting her as surely as if he’d struck her, even when she would have thought that she could not hurt any further—that it was not physically possible.

  “I told you that I love you and I mean it, Bethany,” he said in a low, quiet, awful voice, his powerful hands in fists at his sides, his dark eyes bleak. “And I will love you enough to let you go, if I must.”

  His mouth flattened into that grim line. He looked … defeated, this strong, unbreakable man. It made Bethany feel like shattered glass, all jagged shards and fine dust scattered across the floor. It made her want to rewind, erase, do whatever it took to make him Leo again.

  “If that is what you want,” he said.

  It rang in the air like a vow, and she believed him. He would let her go. He would do it. Only moments ago, she had known that was precisely what she wanted. She had been deeply hurt, but sure. Certain. Leo was finally acquiescing, and this time she knew that he was not playing one of his games. They had moved far past that.

  This time, he meant it. Which meant that all she had to do was stand and walk out of this place, head high, heart battered, perhaps, but free—just as she’d wanted to be for so long.

  All she needed to do was rise, climb to her feet and start for the door. Start the rest of her life as she’d believed she wanted to do for so long.

  Stand up! she ordered herself, desperate.

  But she could not seem to do it.

  “I do not know how to let you go,” he said, his voice darker than she had ever heard it, laced with all the pain and sorrow she knew was inside of her, spilling out of her. “But I will do it, Bethany. I promise you.”

  It seemed to reverberate deep in her heart. It made her feel weighted to the floor, heavy like a stone, when she kept telling herself she should feel lighter, should fly, should cast aside the shackles she had always believed he’d placed on her and make for the sun.

  Was this how it ended for them? Was this how it felt?

  But her legs refused to work. Her hands were clasped together before her as if she were praying, and she could not force herself to wrench her gaze away from his. She was not sure she was even breathing. Time seemed to stand still, fold in on itself, and all she knew was that sorrow in her heart and the way it reflected back at her from his bittersweet gaze.

  She had cut that last silver line of hope, of the dream of him, and without it, she knew suddenly, with a deep certainty that seemed to echo inside of her and grow louder with every passing second, she was as unknowable to herself as he was without the great long parade of his history.

  He was her history. He had made her as surely as she had made herself; they were entwined and entangled, and she did not know how to exist without it. Without him. She could as soon exist without air.

  Thinking that, she released the breath she had been holding and inhaled deeply, as if for the first time.

  “I cannot seem to leave you,” she whispered then, something like grief washing through her as if it was overflowing from within, as if it was a poison, as if it had to get out. “I have been trying to do it for years, and this time even my legs have given out on me.”

  “I will carry you wherever you want to go, if you wish it,” he said gruffly, and she could see that he meant it, this difficult man, however little he wished her to leave.

  He would do it because he was honorable, for all she had longed to believe otherwise. He was not his father. He was not a monster. He was, perhaps, as conflicted and confused as she had always been.

  Then she could not hold any of it at bay any longer—the sweltering heat and storm of all that sorrow, all that pain, all their years and wars and battles and passions—and she bent over with the force of it, sobbing it out into the plush carpet beneath her.

  “Come now,” he murmured, coming closer.

  But still she wept, as if she would never stop, as if she was only beginning, as if she could make sense of the past five years through the salt of her tears.

  “Bethany,” he said softly as his arms went around her and lifted her. “Please.”

  But she sobbed against the wide wall of his chest, his scent and heat enveloping her like an embrace, warming her, caressing her, keeping her safe while the storm raged on.

  “Come, luce mio; do not cry like this,” he murmured close to her ear, pressing a kiss against the flushed skin of her cheek, soothing her the only way he could. “I beg you.”

  But she could not seem to stop. Not when he lapsed into crooning, comforting Italian. Not when he carried her to the window seat in the bedchamber and settled her on his lap, holding her close and murmuring into her ear. She cried and cried, and she could not make herself stop it any more than she had been able to make herself stand up and walk out the door.

  Instead, she simply let him hold her.

  “This is my fault,” he said when she had been quiet against him, in his arms, for a time. Bethany tilted her head back and searched his face. He held her close to his chest, but for once she did not worry that this made her appear the child. She felt …comforted by the steady beat of his heart. By his warmth. By his muscled strength surrounding her.

  “If there is fault,” she said, her voice raspy in the aftermath of the storm that had shaken her, her eyes feeling swollen and bruised. “Then there is enough to go around.”

  “I am the perfect prince,” he said, his tone heavily sardonic, and for once she knew he aimed it at himself. “I have spent my life practicing, so one should hope I’ve succeeded at it after all these years.” His eyes blazed at her, alight with a kind of determination she had never seen before. “But I am not much of a man.”

  “I love you,” she said unevenly.

  The fear was gone, wept away. She was washed c
lean. Only the truth remained, shining hot and bright inside her like a beacon. Like something profoundly, life-alteringly simple. She loved him. What else mattered?

  She sat forward, turning so she could face him on the window seat. “That does not mean it is not complicated. That it is not painful. But I have always loved you.”

  “I know,” he said, a ghost of his arrogant smile curving his sensual lips, though his eyes blazed and his face filled with an emotion that made her stomach clench. “But I did not think that mattered to you any longer.”

  “Of course it matters to me!” she whispered. He reached over and traced her mouth with one long, tapered finger, elegant as the rest of him. He smoothed his fingertip along the bow of her upper lip, the curve of her lower lip, and Bethany shivered slightly as that same familiar fire scorched her from within, as it always did. Always. Leo smiled slightly and drew his hand away.

  Bethany stared at him for a long moment, as if she could see the answer to all of their problems tattooed across his beautiful, regal, beloved face. She was not sure what she felt, or how. All she knew was that once again she could not take the final step that would separate her from him. She could not do it. And every second that she did not leave, that she let him hold her, that she breathed in and felt him do the same beside her, that resilient little thread of hope stretched out between them. And grew thicker. Tougher. It would be that much harder to break the next time.

  Maybe, a little voice whispered inside her heart, it is not supposed to break at all.

  She had wanted him to be all things to her, when he had wanted the chance to be no more than a man. She had wanted him to keep her safe, but there was nothing safe about loving like this—so deep and so hard that it had altered her completely, changed her, made her into someone she had not recognized for years. She had feared it for so long, fought it, fought him, desperate to keep herself from disappearing in him. Because that was what she’d always been so scared would happen if she succumbed to the power of her feelings. He was so much bigger than life, so much more than she had ever dared dream … Of course she had thought he would consume her whole.