by Sarah Morgan
He paused, giving her time to adjust, murmuring soft words into her hair, and she stroked her hand down his back, feeling the ripple of muscle under her seeking fingers. She hadn’t thought anything could feel this good, but she’d been wrong about that, just as she’d been wrong about so many other things.
She arched under him, wrapping her legs around him and he thrust deeper, his slow rhythm creating an avalanche of sensation. She felt the brush of his leg against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, the warmth of his mouth, the strength of his hand and she felt him. Felt the pulsing thickness of him filling her. And with each delicious, perfectly timed stroke, he drove her toward pleasure until finally she felt herself shatter again, and this time the ripples of her body coaxed his to the same conclusion.
* * *
Eva woke in the dark to find herself alone in the bed.
Her body ached in ways she hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe never.
She turned her head to see if Lucas was in the bathroom, but there was no sliver of light under the door.
Dragging herself from the delicious clouds of sleep, she sat up and focused on the room.
Part of her wanted to snuggle back down in the nest of bedding and sink back into the deep delicious sleep, but another part of her needed to find him.
She thought about the intimacy and the discoveries they’d made about one another, not just the first or second time, but afterward. There had been a tectonic shift in their relationship. Neither of them had held anything back.
Was she the first woman he’d slept with since his wife?
Was he regretting just how much they’d shared?
The thought of it marred what, for her, had been a perfect night.
Eva slid her legs out of bed and reached for Lucas’s shirt, pulling it on to keep the worst of the night chill away.
The arms fell past her fingers and the hem to midthigh. Rolling the sleeves back, she walked barefoot out of the bedroom in search of him.
The door to his office was open, but at first glance the room appeared to be empty. The light was out and the laptop lay closed on his desk. She was about to turn away and search for him downstairs when she saw his figure sprawled on the sofa. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand.
Something about the way he sat, the utter stillness, tugged at her heart.
She’d never seen anyone who looked more alone.
Everything about his body language told her that he didn’t want to be disturbed, but how could she leave him? Particularly as she was the likely cause of his current agony. Because he was in agony, she was sure of that.
“Lucas?”
He didn’t lift his head. Didn’t look at her. “Go back to bed, Eva.”
“Are you joining me?”
“No.” He shut her out as effectively as if he’d closed the door.
All that intimacy, the closeness they’d shared, evaporated like morning mist. If she wasn’t still experiencing the delicious and unfamiliar aches and tingles, she might have thought she’d imagined the whole thing.
She wished she could turn the clock back to those incredible hours where neither of them had been aware of anything but each other. But that time had passed.
Making a decision, she walked into the room. “Talk to me.”
“You don’t want that.”
How could he possibly think that? “If you’re regretting what we did, then this involves me, too.”
“Why would I regret it?”
She swallowed, aware that she was on very, very delicate ground. “You loved her. It probably feels like a betrayal, but—”
“Eva, you don’t want to have this conversation.”
Her heart was thudding. “You mean, you don’t want to have it.”
He swung his legs to the floor. His eyes glittered in the darkness. “No. I meant what I said. You don’t want to have it.”
Why would he think she wouldn’t want to talk?
Was he assuming that she’d been hoping for more from him than just a night of great sex? Was he afraid she’d read more into the night before than she should have?
“Do you think it will hurt me if you talk about your wife? I’m not naive, Lucas. I don’t think last night was about love or anything like that.” She ignored the tiny voice in her head that told her how much she really did want it to be about love. She wasn’t going there. She didn’t dare go there. “But I’d like to think we’re friends. I want you to talk to me. I want you to tell the truth.”
“You’re not ready to hear the truth.” He stared at the whiskey in his hand and then at her. “You want love so badly, but what if it doesn’t turn out the way you hope it will? Have you ever wondered whether you might be better off without it?”
Her heart felt swollen and heavy. “You’re saying that because you lost the love of your life, but I still believe it’s better to love that way than never to love at all. You’ll love again, Lucas. I know you will. It may not feel that way now, and I know you’ll never forget her, but one day you’ll find someone who makes you happy.”
She clamped her mouth shut. She probably shouldn’t have said any of that. It was too soon. He wasn’t ready to hear it. He didn’t believe it.
There was a long silence and when he finally spoke his voice was harsh. “You’re such an idealist. Such a dreamer. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Love is nothing like the vision you have in your head. It isn’t some glowing, perfect thing where everyone dances under sunshine and rainbows. It’s messy and untidy and it hurts like hell.”
“You feel that way because you lost her, but—”
“I feel that way because it’s true. You think I’m grieving because we shared the perfect love? Then let me shatter your illusions once and for all. There was nothing perfect about our love. But I did love her, and that made everything so much harder.”
“I know, but—”
“You don’t know. You have no fucking idea.” The raw anger in his voice shocked her.
“Lucas—”
“The night she died, the night she left all dressed up and stepped into that cab, she wasn’t going out for the evening.” His fingers were white on the glass, his grasp so tight it was a wonder it didn’t shatter. “She was going to join her lover. She was leaving me. So how’s your image of our perfect love looking now, Eva?”
Twelve
It’s better to lead than follow, but if you must follow, follow your instincts.
—Paige
He’d expected her to walk out, and he wouldn’t have blamed her. Maybe it was even what he wanted.
Why else would he have told her the truth?
For a long moment she said nothing and he watched a range of emotions cross her pretty features. Only a few hours before he’d seen ecstasy and passion in those eyes. Now he saw shock and confusion, followed by compassion. Of course, compassion, because this was Eva and it wasn’t possible for her not to feel compassion.
It was the last thing he wanted.
He stared down at his hands, disgusted with himself for spoiling her perfect night but instead of walking out, she sat down next to him.
“But she—” She stumbled over the words. “She was the love of your life. You knew her from childhood—”
“That’s right.” He watched her process all this new information. Watched as her glowing picture of the perfect love affair, the perfect marriage, changed shape into something distorted and ugly.
“I saw pictures of you together—at premieres, walking through Central Park. I saw the way you looked at each other.”
“And that simply proves that you can tell very little about a person by looking at them. A point I’ve been making since you first broke into my apartment.”
She didn’t appear to hear him. “You say you loved her and I saw her in the photos. She loved you, too.”
“She loved me. As well as she could. But love is complicated, Eva. That’s what I’ve been telling you. It isn’t all hearts and smiles. It can be pa
in. Sallyanne couldn’t handle being in a long-term committed relationship. She kept waiting for it to self-destruct, and when it didn’t she destroyed it herself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I.” And he blamed himself for that. For not looking closer. He, who prided himself on always digging deep, had failed to even scratch the surface of what was going on with his wife.
“Does anyone else know the truth?”
“That she was leaving me? No. If she hadn’t slipped on the ice getting into the cab, the world would have found out that night, and it would have been as much of a shock to them as it was to me.”
Look, Lucas, look what I did to us. I took what we had and I broke it. I always told you I’d break it.
He reached for the bottle of whiskey but his hand was shaking so much he missed the glass.
Eva quietly mopped up the amber pools with a napkin left over from one of the lunches she’d brought him.
Then she took the whiskey bottle from him and poured two fingers into the glass.
“Aren’t you going to lecture me on drinking? Tell me it isn’t going to help?”
“No.” There was no judgment there, only kindness and friendship. “What happened that night, Lucas?”
He’d never talked about it. He’d never wanted to. Until now.
Why? Why now?
Was it because she made it easy to talk? Or was it because there was a new intimacy between them? Evidence of that intimacy was visible in the faint reddening of the skin on her neck and the tumbled strands of her hair. And then there was the invisible. The connection, the closeness that hadn’t been there before. It had cracked open something that had been sealed inside him for three years.
“She told me she was leaving. We had an argument. I told her I loved her, and her response was to tell me she was having an affair. At first I didn’t believe it—” He broke off, unsure how to describe the magnitude of his confusion. “I thought I knew her so well. I’d known her since she was five years old. We lost touch for a while when we went to college. I stayed on the East Coast, she went West. I wanted the adventure of the big city. I suppose you would have called it my bad boy phase. We met up again by chance at a reunion and this time she was interested. Turned out she liked my bad boy side. We were together when I sold my first book. We celebrated by getting blind drunk and having sex on—” He glanced at her. “Never mind.”
She took his hand. “You don’t have to edit what you say, Lucas.”
“We renewed our friendship and it was as if we’d never been apart. Marriage seemed like a logical step to me. She was reluctant. She didn’t see why we should change what worked, but I persuaded her. I never even questioned whether it was the right thing for her.”
“But you knew her really well.”
“I thought I did. Her parents separated when she was young, and it was a bitter, acrimonious divorce. It left her with a deep-seated belief that marriage couldn’t last. I didn’t know it at the time, but the moment I put that ring on her finger, I signed the death warrant to our marriage. It was over before it had begun.”
“But you never suspected she was having an affair?”
“No. She didn’t love him, she told me that.” He lifted the glass and drank, trying to block out the memory of that last conversation. “She did it because she thought it would drive me away. She wanted to ‘set me free.’ She told me she’d done me a favor. She thought by making me hate her, I’d find it easier to move on. It was her ‘gift’ to me.”
“Oh, Lucas—”
“I’m not sure what would have happened if she hadn’t slipped on the ice that night. Maybe she was hoping I’d make a grand gesture and win her back to prove my love. Or maybe she really did mean to leave. What happened would have been tough to fix. She said a lot of things she shouldn’t have said, and so did I. I was angry. So damned angry—” And the guilt gnawed at his insides like acid.
“Of course you were.”
“She tried to make it as bad as possible, to stop me loving her, but it didn’t work that way. After she died, the feelings were almost intolerable because I had no way of talking to her and getting to the truth. I truly believe she did love me, but she was too scared to trust it. It was as if she was so afraid of how she’d handle the ending, she wanted to just get it done and control it herself. But I still loved her. I’m not sure if that makes me crazy, delusional—” He put the glass down, saying, “possibly both.”
“Loyal.” Eva’s voice was quiet. “I think it probably makes you loyal. Love isn’t something that you can switch on and off. At least, it shouldn’t be.”
“I wanted to.” It was something he’d never admitted to anyone before. “When you’re wrong about someone, you go over it in your head. You think back to everything you ever did together, you examine everything that person ever said and you try to work out if anything at all was real. You unpick it, like a sweater, stitch by stitch, until it all falls apart and all you have in your hands is a pile of wool. Loose ends. And you have no idea how to put it together in a way that makes sense. Do you have any idea how it feels to think you know someone, really know someone, and then realize you don’t know them at all? All those facts, those moments that you thought of as intimacy, suddenly blur and you don’t know if you were ever really close or if you imagined it all. If you can’t trust the person in life who is supposed to be closest to you, who can you trust?”
“You should be able to trust the person closest to you. That isn’t asking too much.” She moved closer to him, instinctively offering comfort.
Her thigh brushed against his and then she took his hand and cupped it in between hers.
“I thought,” she said slowly, “that it was your work that made you so suspicious of people. I thought it was because you spend your days delving into the darker side of human nature. I never thought the reason stemmed from your own experience. I never suspected it was personal. I hate the thought that you’ve been carrying that all by yourself.”
“I didn’t want her memory to be all about gossip. I had her family to think about. Her parents and her sister were devastated. There was nothing to be gained by telling them the truth.”
“But how did you keep it a secret? What about the guy she—”
“He was married. He never would have left his wife for her. That’s probably why she chose him. She didn’t want the commitment, just the adventure. Or maybe she really did just use him as a tool to destroy what we had. I’ll never know. He was only too happy to keep it quiet because the truth would have put his marriage at risk.” He heard her soft sound of sympathy and felt a flash of guilt. “I’ve destroyed your shiny view of love.”
“No. I know love can be flawed, and messy. I know all those things.”
“And you still want it?”
“Of course. Because in the end, love is the only thing that matters.” She made it sound simple, and he’d only ever found it to be complicated and painful.
“I disagree. There have been so many days since she died when I wished I’d never met her.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “I couldn’t handle that she’d hid so much from me. I was as deluded as you were when you looked at those photos. A picture can be faked, but I was living with her and I thought what we had was real. If you can’t trust a person you’ve known for more than twenty-five years, who can you trust?”
“It’s no wonder you’ve steered clear of relationships ever since.”
“Fortunately people make allowances for grief. I focused on my work. My output tripled and the stories I was writing were darker and deeper. My sales numbers rocketed. Critics said my writing had reached a whole new level. Sallyanne would have said it was her last gift to me. Ironic, don’t you think? I’m a global bestseller because my wife screwed me up so badly.” He picked up the glass and drained it, the whiskey scalding his throat. “So that’s love, Eva. That’s how it looks. You should go back to bed and I should write.”
“Write? It’s
four in the morning.”
“I won’t sleep. But you should. You’re bad enough in the mornings without having hardly any sleep.” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, wondering what would have happened if he’d met her at a different time of his life. He dismissed the question because the answer was that there hadn’t been a single time in his life when he would have been the right man for a woman like her.
“Will you come with me?”
Part of him wanted to, but he reminded himself that at the moment all they’d shared was one night. That was all. People walked away after one night all the time. He didn’t intend to let one night become two nights and two nights become three.
“No.” He curled his fingers into his fist so that he couldn’t be tempted to touch her again.
Her gaze searched his and then she straightened her shoulders and stood up. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t regret what we did. Don’t start examining it and unpicking it. And don’t start worrying about where I might think this is going. I know what last night was. So don’t feel you have to give me explanations, or excuses or, worse, apologies. I’m going back to bed now. With no regrets. And I’d rather you didn’t have any, either.”
She walked away, leaving him to his self-imposed solitude, and he stared after her, seeing her slim curves silhouetted through his shirt and wondering how it could feel so bad when someone had just done exactly what you’d asked them to do.
He’d sent her away, but now he wanted to follow her. He wanted to thaw his frozen heart on her warmth, but he fought the impulse because he knew it was wrong of him to use her as a sanctuary when there was no way in a million years he could live up to her dreams.
If he didn’t care about her, it would have been easier. But he cared. He cared too damn much for his own piece of mind. So he forced himself to stay where he was, his only companions regret, guilt and a whole lot of other emotions he couldn’t begin to unravel.
* * *
Eva lay curled in a ball in the cold bed, staring into the darkness.
