Chapter 41
S CARLETT
I climb out in front of a nice house in Long Island, a few towns away from where I live.
Several cars are parked in the driveway, and more cars are pulling in. It’s a big party.
Elisa greets me in the foyer, where I remove my overcoat and leave it with the housekeeper.
Colley’s mother moves away from me as a dozen people walk in.
This would be the perfect moment to get lost in their big house and find a guest to talk to for the rest of the evening, but first, I need to find Colley.
He’s the reason I am here.
I find him surrounded by gifts––his mother was right––and girls and boys with flushed cheeks.
His face brightens up when he sees me.
We exchange a few words, and I give him his gift before he thanks me and insists that I allow him to kiss my cheek.
I grant him his wish, a little flushed and emotional as he does that, and then, I let him enjoy his party while I retreat to the foyer.
People are still walking in, and I grab a cocktail from a server’s tray and pull to the side when the door opens again, and two men wearing suits stride in.
The younger one walks in first.
He carries a bouquet of roses while the man behind him has a beautifully wrapped gift in his hand.
The moment I set my eyes on him, the scaffolding of justifications I have created in my mind these two weeks collapses in a cloud of dust.
With a shaking hand, I put my drink on the window sill, and attempt to step back when a voice rings next to me.
“Not so fast,” Elisa says, and I whip my eyes to her.
She grabs me by the arm and pulls me to the side outside of the two men’s view.
“What is this?” I ask, trembling inside.
She nudges me into the reading room and closes the door behind us. A faint scent of mint and orange peel spins around the room.
“You have to give this man a chance,” she says in a firm voice.
My eyes go wide, my mouth pulling open.
“You set me up?” I murmur.
She gestures at me dismissively.
“That’s nonsense. No one has set you up.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He’ll find out soon.”
“Uh… What is this again?”
She sucks in a troubled breath.
“Listen to me closely. I don’t know what he had told you about his past.”
I cross my arms over my chest, my blood zipping through me at a dizzying speed.
“Not much.”
“Right. Well, you must know about my sister.”
“Yes, I do. But how much do you know about him and me?”
“Enough.”
“Who told you about us?”
“It doesn’t matter. If Margot were here today, she herself would tell you to give Ewan a chance,” she says in a quiet voice, trimmed with emotion.
“I don’t think it’s about that. We barely got to know each other.”
“I think you two know a lot about each other. He never did the things he did for you with any other woman since my sister passed. He said he’d never get married or have a serious relationship with a woman, and that’s exactly what he did.
Sadly, by doing that he did no one a favor.
Ewan is born to be a husband and a father.
He has it in him. Margot knew that. And he knew that, too, but he thought he could forever stay away from that part of his life.
None of us were happy with his choices. Not Ezra. And not me.”
I have a hunch.
“Ezra told you about me.”
“He asked me to help him get you two together again. His father clammed up after you left his house.”
I lift an eyebrow.
“Yes, he gave me the backstory,” she says, irritated.
“I was so happy when he told me it was you,” she adds in a different voice.
She sighs. “I don’t know why you two split up.
I have no idea and don’t care. All I care for is you two to be adults about it.
You were all right until Ezra arrived. All I can think of is that, for whatever reason, you got spooked. ”
“You know…” I say quietly. “He didn’t even give me his name. And we started seeing each other in secret, which gave me plenty of reasons not to trust him.”
She listens to me, unfazed.
“His name is Bard. And he probably did what he did because he was afraid of losing you. And he was right, wasn’t he?
Which only proves my point. He thought about you seriously.
That’s why he was so secretive about everything.
Anyway, he’s here. You’re here. Please talk to him.
And if things don’t work out, at least you did your best. Wait here,” she says and swiftly leaves the room while my heart wants to climb out of my chest and go with her.
A quiet sigh leaves my chest when I sag against the back of a nearby chair, a strange sensation poking at me.
At first, I have no idea what it is.
It’s a nagging feeling. Like I forget to do something. Like I missed something important.
I wish I knew what it was.
Waiting for him, I reach inside my bag and check my phone, and then the sensation morphs into a thought, and I get into my last conversation with my friend, Sammy.
I slip into the chat, and there it is. Her last message. The one I never got around to reading.
My knees weaken, although I push upright as I re-read her message.
Sammy: His name is Bard. Ewan Bard.
My hand drops to my side, the screen going dark.
Fucking good thinking, Scarlett.
The universe was trying to help, and I couldn’t even be bothered with it.
SCARLETT
A few minutes pass. One? Two? Ten?
Finally, the door opens, and the broad shoulders of a man filling a high-end suit to perfection enter my line of sight.
Our eyes connect, and my first impression is that he’s not in a good mood.
He probably just realized he was set up, and he abhors it as well.
“Scarlett?” he says in a neutral tone, like we’ve never shared a story.
“Ewan.”
I sound disappointed because I am.
“I’m sorry about this. Elisa set us up,” I say.
He closes the door, and doesn’t take another step toward me.
Instead, he leans against the door.
“She said we should talk,” he utters, not in a mood to chat.
“Yeah. She said a lot of things. Don’t mind her,” I say, making up my mind and walking to the door so I can exit the room, get lost, and never have to talk to them again.
He doesn’t move.
When I stop in front of him, he looks down for a moment, checking my dress and my shoes before he slides his hand to the small of my back, his nostrils flaring as he inhales the invisible drops of my perfume.
“What did she say to you?” he asks in a different voice while I sail an ocean of emotions.
My gaze drops away from his when he slides his forefinger under my chin and tilts it up.
“What did she say to you, Scarlet?”
My chin trembles against his touch.
“She told me your name. And she talked about her sister. She said you were born to be a father and a husband.”
A faint smile fleets through his eyes.
“She also said you’d sworn off women.”
His fingers dance across my jawline.
“It’s true.”
“She said Margot wouldn’t have liked you to do that.”
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to her. I did what I thought was best for me and my son.”
“So I was right to leave that night.”
He gives me a nostalgic look while my eyes melt into his.
I always got to know Ewan, the wild man with a glint of craziness in his eye, yet this is a different man.
Brewing a storm behind a mask of coolness.
Growing a glacier in his chest.
“I don’t know about that,” he says, putting his other hand on my waist. “But your leaving has changed a few things.”
“What changed?” I ask.
“Ezra said I was a fool for letting you go, so we had an argument that evening, and I defended your position. He said I was crazy, and we ended up eating all the food, drinking all the wine, and exchanging tips on how to make women happy.”
A smile tickles my lips.
“You did not.”
“Yes, we did. And then we spent the rest of the week together. He reconnected with his girl, and we spent New Year’s Eve together as well.
I never thought we’d do that without tearing each other apart.
I learned a lot about him. And he was happy with how I was.
He still believed I was crazy for not calling you.
I explained to him that time would do its magic thing, as things were out of my hands.
He couldn’t understand why you left and blamed himself for making you leave.
I told him that wasn’t the case, and it had nothing to do with him while having everything to do with me.
And then… As he went back to his life, I got to spend some time alone and worked around the house and made it more homey while thinking about you and the time we spent in Florida.
I missed you a lot and the opportunities we had lost as we couldn’t make things last.”
A knot forms in my throat.
His eyes are heavy with emotions, too.
“I put two more fireplaces in the house and installed proper lighting inside and outside. It looks nice.”
He looks down, his jaw tense.
“The reason why I didn’t go as quickly as I wanted to with you and tell you a lot of stuff about my life wasn’t Ezra or me being unsure of you. It wasn’t even Margot.”
He raises his eyes, and a stern man looks at me.
“There is more to me than meets the eye. More than even Elisa knows. She knows a lot, but not the things you’d know if you were a part of my real life.
I couldn’t tell you that for a thousand reasons.
First off, it’s a security matter, and there are rules I can’t break, not even for you.
And then, I can’t ask a woman to accept that.
Normal women don’t say yes to it, while people like me are born into it. ”
Silence follows his words while my brain is frantically trying to make sense of his words.
And then, from the foggiest corner of my memory, Sammy’s warning about him comes to life again.
How blind I was.
How blind I wanted to be.
No, it can’t be that.
Look at this house, these people. Elisa and Colton. And Elisa’s husband.
These are normal people leading normal lives.
I feel like fainting.
The truth was always there.
Like his name.
Like everything else.
Why did I refuse to see it?
Because I cared. I cared about him.
And something inside me told me he was more than that.
He was this nice man who did nice things for me, not even my husband used to do.
So how could I pull away from him if I didn’t do it when things were fresh between us and ties easier to sever?
“What can we do about it?” I murmur, my voice gliding over the edge of tears.
His eyes search mine as if there is a chance to make this work.
He notices the battle on my face.
The surprise, disbelief, and recoil.
And he is hurt.
He has the right to be.
As much as I have the right to be angry.
He shouldn’t have let this game go on if he had known the truth would make us enemies.
“There’s probably nothing we can do about it,” he says, bereft. “And maybe it’s better this way. For both of us. For all of us.”
His hands slide off me, and he straightens and gets ready to leave when I grip his forearm.
“How did she do it?”
He turns to me, surprised.
“Excuse me?”
“How did Margot do it?”
Darkness slides over his face.
“Margot…” he says, and his eyes trail down, a cynical look sliding over his face. “Margot lost her life because of me.”
He flicks his stare up.
“So maybe she isn’t the greatest role model for you.”
I look at him with pain bleeding over my face.
“She loved me. That’s how she did it.”
A few more seconds pass before he turns his back to me to exit the room.
I move at the last moment and slide between him and the door, forcing him to close it.
His eyes dip to mine.
“How is that life, Ewan?”
He bites his lips, his jaw made of steel.
“Dangerous.”
“There was nothing dangerous when we spent time together a few weeks back.”
“Because you didn’t see much.”
“You said you worked around the house. And you had no security at your place. Plus, we were alone in Florida.”
His gaze softens as I continue.
“And then there’s this party. And Ezra. And Colton. There is nothing dangerous hovering over this.”
His fingers come to my face as I build my case, completely in denial.
“Everything you see is the result of having heavy security around the clock. As a rule, I stayed away from Elisa’s life and had Ezra in a boarding school.
I’ve always had arrangements in place if anything bad happened to me.
I didn’t want to bring anyone into this life because it wasn’t fair for them. ”
“It wasn’t fair to let me fall for you either, and yet you did it without warning me about all this.”
His hand comes to my face.
“I fell for you first. Before you did anything. And there was nothing I could do about it. I just wanted us to find a way. We failed. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, Scarlett. I lost my parents and my wife to a war. No sane man would do that again.”
He lowers his lips to me to leave a kiss on my cheek, yet I tilt my head, and our lips connect.
Slowly and reserved at first. And then with a little passion. And then with more passion. And then, with heat brewing in our blood.
I feel it and so does he.
We break away from each other fast.
He runs his tense fingers through his hair while I try to come up with a few words.
“You said this kind of life would be dangerous. You also said the time we spent together didn’t feel like danger because there were measures in place to make it feel that way.”
“They are not mutually exclusive.”
“Then give me a chance.”
“No,” he says directly, and my eyebrows pinch into a frown.
“Why?”
He kisses me again, ready to walk out. His kiss is friendly, fleeting.
“Because you don’t deserve it.”
He makes an attempt to exit the room when I interfere again.
“I don’t deserve to have my heart broken either, so let me choose what I deserve for a change.”
He ponders something, his eyes empty, almost.
“Okay.” He glances over his shoulder. “Where are your things?”
“With the housekeeper.”
He motions to the door.
“Let’s get them. We’re leaving.”