Thirty
“She’s called a footman to bring down her luggage.”
Apollo stood up from the chair on the veranda, where they were all taking breakfast, at Luz Alana’s announcement. All except for Aurora, who had arrived from the promenade claiming a headache and had not been seen since.
“Who called a footman?” He asked the question, knowing damned well who the she in question was. He’d tried to slip into her bedroom the night before, but the door had been locked.
She hadn’t been the same since the night at Phuong’s. But he’d thought she only needed time. He was asking a lot from her. It would probably be kinder, more honorable to let her go, but not having her was unthinkable.
She was his , dammit.
He was certain something had passed between Aurora and his aunt when he’d insisted on getting the damned pancake.
The moment he’d come back, he’d known. Her eyes had been dull and her shoulders curling in on themselves as he’d handed her the thing. She’d eaten it, all the while with a tight, dead smile on her lips as she chewed and painfully swallowed. It had been agony to watch her pretend to enjoy it. Being in love was not for the weak. Even the simplest things turned into torture.
“Where is she?” he asked Luz Alana, before looking over at his aunt, who was examining the toast on her plate much too closely.
“Still in her room.”
He was at the bottom of the staircase when a harried Manuela appeared at the top. “It’s locked, she won’t open it.”
“Give me a minute to talk to her first,” he told the women as he mounted the stairs two at a time. He reached her door in seconds and had to exercise an enormous amount of restraint not to kick it open.
“Open the door, Fiera,” he demanded, projecting his voice. He lifted his knuckles to rap on the thing or tear it off the hinges if he had to, but after a second, she opened the door.
She looked pale and the bruise had turned a sickly green. She was back in her usual attire. This time a dark gray suit with those slit skirts she loved so much. Her back ramrod straight as she reached for her gloves. Most disturbingly, every piece of clothing on her was unrumpled and pristine.
She’d opened the windows, and the room was blindingly bright. From where he stood, the sunlight cast her in shadow. His heart hammered in his chest as he watched her move. That ruthless efficiency of hers. The detached composure she employed in everything. Except with him. In his bed. There she was wild, impulsive, greedy, happy, his.
“Your Grace.” Her voice was like a faint echo. She was right there in front of him and yet she could’ve been a hundred miles away.
Apollo was not afraid of very many things, but in that moment, he feared that she might already be lost to him. The way she’d been discarded by her parents, her brothers. Her own mother. It all had left a hole inside her that Apollo didn’t know if even he could fill.
“Why are you sending your bags downstairs?” There was no controlling the emotion in his voice.
“I’m going back to Paris,” she informed him in that overly friendly tone she used when she was at her breaking point. She refused to look at him and kept that eerily vacant stare on something over his shoulder.
“What did my aunt say to you at the promenade?” She flinched at the question, her chin quivered for an instant, but she quickly regained her control.
“Nothing.” This was the calmest, the politest he’d ever seen her. “I asked after Juliana.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t look at him.
He’d always been so good at keeping a distance from any unpleasantness. He’d mastered the ability to regard anything he didn’t like with detached disdain. He was not a man who let his emotions command him. But in that moment, he was as close as he’d been to coming undone.
“You promised me, Aurora.” She blinked, then tipped her lips farther up in a brittle smile, before turning away from him. “You said you’d stay until we knew it was safe for you to go back to Paris.”
“I should’ve never promised that,” she told him, while she puttered around the room, until there was nothing left, but to face him. Her matching gray hat, as always, was precariously perched on her head. “I should not be here.”
“That is for me to surmise,” he told her, remembering all the times she’d said she was not his problem. “You’re my guest, my companion, my—”
“No,” she almost shouted, putting her hands up, as if she wanted to force whatever he was about to say down his throat. “Please don’t say things you will only regret later.”
“The only thing I’ll regret is letting you leave here now, knowing how I feel about you.” Her eyes widened, a hunted, panicked glint in them.
“I have to go,” she said, hurrying to the door, but he wrapped his arms around her before she could slip away. “I need to go. My train is in an hour, Your Grace.”
“I’m not Your Grace , carajo,” he told her, taking her chin in hand and forcing her to look at him. Even now, within that shroud of misery, he could feel that current of wanting running through her. “I’m your man, your lover.” She shivered in his arms. “I love you, and you are mine,” he insisted, and even as she shook her head, she pressed her forehead to his. He could feel her racing pulse, her breaths ragged as she fought that war she always had waging with herself. “Tu lo sabes, Fiera. Tu eres mia,” he told her, searching for her mouth. Her sob and his harsh breath mingled in a kiss that tasted of her tears. “Y yo soy tuyo.”
He kissed her again, wanting to feed her the storm raging in his heart. The devastating, undeniable truth of his love for her. She fisted the back of his jacket, so hard he thought he heard it rip.
“No, Apollo,” she said, wrenching herself away. “You have to let me go.”
He took one of her hands and pressed it to his heart. “This is yours, and there’s nothing that can change that.” That seemed to only make things worse. A flurry of emotions passed through her face. Despair, yearning, anguish, ending in something that looked like cold determination.
“I won’t let you ruin everything over your misguided honor.” She poked his chest hard with her finger. “Do you think you can just change the rules, Apollo?” she demanded.
“Maybe they need to be changed, Aurora.”
“You have a hundred potential allies coming here tonight, do you think you can just walk in there with me with impunity?” This was what it was all about. She could not believe she deserved him choosing her over his position. That the devil’s bargain she’d made when she was just a girl in order to escape the hell Philip Carlyle had in store for her meant she needed to live in penance forever.
“You don’t believe you deserve to be happy,” he said, finally seeing things clearly.
“What are you talking about?” she balked, breaking free from his hold.
“Your defiance, your need for independence, it’s not freedom, it’s your prison.” How had he not seen this before? “You’ve bought their lie. You think that you don’t deserve to be happy because you broke their rules.”
“You just want a woman to save.” She was ruthless, looking at him right in his eyes as she said it. Making sure he’d despise her afterward. “I’m not your mother and I am not Juliana. I don’t need to be saved.”
“But you need to be loved.” His words seemed to shatter her. “I love you and I know you love me.” Her face crumbled, her chin quivering as she fought back tears.
“I don’t love you.” She said it like her heart was breaking. “I don’t love you, Apollo.” Her voice broke on his name.
“I don’t believe you,” he told her. He knew she was lying. Maybe to herself, to him. He didn’t know. “You’re scared that I’ll stop loving you, but I am not your father.” She shook her head, as tears welled in those brown eyes.
“I can’t,” she pleaded with him.
“Aurora!”
Before they could say anything else to one another, Manuela’s panicked voice and frantic knocks made them both start. “Please, open up, there’s been an accident and they’re looking for doctors.”
Apollo took a step back, knowing that the conversation was over. “Duty calls, Doctora,” he bit out, as she went to open the door.
“What happened?” she asked, already reaching for her medical bag.
“There was an accident. A coach turned over near the train station,” Manuela informed them, while Luz Alana sent him a nervous look. “They know you’re a doctor and were hoping you could come and help.”
“If you go, you will take Jean-Louis with you.” For a moment he thought she’d fight him on it, but after a moment she nodded.
“All right, I will return to collect my things after,” she told him as she left the room with her friends in tow.
* * *
She’d done the right thing. Then why did she feel like she had a hole in her chest? Hours after she’d arrived at the accident, she could not achieve the focus she’d always been able to command for her work.
She was distracted. She’d made mistakes, and she was heartsick. She was miserable for what she’d told him. Her stomach roiled every time she remembered the way he’d looked at her. He hadn’t believed her, she knew that. But he’d finally seen the depth of her cruelty, and instead of hating her, he’d pitied her for it.
“Can you dip that in the carbolic solution, please?” she asked Jean-Louis, extending him the needles she’d used to suture a patient. Yes, because despite how horrible she’d been to him, he’d still made sure she had Jean-Louis with her. Despite her complaints, she had to admit the duke’s henchman had turned out to be quite a competent assistant, and a surly one.
“Drink this first,” he told her, offering her a glass of lemonade.
“I don’t have time,” she said dismissively, already turning to take care of the next person lying on a pallet.
One of the many they’d had to temporarily set up inside the train station after a coach carrying two dozen people intending to board the morning train to Lucerne had overturned only a few dozen meters away.
“The boss will have my head if I don’t make sure you take care of yourself,” Jean-Louis insisted, his hulking body seeming to take up half the space in the train station.
“I can take over, Docteur,” said one of the women from town who’d come to help with the wounded. “You have been on your feet for hours.” Aurora sighed and stepped outside with her bodyguard, who watched her drink the lemonade with the air of a sullen headmistress disciplining a wayward student. She finished the thing in three gulps and handed him the glass.
“There, happy?” He sent her a stubborn look as he pulled a parcel from his jacket pocket.
“Eat,” he ordered, handing her the bundle.
“I don’t have time, Jean-Louis,” she complained even as she unwrapped it. She was starving. She hadn’t had an appetite since the afternoon before at the promenade. Then again, her stomach had been in knots for days now. She was sick of herself as much as she was of this entire situation. What was worse, she knew that distance would not make any of it better.
Apollo was in her blood now. He was running through her veins, stuck under her skin, and nothing she did would change that. And she’d brought this misery on herself. She took a few bites of the apple and cheese she’d been handed, then turned to Jean-Louis, who was eating his own apple.
“How did you even have time to pack food?” she asked, just to have something to do that wasn’t think of the way Apollo had looked at her when she’d told him she didn’t love him.
“Le caid told the cook to make us a basket while you were talking to Mademoiselle Manuela and Madame Luz.” Even after she’d spoken to him as she had, Apollo made sure she had food and water.
Her gut roiled at the mention of her conversation with her friends. Both Luz and Manuela had pleaded with her to stay in Nice. Begged her to let them come help her to the station, but she’d refused. She’d snapped at them, said ugly things she didn’t mean. That she had no interest in handing over her freedom like they had. That she didn’t need someone by her side to give her life meaning. She’d been awful and cold, and for the first time in all their years of friendship, they’d looked at her like there was no hope for her.
They’d both embraced her stiffly and turned back to the house without another word.
“Are you all right, Docteur?” Jean-Louis asked, jolting her out of her thoughts. She looked down and realized she’d dropped the slices of apple to the ground. They were caked in the rocky dirt under her feet.
Ruined.
“I’m fine,” she lied, offering the man a smile that hurt her face. The big man did not seem very impressed by her effort.
“I’ve known him since he was twenty years old and making trouble for himself in Paris.” She didn’t have to ask who the “him” was. Jean-Louis spoke softly for such a large man, and despite his penchant for picking her up without permission, he had kind eyes.
“I commend you for your patience,” she said with a cynicism she didn’t feel.
Jean-Louis smiled sadly as he looked into the distance. “I’ve never met a more unbothered little prick,” he told her, with an air of bafflement. “For all his bluster and peacocking around, the man needs very little. He barely goes to that big mansion he bought for himself.” She knew that. He spent more nights in his little apartment in the eighth arrondissement than he did at his formal residence. She didn’t think he’d set foot in the Parisian town house he’d inherited from his father yet. “And though he’s a fair and generous boss, he never seemed to need people.”
Her throat closed at his words and she didn’t know why.
“Apollo’s very self-sufficient,” she told him, contracting her muscles to smother a shiver spreading through her.
Jean-Louis made a noise that she took as agreement, then he turned to look at her. “He’s a ruthless bastard. Destroyed his own father without a second thought.” He made that statement with a grin, so she didn’t think the man considered that a flaw of Apollo’s. “In the fifteen years I’ve been with him, he’s only ever asked me for a personal favor once.” Something about the way he said that to her made her start shaking. It was hot outside, and her usual wool suit was making her sweat, but she could not stop the tremors.
“What was that?” she asked, unsure if she wanted to hear it. Her walls were crumbling rapidly, and this quiet man’s defense of Apollo would likely decimate what was left.
“He asked me to take care of you.” A humming sound escaped her throat at his words, and she began to swallow compulsively. She’d cried more in the past week than she had in the last thirteen years. “When he went looking for that cochon who hurt you, I have never seen him like that. I was certain he’d kill the man. I’m amazed he didn’t.” He hadn’t killed or exposed Ackworth, even when it would’ve helped him, because she’d asked him not to. There was a clicking sound in her throat she’d never heard before, and her teeth were rattling.
“May I ask you something?”
She nodded, certain he’d ask it regardless of what she said.
“Do you truly believe he doesn’t love you?” That was the trouble. She believed it all too well. She could feel it when he looked at her. Could taste it when he kissed her. Saw it clear as day in his eyes when he was so deep inside her she felt like one half of a perfectly locking puzzle.
But love never stayed as love. It morphed into resentment, obligation, disdain, control.
“Love won’t be enough when he realizes I can’t be who he needs me to be.” The large man gave her a pitying look, like she was beyond reasoning with. That made her angry, because when had the entire world begun to behave like scandal and ruined reputations didn’t matter?
Was she the only sensible person left?
“Look at me, Jean-Louis,” she demanded in a choked voice, gesturing to her soiled skirts streaked with blood, piss and dirt. “Do I look like a duchess to you?” Jean-Louis set his mouth stubbornly as if she was the difficult one. “You know what I do, you know how unfit I am to be sitting in parlors and hosting dinners. I’m no duchess.”
The man sent her a long look, clearly unmoved by her tantrum. “A lot of people would say you’re not what a doctor looks like and yet here you are,” he told her, and she remembered the man was known for knocking out his opponents with a single blow. “You can’t actually believe all those snobs are better than you.” He waved a hand in the direction of the villa or maybe England, she couldn’t know. “Besides, he’s the duke , and he thinks you look like a duchess .”
“Well, he’s wrong,” she declared, pressing a fist to her sternum and turning toward the makeshift clinic in the train station. A barrage of shouts and screams coming from the site of the accident caught her attention, then she saw two men running toward her carrying another man between them.
He was bloody and one of his legs looked mangled. He was wailing in agony.
“Take him inside,” she ordered as she ran after them with Jean-Louis on her heels.
“He was thrown far, landed in a ditch,” one of the men said as he laid the victim down on a pallet. “We only just found him.” The injured man’s face was darkened with dirt and there were bloody spots all over it where broken glass had nicked him, but his leg was the biggest problem.
“Sir, can you hear me?” she asked in French. The man was conscious, but only barely. Jean-Louis, bless him, handed her a pair of shears, which she used to cut through the trouser leg. To her relief, the wound was not as bad as it seemed.
“Marion,” the man moaned as she worked to assess if there were any fractures or internal injuries.
“Marion?” she asked one of the men who’d brought him in, but he only shrugged.
“Marion,” the man insisted, becoming distressed. “I need to talk to her.”
“We will try to find Marion,” she reassured him while she did the examination. But with each passing second, he became more agitated about this Marion. “Sir, what is your name?”
She had to lean down to hear him, but after more desperate calls for his Marion, he finally told her. Damien Allard.
“Damien, do you have family here in Nice?” He nodded and began to say Marion’s name again like a prayer. She tried to get some more information, his direction perhaps, but the more questions she asked, the worse his agitation became, so she gave it up.
“Does anyone know who Marion is?” Aurora finally asked loudly enough to get the attention of the other nurses and doctors. “Jean-Louis, look through his pockets,” she said as she prepared the wound for suturing.
“Damien!” The woman’s cry came from outside as Aurora was bandaging the wound. Her patient, who had finally managed to settle, sat bolt upright the moment he heard her. It took three people to keep him from standing and tearing the stitches.
“Monsieur Damien, you must stay lying down,” she ordered to no avail. The man insisted on getting up. Finally, a small, slight woman reached the pallet, her pretty face streaked with tears. She was wearing a country dress with an apron and her entire front was soaking wet. Aurora had to move out of the way when she threw herself at the man.
“Damien,” she exclaimed as terrible sobs escaped her. Aurora stood stiffly to the side as she watched her reach for him. “Damien, my love,” she cried as she attempted to kiss him and confirm he was still in one piece at the same time. “I’m sorry,” she cried on his chest as he wrapped his arms around her. “I shouldn’t have let you leave as I did.”
“Shh,” he soothed her, kissing her hair.
Aurora’s skin felt tight on her face, on her entire body, witnessing the intimate moment. When she looked around to see if anyone else was watching, she noticed that everyone else was busy with the chaos in the room. Only Jean-Louis had his attention on the two lovers.
“It’s all right, my love,” Damien whispered to Marion. “I know why you said it.”
“I was afraid,” she confessed, as Aurora backed away. She should leave, she was intruding on an obviously private moment, but she was transfixed by this woman’s ability to expose herself in a room full of people. “I love you and I would’ve never forgiven myself if I’d lost you thinking I didn’t.”
Damien’s body convulsed and Aurora took a step forward, thinking he was having a seizure, but then he looked up and she saw he was crying. He hid his face in Marion’s hair and wept.
“That is all we need,” he told her as he kissed her again. “All we need.”
Again Aurora looked around, wondering if everyone else’s heart was close to exploding. When she found Jean-Louis’s gaze, she was confronted with a look that communicated something along the lines of “ignore that at your own peril.”
“Oh, go to hell, Jean-Louis,” she mouthed with a roll of her eyes. What would be next, a staging of Romeo and Juliet by the nurse and train conductor?
But the more she looked at the pair of lovers, the more she felt like a very small boat in a raging storm. Water whipping around her, splashing over her until she didn’t know which way was up. Only that she was drifting farther and farther from the only place that had ever felt like safe harbor.
She was here on the stark, flimsy vessel she’d built for herself. On it was her work and her purpose, but no love, not any love that would require any kind of gamble. She’d never been enough for her father, her mother. Philip had used her need for love against her. Opening her heart had left her wounded and scared, and Apollo’s was so big, so bright, it terrified her. Because she didn’t think she could survive watching it disappear.
The room started to darken, and when she looked out the window, she noticed the sun was setting.
The station was quieter now. Damien had been the last injured passenger they’d brought in in hours. She was done here. There was nothing more to do. She pulled her watch from her pocket and winced when she saw that Apollo’s party was starting soon.
“What now, Doctora?” Jean-Louis asked a bit too smugly.
After taking off the apron she’d put on to work, she walked over to the man with her hand up. “I do not want any lectures, just take me back to the villa without comment.”
“Of course, you’re the boss.” She didn’t look straight at him, but even in her periphery, she caught a glimpse of Jean-Louis’s satisfied grin.