I knew he had been joking, but I definitely didn’t need to add skinny-dipping into this situation. While I kept swallowing and trying to keep my breathing even, he studied me. “I’ll meet you in the hallway in ten minutes.”
Then he let go of me and went back to his room, closing the adjoining door behind him. I leaned back, gripping the counter for support.
I should tell him I’d changed my mind. That us swimming together, alone, was not a good idea. I shoved some lettuce into my mouth. Now I could invoke the “no swimming for an hour after eating” rule.
I looked at the door. I had to figure out a way to overcome my attraction to him. Yes, this show and experience would end, but my contact with him would not. I would still be doing PR for his family, which he happened to be a part of, and soon Kat would be a part of it, too. She would invite me to events and special occasions. Dante would keep being in my life. I could not be married to someone else and still react to him this way.
Maybe the answer wasn’t hiding from him and avoiding him, but spending more time with him. Kat had told me once about something called exposure therapy, where kids overcame their fears and anxieties by constantly being around the thing that scared them. Supposedly, this would desensitize them and lessen their reactions. At this point I was willing to try anything to get him out of my head.
After eating a bit, I chose my most modest bikini—a red and white polka-dot 1950s-inspired suit that always made me feel like Marilyn Monroe.
Putting the robe back on over my suit, I grabbed a towel and went out into the hallway. Dante gave me a gorgeous smile, which I concentrated on rather than his half-nakedness, and we started walking to the pool. He told me a story about breaking his left arm that involved his six-year-old belief that he could fly if he just really put his mind to it.
He stopped at the gate of the fence that surrounded the pool. There was a rule sign posted, and he studied it.
“What are you doing?”
“Acquainting myself with the rules. Okay, I’m ready.”
We went in, and he threw his towel onto a nearby chair and dove into the pool’s deep end. He resurfaced quickly. I slipped off my sandals and took off my robe. I could feel his eyes on me and the tension that it caused for both of us.
Repeated exposure, I reminded myself. Keeping my company alive by making Matthew Burdette happy. Those were the things I needed to concentrate on.
Ignoring my pounding heart, I went over to the stairs and descended slowly, acclimating myself to the water. It was warm and inviting, and if I closed my eyes I could almost imagine that I was entering some tropical ocean instead of a pool at a ski lodge.
I got to a place where I could touch the bottom and keep my head and shoulders above water comfortably. He swam to a point across from me.
“I heard that the men who star on this show keep a running bet on who can make out with the most women. Where are you ranked?” It was a good thing to ask him. Him messing around with other girls was still the one thing I could hold against him. The one thing I couldn’t abide in a man.
He smiled and stayed quiet. I was about to ask him again when he said, “I invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.”
I knew it. “You’re not a US citizen. The Constitution doesn’t apply to you.”
“You could always rectify that by marrying me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him while he laughed at his own joke. “Pass. And thanks for not answering my question.”
“Why do you care if I kiss anyone else?”
“I don’t!” I said, a little too quickly.
He treaded water, watching me. “You really want to know how many women I’ve kissed from this show?”
I did, desperately and inexplicably. “Yes.”
“Including you?”
I nodded.
“One.”
Which filled my heart with both glee and disbelief. “I find that hard to believe.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve never lied to you, so I don’t know why you wouldn’t believe me. I haven’t kissed anyone. Out of respect for you.”
I couldn’t have adequately described to anyone the twenty different things I felt when he said that. It was overwhelming, terrifying, and made me tremble.
“I know you better than that.” I had meant to sound playful, but I came across as accusatory.
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Really? Fine. Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
“You’ve stolen my heart.”
That made the million different swirling emotions kick up into overdrive. I tried to laugh, but it came out weird. “Something real and not flirtatious,” I told him.
A strange expression crossed his face, and then his smile returned. “I don’t keep secrets from you, Limone. You know that.”
My heart palpitations were making me jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof.
“But in the interest of full disclosure, I have a terrible credit score.”
“How can you be rich and have a terrible credit score?”
His muscled arms moved back and forth in the water, keeping him in place. I wondered how long he could tread water. I was extremely impressed by his endurance.
“I don’t get my trust fund until my twenty-fifth birthday, and I used to be terrible with money.”
“Used to be?”
His eyes twinkled with mirth. “I’m still working on it.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
“What made you more careful?”
“Meeting Kat freshman year. I felt bad being so extravagant when she had nothing. I could see myself through her eyes and how I wasted my money, so I economized.”
He cocked his head to the side. “You spend a lot of time worrying about how other people see you, don’t you?”
I crossed my arms, ready to let him know just how wrong he was, but he kept speaking. “I am impressed that you’re able to handle your money so well.”
“You should be,” I retorted. “It sucks.”
He held his arms up in a “look who you’re talking to, I get it” gesture.
Before I could ask him to clarify, he said, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
There were probably a lot of things he didn’t know about me. A lot of things that I thought and felt that were better kept private.
I remembered his story about breaking his arm, and thought broken bones were probably a safe topic for conversation.
“I broke my ankle skiing right before my last solo ballet recital.”
He raised both eyebrows at me. “I didn’t know you were a dancer. Given your hatred of all things exercise-related it should be unexpected, but I guess it’s not that surprising. I’ve danced with you often enough to know that you know what you’re doing.”
“Grandma Lemon wanted me to compete in beauty pageants, but I couldn’t sing, and she said twirling a baton was beneath me as a Beauchamp, so I started taking ballet and I loved it. I miss it so much.”
I had enjoyed it, the exactness and grace of it, and at the time, I wanted nothing more than to earn a solo and become a professional ballerina someday.
“Did you stop because of your ankle?”
“I stopped because when puberty hit, I no longer had the right figure for ballet.”
He waggled his eyebrows at me suggestively. “Ballet’s loss was my great gain.”
I shook my head. One-track mind. “My sophomore year, I finally got my solo. Madame La Grand let me know that it would be my last performance with them. My company was performing excerpts from The Nutcracker, and I won the part of Clara. We had rehearsals every day, and then I would go home and practice for hours every single night. I wanted it to be perfect. Then my family went skiing in Utah the weekend before the show, and that was it. I never got to perform it.”
“That’s so sad, Limone. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
I could feel the tears welling at the back
of my eyes at the emotion in his voice. “Speaking of sad, I still remember every single step of my routine even though it’s been almost ten years.”
“Couldn’t you go back? Do ballet for fun?”
“Sometimes you need to know when to let go of impossible dreams and be real about your life.”
He slowly swam closer to me. “So you think you have to settle for less?”
We were no longer talking about ballet, and Sterling needed to be off-limits. “It’s not settling to be with someone who I know won’t cheat on me.”
Even closer. “This isn’t about cheating or getting hurt. It’s about control. You think you can control your life if you choose a certain kind of man. But you can’t control anything. If that’s the one thing in my life I’ve learned, it’s that everything is out of our control.”
From the timbre in his voice, I knew he was talking about his father. The king had become a quadriplegic after a boating accident.
“You should be choosing a man who loves you so much that he could never even conceive of hurting you. A man who would always put you first, above everything else.”
He was close enough to touch me, but he didn’t. I couldn’t drag air into my lungs fast enough as that zing of electricity crackled between us.
Speaking was pretty much out of the question when he looked at me like that.
“Limone, there’s something I need to say to you.”
That loosened my tongue. I couldn’t let him continue. “Stop. Don’t say it. If you do it will ruin everything. I’m engaged.”
“And yet you’re here with me.”
“I’m here because I don’t have a choice,” I snapped.
“You’ve always had a choice,” he said, his silky voice making my stomach flip repeatedly. “And if you were mine, I could never go this long without seeing you. Without touching you. Without kissing you.”
He was going to kiss me. And I just stood there frozen, unable and unwilling to move.
“Is it magic between you two the way it is with us?” His seductive voice was almost more than I could stand.
And even then, I couldn’t lie to him. I needed to, for my own self-preservation. For the preservation of my upcoming wedding. To keep my heart intact.
So I did the only thing I could think of to put some distance between us.
I splashed him.
He wiped the water from his face slowly, with a grin that promised retribution. I should have known he’d take it as a challenge.
Maybe that was why I did it.
“There are rules,” he said. “You can’t simply splash me. Did you not see the sign?”
“Oh, I saw the sign.” I splashed him again.
He turned his head this time, as if he’d been expecting it. “As a member of the household of a reigning monarch, it is my duty to report this. Who do you call for pool violations?”
I splashed him again, and kept splashing him. We were both laughing when he reached through the mountain of water for me, restraining my arms. He held them up in the air, which made the rest of me slam into him.
The laughter died quickly, and he let go of my arms. They fell to my sides, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I could feel his heart rapidly beating against his chest. We were both breathing hard and fast, and it wasn’t from the splashing.
I stared at his mouth, willing him to kiss me. My tingly lips and racing pulse throbbed. But he didn’t move. We stood, pressed together, surrounded by the warmth from the pool and each other. I wanted him to make that first move so that I could blame it on him later. Just one kiss wouldn’t hurt, would it? If it wasn’t my fault? What could I do if he just grabbed me and kissed me? I had to make the show happy, right?
Thinking about the show made me remember the camera, and I turned to see them still filming. This would look so bad. So, so bad.
“Are you sure we can’t . . .” he started to say as I backed up, and I knew then that he wanted it just as badly as I did.
Heart in my throat, suddenly angry at my own behavior and wanting to take it out on him, I said, “In your dreams, Dante.”
He didn’t get upset though. He just looked at me in that way of his and said, “Every night, Limone.”
There was nothing to do after that but excuse myself and hurry back to my room before he got any ideas.
Or before I got any.
I practically ran back, making sure to lock every single door. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Why I was so willing to ruin my entire future for lust.
But I did know one thing for sure.
The exposure therapy was not working.
I heard him return to his room. I thought he might knock and try to talk to me, but he didn’t. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. I just kept rerunning our conversation over and over in my head. What he said, how he said it, what it meant, and whether it was real or just some kind of game that he wanted to play.
Mostly I thought about what he’d said regarding me.
It was probably three o’clock in the morning when I realized that my hotel room had a phone with a landline. I’d been without a phone for so long that it hadn’t even occurred to me that I might have one now.
Kat was going to kill me, but I needed her.
She picked up on the fourth ring. “Just so you know, the next time I see you, I am going to smack you.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I really needed to talk to you.”
“What has he done now?” She sounded exhausted and mumbled her words.
“Am I a control freak?”
She was quiet for so long I thought she might have fallen back asleep. “Is this a trick question? I feel like there’s not a right answer here.” She didn’t sound sleepy anymore.
“The right answer is no!”
Another long pause. “Even if it’s not true?”
“I am not a control freak! I don’t want to control everything. I know I can’t.”
“You kind of do. And that’s okay. People who know and love you understand and accept that about you. That’s just you. Like how I’m screwed up emotionally and almost totally ruined my chance at true love. Nico and you know that about me and you both love me anyway.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had never, ever thought of myself that way. And now two of my closest friends were telling me that’s exactly how I was.
“Are you attracted to him?”
A pain started throbbing in between my eyebrows. “That’s not the issue. That has never been the issue.”
“Do you like being with him?”
I did, more than I should. “Yes, we’re friends. And before you ask any more questions that you already know the answer to, there isn’t a future with him, and that’s the problem. I need to make different choices. Be with a different kind of man. You understand that, don’t you?”
She sighed. “There are no guarantees, Lemon. Even Sterling can’t make you a guarantee for the future.”
“I shouldn’t have come here. I should have said no. Because . . . I have to tell you something that you can’t tell anyone else.”
I heard a noise that sounded like sheets rustling, and I could imagine her sitting straight up in bed. She did love a good secret. “I promise I won’t say anything.”
“I’m not missing Sterling. Like, at all.”
“You know what they say. Absence makes the heart go wander.”
“I think that’s supposed to be ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’”
“Not in your case.”
I couldn’t even laugh. But I was glad I had finally said it out loud. I had kept it buried inside me because I didn’t want to think about what I might have to do if I admitted it.
“Don’t you think you should miss him?”
Of course I thought I should miss him. I didn’t know if it said something about me, or something about our relationship.
Or if it said something about Dante.
“You remember how I was right after we left Monterr
a and I was apart from Nico.”
During their time apart, Kat had been the most miserable person alive. I’d never seen anyone so sad and depressed. I had actually worried for her mental health.
And I’d never felt that way about Sterling while I’d been away from him. Not even once.
“Maybe it’s because I’m just secure in our relationship,” I rationalized.
“Nico’s in New York and I’m in California and I feel like part of me is missing. And I’m very secure in our relationship. You know I adore him. But when we’re apart, I’m counting down the minutes until we’re together again.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
“Look, it’s late and we should both get some sleep. Just ask yourself this—when you’re apart from Dante, do you miss him?”
“Good-night, Kat.” I hung up the phone.
It was a question I didn’t want to answer.
Chapter 16
I had a lengthy conversation with your doctor, and he thinks you need more Vitamin Me.
They kept Dante and me separate on our return back to California, and I was glad to have some alone time before returning to the house.
Genesis was excited to see me, Michelle was indifferent, and Scabigail was hostile. Genesis had a date that afternoon with Dante, and she asked if I would help her get ready. I said yes, and helped do her hair and her makeup while she told me about what an amazing time they’d had in Cozumel. There had been some kind of comic book convention at their hotel, and he’d agreed to take her. I tried to imagine Dante with a bunch of comic book enthusiasts, and I couldn’t.
He must have really liked Genesis to do something like that.
Which is good. Even if it felt awful.
She left, and I had more time to think about what a terrible person I had become. How I was engaged to one man and falling for another. How I despised cheaters and was in danger of turning into one.
And how all of America could end up hating me for being such a fickle, horrible woman.
Taylor scheduled another interview, covering up the camera so we could talk candidly. I didn’t tell her about Sterling and not missing him, but I did tell her pretty much everything else. It was nice to have someone to talk to who wasn’t half-asleep or halfway across the world. She was so sympathetic and so kind, she even started crying. Which made me cry, and we sat in the interview room crying and hugging each other.
Royal Chase (The Royals of Monterra) Page 15
