by Maisey Yates
Her father was gone. And even when he’d been here, he’d been spare on physical affection. All of her close friends, the ones she’d made in her two years of university while starting her history degree, had moved away. None of them were spending their twenties rotting in their parents’ estates. They had all moved to Manhattan, London, exciting places. They were all pursuing careers, or higher education. Bigger goals than clinging to good memories. They were out making new memories. And until this moment, until his skin touched hers, she didn’t realize how incredibly lonely she had become.
She had no one to blame but herself.
And this is why you’re leaving.
She took a deep breath, trying to do her best to keep her reaction to him concealed. But then she made a terrible mistake. She looked up, her eyes meeting his, and what she saw there astonished her.
His eyes weren’t blank. They weren’t flat. They were… They were molten. The heat there a perfect reflection of the fire that was rioting through her core.
“Come on,” he said, his voice rough.
She could do nothing but follow him. Which was terribly telling. Not just of this moment, but of the past fifteen years or so.
And once they were outside, her breath caught in her throat, all of the sensations building in her chest, making it impossible for her to do anything but stand there and tremble. He was touching her. And right before them was a beautifully appointed table set for two, a candle at the center.
It was like something that had been torn from her fantasies. Her girlish fantasies. When loving him had simply meant aspirations of sweet romance, holding hands and making sophisticated conversation.
Back before she had realized that there was much more to the connection between men and women than candlelight and hand-holding.
“Is something wrong?”
She looked at him, at his fierce expression. There was an intensity behind his eyes that she couldn’t decode. All she knew was that she had waited most of her life to have him look at her like this. And for some reason he was looking at her this way now. She was… She was powerless to resist. Utterly and completely held captive by that look in his eyes.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she lied, making her way across the expansive terrace and taking her seat at the table.
She noticed then that Leon had a glass of water in front of his plate rather than wine. “I didn’t think you were on pain medication anymore,” she said.
“I’m not. But as I’m not entirely certain what my relationship is to alcohol I decided it best to continue to abstain. I seem to have done all right without it in the past week. Why start now?”
She nodded slowly. The truth was, Leon overindulged in everything. It was difficult to say what specifically he might have a problem with, and what specifically he just chose to indulge in to excess. But she was grateful that he was choosing to remain completely sober tonight. The idea of him being drunk and amnesiac made her feel far too much like the predator he had implied she might be when they had first left for the airport in Italy.
“Oh. Well. Maybe I should drink something else then.”
“You’re fine. It occurs to me that we’ve been talking rather a lot about me. I want to hear more about you, Rose. Because it isn’t only myself that I have forgotten about. I don’t remember anything about you.”
Her heart was thundering hard, her throat suddenly dry. “I’m not sure that I’m a very interesting topic of conversation.”
“I doubt there is anything more interesting to a man than the topic of his wife.”
“We don’t… We don’t have that sort of relationship,” she said, the truth stumbling out of her mouth uneasily.
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure that you are well suited to marriage.”
He frowned. “Have I been unkind to you in some way?”
“No,” she said, trying to dispel his fears quickly. She was afraid that he was imagining himself to be some kind of monster when that couldn’t be further from the truth. “You are independent. We do not live in each other’s pockets, as you have already noticed by virtue of the fact that we have separate bedrooms. We do not often take long meals together out on the terrace. We do not often share our innermost thoughts.”
“Why did you marry me?” The words were so confused, so utterly filled with disbelief. It was shocking. To hear him question why on earth she might have married him.
“I could give any number of reasons a woman would marry you. You are incredibly handsome. Successful. And as for me… I am… Well, let’s not be dishonest about the situation, Leon. I am quite plain.”
He frowned even more deeply. Then he reached across the table, the edge of his thumb touching the corner of her mouth. Her heart slammed hard into her breastbone, her entire body going rigid, every fiber of her being on high alert to see what might happen next. He traced the line of her upper lip, then dipped down to the lower one before sweeping his thumb up to her cheekbone, dragging it slowly across her skin.
“I will confess that my first thought was that you were plain. But as I have spent time with you, as you have cared for me… I can no longer see what I first did. The only real memory I have, the only concrete image in my mind is your eyes. You are what I remember, while everything else is vague impressions and hazy ideas. If it is not entirely absent altogether. Your eyes are my truth, Rose. How could I find them, or you, anything but incredibly beautiful?”
She had stopped breathing now. Any moment, she had a feeling she was going to tip sideways in her chair and lose consciousness completely. But to have him look at her like this, to have him say those things… This entire nightmare was being twisted into a dream. Perversely, she was enjoying it. Perversely, it was everything she had ever wanted. But not like this.
Still, she found she couldn’t turn away. “That is… It is an incredibly nice thing to say.”
“I’m stingy and arrogant, remember? I am neither generous nor particularly nice, to hear you tell it. I am not being kind when I say these words. I am being truthful. There’s a limit to the sorts of truths you can tell in my position. There are very few things I know for certain. But this is one of them.”
He shifted the position of his hand, cupping her face, his palm warming her. Igniting her. “You are my wife. I wish to know everything about you.”
He dropped his hand away from her face, drawing it back to his side of the table. She cleared her throat nervously, shifting the cutlery on the table in front of her as a displacement activity.
“Did you go to university?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“What did you study?”
She shifted, feeling uncomfortable and edgy beneath his intense dark gaze. “I was a history major. As you’ve probably guessed, I like old things. Really, the older and dustier the better.”
“Is that a jab at my age?”
She laughed. “Um. It wasn’t, but that’s an interesting point. No, I like the smell of books, musty pages and such. Aged velvet furniture that’s always a little damp.”
“Doesn’t sound too appealing to me.”
“No. Of course not. Your room here is all modernized.”
“I like things sans dust and mold, what can I say,” he returned. “So you did your history degree.”
“No,” she said. “I went for two years. And then I stopped.”
“Why?”
“I married you.”
Her answer settled uncomfortably between them. An accusation, when she hadn’t meant it to be one.
“Which begs the question,” he said, “that I have been dying for the answer to. How old are you?”
She fiddled even more intensely with the silverware. “Twenty-three.”
“So you were twenty-one when we married.”
“Twe
nty. I was just shy of my birthday, and we have been married a little over two years.”
“That seems a bit too young.”
She lifted her shoulder. “My father was dying. We both knew it. Knowing that I was safe with you, knowing that we were settled brought him a lot of joy. Neither of us wanted to deny him that.”
“And then your father died and… I have been off partying. I left you here in this house by yourself with no finished degree doing…”
“You helped. When he died. You didn’t just abandon me and go to parties. You supported me. You took care of so many details when I was far too emotional to do it myself.”
The relief on his face touched something deep inside of her. “Well, that’s something.”
“And I’ve been organizing my family history. Our family tree, which stems back to the founding of the country, actually. So it’s very rich and…you know, complicated.”
“Wonderful. So I left you here to grow moldy with the old furniture you love so much. How generous of me.”
“No,” she said, her chest tight. Because it was the truth. Her father had died and Leon had returned to the exact lifestyle he had been living before their marriage. He had never touched her, not once, but he had continued to sleep with other women. She knew it. She wasn’t blind. Gossip magazines were alight with it. The poor, sad Tanner heiress and her wandering husband. But she didn’t want to tell him that. She didn’t want to tell this man that.
How strange that she did not want to disappoint him with the truth about himself.
“You are not being truthful with me.”
“I’m not entirely certain the truth is beneficial in this situation.”
He rose from his seat and came to stand in front of her before dropping to his knees. They were eye level, and he was so close she could smell the soap on his skin, could feel the warmth coming off his body. She was seized by the desire to touch him. To close the distance between them. But she didn’t. She just sat there, frozen as ever.
It turned out she didn’t have to close the distance, because he was the one to do it. He reached up, cupping her cheeks with both of his hands, drawing her face down toward him. “Then we shall make a new truth. I see no reason why we cannot make a new life. You have shared with me your dreams, and I find that I like the sound of them.”
“You aren’t working right now. You are…housebound. I am the only entertainment you have.”
His dark gaze turned stormy. “You make me sound like a child.”
In some ways, he was. In some ways, he always had been. A man with a very short attention span who was constantly on to the next toy. The newest thing, the shiniest thing. As a girl she had found it exciting. His flashy cars, his sharp wardrobe, even the beautiful women he would sometimes bring to her father’s parties. Until the sharp claws of jealousy had sunk deep inside her. Until she had wanted to occupy the position those women were in.
It was the moments in between that got her. That held her affection for him. The spare times when she’d caught a hint of haunted darkness around the edges of his bright smile. The times when he’d looked at her and seen down deep.
The times he’d looked at her, period, and not just past her.
“I…”
“I am not a child,” he said, his voice a dark temptation she couldn’t turn away from.
And before she could say another word, before she could protest, before she could even breathe, Leon had closed the distance between them. And he was kissing her like she had never been kissed before. As he had never kissed her before, since he was the only man she had ever kissed.
His lips were hot, firm and commanding as they moved over her own, his tongue a slick, sweet enticement as it delved deep inside her mouth, sliding against her own. Immediately, her breasts felt heavy, her core a hollow ache, wet with need for him at the first touch of his mouth to hers.
She was drowning. In this. In him. In the desire. Completely and utterly at its mercy.
She wasn’t even sure she cared. Because she was being swept away on a tide that she couldn’t even hope to fight against. Desire dictating her every response, her every movement.
She felt… She felt ravenous for him. Completely and totally starved of the one thing she had craved for so long. She wrapped her arms around his neck, leaning out of her chair and crushing her breasts to his chest, nearly sighing with relief as she pressed herself against him. She wanted to meld herself to him completely, wanted to get lost in this forever.
It was a sickness, a kind of madness that overtook her completely. The desire to feel his skin against hers, to have nothing at all between them. His memories didn’t matter. His broken ribs didn’t matter. His betrayal of their vows didn’t matter. All of the hurt, all of the torture she had endured over it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered but this. The fact that she was kissing him finally.
He slid his hand down her back, pressing her more firmly against him. She parted her thighs, resting the part of herself that was aching the most for his touch up against his hardened arousal.
He growled, drawing his hand down lower to cup her rear, pressing her even more tightly to him, rolling his hips against hers.
It occurred to her then that it wasn’t only alcohol he had gone a long time without. Granted, she had gone twenty-three years without this kind of sexual contact, but Leon was accustomed to more.
And it was that thought that found her pulling away from him, running her shaking hands through her hair and sitting back in her chair. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words rushed.
He looked at her, frowning. “Why are you sorry?”
“You don’t remember anything. You don’t remember us. And you’re injured…”
“This,” he said, his eyes meeting hers meaningfully, “has nothing to do with memory. This is another bit of honesty, I think.”
Except it wasn’t. Because they didn’t do things like this. Because he had never touched her before. She couldn’t bring herself to voice that admission. Could not do that to what was left of her pride.
“I think it would be for the best if we held off on things like this.”
“Why is that?” he asked. “Is it because you are so angry with me about something that happened before?”
“It’s because I don’t feel right about asking you to sleep with a stranger.” It was nearly the truth.
“Everyone is a stranger to me. I’m a stranger to myself. And yet I seem to sleep in my own body every night.”
“It’s different. And you know it.”
“Is it?”
“I think you’re just…just male. And therefore would come up with any excuse for sex.”
He shook his head slowly, his dark eyes searching. “You are my wife. You are not a stranger to me. And I can feel…that there is something broken between us. I know it, as surely as I know certain things about myself. I do not need a memory to know that I wish to fix that.”
Her throat tightened, pressure building in her chest. “It is not entirely on you to fix it.”
“I want to try.”
She gritted her teeth, trying to hold her emotions in check. “Let’s wait. Let’s wait until you remember.” The words nearly choked her, because the last thing she wanted was to wait. If they waited, he would remember his indifference. If they waited, he wouldn’t want to fix what was broken. Because in Leon’s eyes their marriage wasn’t broken. Why would it be?
With their current arrangement he was allowed to behave as he saw fit. To do exactly what he wanted whenever he wanted with whomever he wanted. Once he remembered that their arrangement consisted of her staying home while he behaved like a man with no wife at all he wouldn’t want to change a thing.
“You are not my doctor, agape.”
“No, I’m not. But I am the one who
—”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because I don’t have my memories I’m not in full control of my desires. A man does not need a memory to know that he wants a woman. He feels that in his body. In his blood. Mine burns for you. My mind may not remember, but my body suffers no such affliction.”
She drew in a deep, shuddering breath, the weight of all the restraint, of the denial pressing down on her. He was promising things that didn’t exist outside of misty fantasy for her. Pleasure, satisfaction on a level she could hardly comprehend. But it wasn’t for her. Not really. And she had to resist. No matter how enticing it was.
“No,” she said, standing from her chair and sweeping past him, not pausing to look back at him as she walked straight into the house. She kept going. She nearly ran. All the way through the house, up the stairs, down the corridor and into her bedroom. She shut the door tightly behind her, and leaned back up against the wall.
And she couldn’t help but feel she had run away from her salvation.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE WAS BREATHING HARD, her heart fluttering in her chest like a trapped bird in a cage.
She wanted him. And this sorely tested her. All of her willpower, all of her restraint. He was offering her what she wanted on a platter. Seemingly. But she knew that as decadent, as wonderful as it all seemed, it would be poison in the end.
“It would be. It would kill me.” She spoke those words aloud into the emptiness of the room. Trying to make herself believe them. Trying to force herself to feel it.
She squeezed her eyes shut tight, curling her fingers into fists. And she waited until she stopped shaking before she moved away from the wall.
When she could catch her breath she reached around and took hold of the tab on the zipper, drawing it down, feeling as though she was casting some of the weight off as she let her dress fall from her body and pool at her feet on the floor. She wandered into the bathroom, turning the tub taps on and letting the water run until it was hot.
