A Year and a Day (Harlequin Super Romance)

by Cooper, Inglath

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, not knowing what else to say.

  He was quiet for a few moments. “It was my fault. I was supposed to pick her up after a football game. I had a girlfriend, and I let myself get distracted. By the time I realized what time it was—” His voice broke.

  Audrey reached across, took his hand and pressed it between both of hers.

  They sat that way for a long time. “What about your parents?” she asked finally, her voice raspy with disbelief.

  “They live in Augusta.”

  “And you don’t see them?”

  He lifted a shoulder, the pain in his eyes deepening. “I guess I don’t think they should have to be reminded.”

  Audrey sat back in her seat, her gaze still on him. “So they lost two children that day, not just one?”

  Nicholas glanced away, and then said, “I guess they did.”

  With this glimpse into his past, Audrey understood so much more about this man who had gone to such lengths to find her. He had known pain in his life as well, and she knew suddenly that it had influenced the choices he made and most likely still did.

  In this, they were the same.

  THE SOMBERNESS of that conversation tempered the remainder of the day with a kind of quiet reflection. Audrey somehow felt closer to Nicholas, as if he had shown her something of himself he did not often reveal.

  After lunch, they walked through the idyllic little town. Sammy raced ahead and then darted back to report in on some marvelous sight he had just spotted.

  For Audrey, it was almost scary, this connection. Not just between Nicholas and her, but between the three of them. Nicholas spoke to Sammy with respect and interest, and she could already see the effect of that on her son.

  They returned to the house early that evening. Celine had left a tureen of stew and a loaf of bread just inside the door, and Audrey invited Nicholas to stay and eat with them.

  “I should head back,” he said, surprising her.

  “Oh,” she said, admittedly a little disappointed. “I—well, it was a wonderful day. Thank you.”

  “Could we do it again tomorrow? I was also told San Gimignano is a must see.”

  “I can’t tomorrow,” Sammy piped in. “You said I could go with Celine to George’s agility class. I really want to go.”

  “I forgot,” Audrey said, running a hand across his hair. “What time is the class?”

  “One o’clock,” Sammy said.

  “We could wait until they get back,” Nicholas suggested.

  “The last time it was after dinner,” Sammy said.

  Audrey looked at Nicholas. “Maybe we could go and be back by then.”

  “That sounds good,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” He stared at her for a moment, the heat of something she was afraid to identify in his eyes. He stepped back then, quickly, as if he didn’t trust himself to stay.

  Later that evening, Audrey made herself a cup of decaffeinated coffee with the French press she had borrowed from Celine, then sat outside drinking it and going over the day as the moon threw light across her small yard. She thought about Nicholas’s sister and how that tragedy had shaped the man he was. And of how it answered so many of her questions about him and allowed her to see him from a very different perspective. With this new insight, the tiny crack in her heart where her feelings for him had already wedged themselves now widened and became a chasm through which any remaining resistance washed away in a great rushing current.

  THE NEXT DAY dawned sunny and warm, the sky a perfect cloudless blue. Celine and George picked Sammy up just after eleven. “Why don’t you just let him spend the night with me?” Celine asked. “Then you won’t have to worry about what time to be back.”

  “You’ve been too good to me, Celine,” Audrey said.

  “I love having him stay. It’s a treat for me. Not to mention for George.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. And Audrey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not doing your son any favors by walking around with that noose of guilt around your neck. Go and enjoy the day. You deserve it.”

  She showered, washed and dried her hair, slipped on a sleeveless white dress with a scooped neck and a loose flowing skirt. She took extra time with her makeup and felt like a teenager getting ready for a first date.

  Nicholas arrived a short while later, the look on his face when she opened the door justifying all of her efforts.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.” A smile touched his mouth. “You look incredible.”

  She dropped her eyes, not used to such honest appreciation. “Thanks. If you’re ready, we can—”

  “—go,” he finished. “I’m ready. I’ve actually been ready since four this morning, but I thought if I came that early it might come across as overly anxious.”

  She looked at him then and laughed, relaxing. They drove with the top down. Audrey tipped her head against the seat and let the sun warm her face. They rode for ten or fifteen minutes, silent, but at ease with one another. Nicholas glanced away from the wheel, his gaze searching out hers. “Sure you’re all right leaving Sammy?”

  “Celine is wonderful with him. And George is the dog he always wanted.”

  “How did you meet Celine?”

  “I hadn’t, actually, until I got here.” She hesitated, remembering the day she’d arrived, how welcome the sight of that small house had been. “The address was given to me by an underground network that helps women…like me.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and then said, “How did you find out about it?”

  “A nurse I met in the emergency room,” she replied, the words somehow not so difficult to say anymore. “She had been where I was. Recognized the signs, I guess.”

  “And?” he asked, his voice soft.

  “I e-mailed the contact person for the organization. Told her I wanted to leave the country. And she sent me here, to Celine.”

  “She’s a nice woman.”

  “Yes, she is.” Audrey studied his handsome profile, his set jaw. She wondered at the thoughts going through his mind.

  He suddenly turned the car into the parking lot of a small restaurant and stopped at one end where there were no other vehicles. “I have something to give you,” he said.

  Audrey stared at him, unsettled by the change in his voice.

  He reached inside his jacket, pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Information,” he said. “In case you ever need it.”

  Her stomach dropped. Without asking, she knew this was about Jonathan. “Nicholas—”

  “Please,” he said. “I hope that you never will. But if you do, I want you to use it.”

  She had always wondered about her husband’s business practices and suspected that Ross’s willingness to accommodate Jonathan extended to his construction company as well. “And how did you come across this?”

  “That’s not important.”

  She studied him for a moment. “It is,” she said. “This isn’t you. You compromised your ethics.”

  He held her gaze, and then said, “As much as I might wish it were different, the world doesn’t always operate to suit my ethics. That’s a lesson I’ve had repeated enough times to know it’s true.”

  He took the envelope from her, folded it in half, then tucked it inside her purse. “I don’t want this day to be about that,” he said. “I very much want it to be about us.”

  She glanced at her purse, then back at him and nodded once. “So do I,” she said.

  THEY GOT BACK on the road and drove for a good while, staying away from the autostrada, following curving roads that wound through small town after small town. They passed farmhouses and fields of dark, rich dirt, newly plowed for planting. They passed groves of olive trees and small, family vineyards seamed into nearly vertical hillsides.
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  They came to a small sign that read San Gimignano and turned there.

  A hill town overlooking the Elsa Valley, San Gimignano was established in the tenth century. Audrey passed along Celine’s explanation of how the town prospered with the wealthiest families building towers that dominated the landscape.

  Nicholas parked the car just outside the town walls, and they walked in.

  “It feels like stepping into another time,” he said.

  They started at the foot of the main street and wandered store to store. There were bakeries with fresh-out-of-the-oven rolls and loaves of bread. Stores with fine leather goods. A small gallery that displayed the works of local artists.

  Halfway up the hill, they stopped outside a small restaurant where the most incredible smells permeated the air. Tomato sauce, garlic and basil.

  “Are you hungry?” Nicholas asked.

  “Starving,” she confessed.

  “Then let’s eat,” he said, taking her hand and leading her inside.

  They sated themselves with the local specialty, linguine in a saffron sauce. Ate bread dipped in rich olive oil, and drank red wine made from the restaurant owner’s vineyard, the woman smiling with pleasure to see that they liked it.

  They talked about everything, little stuff, big stuff. And again, it felt strange to be sitting across from a man who was interested in her opinions, who wanted to hear what she had to say.

  She took a sip of her wine. “Sometimes,” she said, “I can’t believe life can be like this.”

  “Like what?” he asked softly.

  “Not having to constantly monitor what I say or do.”

  “Was it always like that between you?”

  “Not in the beginning, no. He was kind to me. In a different way than I was used to…”

  “When did things change?”

  “We’d been married a year the first time he…hit me,” she said, flinching at the sound of the words.

  Nicholas reached out and put his hand over hers.

  Something in his touch gave her the courage to go on, to say what she’d never said to anyone else before. “At first, I thought it had to be a mistake…an accident. How could he mean to do that? Or maybe I’d done something to cause it. I tried so hard to figure out what it was, to make sure I never did it again.”

  “It didn’t matter though, did it?” he asked, his voice threaded with quiet anguish.

  She shook her head, her hands clasped around her glass. “No. For so long, I kept thinking it would get better, that somehow I could make it work. But it was the opposite. It seemed like the more I tried, the worse things became.”

  “Audrey. I’m sorry.”

  She bit her lip, looked down, then met his gaze. “I think back and remember things that happened in the beginning, things that should have made me wonder…I ask myself why I didn’t see…or why I wouldn’t let myself. But then the answers don’t really matter. I look at Sammy, and I can’t regret any of the choices I’ve made.”

  Nicholas was silent for a moment, and then said, “The thing you have to know is that none of this was your fault, Audrey. None of it. You have to let yourself believe that.”

  She nodded once. “I’m working on it.”

  They left the restaurant a little while later, both of them quiet under the weight of everything that had been said. They continued up the winding cobblestone streets to the towers at the top of the town. Each tower had once represented the wealth of the family who had built it. In the thirteenth century, there had been seventy-two towers. There were only fourteen left now, the others having fallen into disrepair when San Gimignano went through a decline in prosperity.

  Nicholas and Audrey climbed one of the middle towers, the tallest remaining. At the top, Audrey went to one of the small windows that looked out over the countryside beyond the town. Nicholas stood behind her.

  She shook her head, amazed. “It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Incredible.”

  She felt his gaze on her, something in his voice telling her he was going to touch her. She closed her eyes, hoping she wasn’t wrong. Here in this town that felt cut away from everything, Audrey felt as if they, too, had been given this piece of time for themselves. And she wanted it as she had wanted few things in her life.

  Need sparked low inside her. She had not asked for it, had not been looking for it, but this connection she felt to Nicholas was like finding something infinitely precious. She wanted to hold onto it even though she knew it was impossible.

  His hands dropped to her shoulders, a question in his touch. She answered by leaning back into his solid chest. His hands slid under her arms, his palms flattening against her belly.

  She turned and looked up and let him see what she felt. She trusted him—and knew somehow that her fear of trusting again would never be put to test by this man.

  “Audrey.” He kissed her then, his arms tightening around her waist, lifting her up and into him so that her feet left the floor.

  He spun them around and leaned his back against the stone wall behind them, pulling her as close as it was possible for two fully dressed people to get.

  She felt dizzy with longing. He took in her face, as if memorizing every angle, dimple, freckle. No one had ever looked at her this way, made her feel desirable without guilt or manipulation.

  And then with a jumble of emotion in her heart, she kissed him, urgent and needful, wanting to give even as she took.

  Outside, birds trilled. The sun dipped into the open archway, throwing light onto their faces, leaving the rest of them in shadow. They kissed for a long time, as if nothing else mattered now or ever would.

  Finally, Nicholas pulled back, ran a thumb across the line of her jaw, then against her lips where his mouth had just been. “Let’s find a place,” he said.

  And for Audrey, there was only one answer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HIGH UP at the top of the town was a small hotel with a heavy wood door and a plaque with a five-star inscription. They arrived there breathless, climbing the main street with the kind of intent that blanks out everything else but the need to be alone.

  At least this was what Audrey felt, what she sensed in Nicholas’s long purposeful strides. There was a rightness to what she felt that did not need explanation or justification. It seemed simple, this urgency, and as basic as breathing, basic and yet without it, life could not go on.

  Audrey waited by the enormous door while Nicholas went to the front desk and requested a room. The transaction was mercifully quick. And since they had no luggage, the bellman nodded in understanding when Nicholas turned down his offer to show them the room. Instead, he pointed out the elevator, punched the button for the fourth floor and sent them on their way.

  As soon as the doors closed, Nicholas turned to her. “Was that too awful?”

  “No,” she said.

  He reached for her hand, wrapping it in his. And then the elevator stopped. The doors opened. He let her step out first, then followed, still holding her hand.

  The room was at the end of the hall. With the key, Nicholas opened the door, then closed it behind her.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Against one wall was an old dark wood bed covered with a heavy damask comforter and a half dozen oversize pillows. Audrey went to the window. Like the tower they’d climbed earlier, this view took in the Tuscan countryside beyond the walled city.

  Nicholas came to the window and stood behind her. She closed her eyes for a moment, then turned to him, putting a hand on his chest. He looked down at her, as if again memorizing her face, then lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the palm.

  The look in his eyes filled Audrey with a simultaneous twist of happiness and panic. She had nothing to offer him. No life of her own. No future painted out into which he might eventually blend.

  And she was a woman who would always be looking over her shoulder, never able to trust that the present could be more than what it was.

/>   Nicholas cupped her face with both hands. “Don’t do that,” he said, seeing what she was unable to hide. “For now, this is enough.”

  Audrey blinked, letting the words sway her worried heart. She did not want to think beyond this moment, to what might or might not be. For now, she just wanted this. Wanted him.

  They held each other with uncensored care and deliberation. His touch had the power to heal, to erase inch by inch the scars she had thought she would carry forever, certain that their depth would prevent her from ever feeling anything close to what she felt now.

  He pulled back and looked down at her with a mix of admiration and desire in his eyes. “You are so incredibly beautiful,” he said.

  Audrey glanced away, not knowing what to do with the sincerity in his voice. She felt unworthy of it, and yet at the same time, felt his vulnerability, his desire to convince her he meant what he said. “How did this happen?” she asked.

  “The two of us being here?”

  She shook her head.

  “What?” he urged softly.

  She met his questioning gaze. “Someone like me meeting someone like you.”

  “Audrey.” Her name sounded as if it had been ripped from his throat. “You have no idea what I see when I look at you, do you?”

  She bit her lip. “I feel like I don’t deserve what’s in your eyes.”

  “I’ll tell you what I see,” he said. “A woman who makes me want to be what I once hoped to be.”

  She put her arms around his neck and held on, something giving way within her, as if she had been keeping back some piece of herself, afraid to make herself that vulnerable.

  He scooped her up and carried her to the bed, lowering her somewhere near the middle and then lying down beside her. Audrey’s head slipped between the two pillows. He pulled one off, and she laughed, putting her hand at the back of his neck and pulling him to her, kissing him with longing and need.

  They took their time with it, the afternoon sun warm across the bed. He undressed her, removing her clothes with a kind of reverence that she thought it would take a long time to accept as real. He stood then and unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes never leaving hers.