CHAPTER SEVEN
LILYPRESSEDHER head against Trip’s muscular chest, her body shattering around him as his hips jerked against her, each movement breaking her into ever tinier fragments. His hand was tight in her hair and she breathed him in like oxygen.
She had tried to forget how good it was between them, tried to tell herself that she had misremembered the storm of their passion. But she had been lying. Trip was the only man who had ever made her feel so helpless and hungry all at once. His was the only touch that could wrap her in a blaze of desire, turn her inside out and dissolve her into a creature of pure, endless need. A woman, no less.
It had been just like that first time. Like every time in between, and maybe it would always be like this with them. With each of them scraped raw, dazed and aching, shivering with the aftershocks of their encounter and that head-spinning need and longing that stormed through their limbs until it exploded into a firestorm that blinded and burned everything in its path.
But they stayed safe, bodies fused in a painless white heat.
‘Lily—’ She felt his fingers move and then he was tipping her face up to his, his blue eyes hot and fierce like the centre of a flame. Her legs were still wrapped around his waist and it was then, gazing down at the place where their bodies were pressed together, that she realised that he was still kneeling, his other hand supporting the weight of her so casually that it made her tremble inside.
‘I didn’t check. Are you...?’
‘Yes. I’m on the pill.’
Something shifted in his face, beneath the surface of the skin, too quick to capture, but he didn’t make any attempt to break their embrace and she didn’t either. She just wanted to stay there for ever, splintered into a thousand pieces, with his hardness clenched deep inside her, and his heart raging next to hers.
It took a while for her muscles to relax, for her to take a normal breath and even then he still held her close. Finally, he shifted his weight, lifting her up and letting her legs drop from around his waist and laying her down on the warm grass. She watched in quiet wonder as he moved to lie down beside her.
A breeze was lifting the leaves high up the trees and she gazed up at the fluttering sunlight as Trip caressed the palm of her hand, his face relaxed, at peace, whereas she—
It had taken only a few minutes but the events of moments earlier were starting to fill her head, each frame tossing up one question after another.
Her eyes moved across the clearing. In this circle of quivering pines and oak saplings it felt as if the world outside were gone, had become a shimmering desert. All that remained was this tiny oasis.
And she had taken his hand and led him here.
What had she been thinking?
Nothing.
She hadn’t been thinking, just feeling. Her need to touch Trip, to press up against the familiar curve of his shoulder and the solid warmth of his arms, had spread white and blinding across her mind, blotting out both common sense and any thought of self-preservation.
And she still wasn’t thinking about her own well-being now. How could she after everything Trip had been through?
Her fingers moved to touch a long thin scar on his leg and, now that she was looking, she could see more scratches, grazes and discoloured skin beneath his tan.
The creases around his eyes made her heart contract. He was never more beautiful than when he smiled, and the thought of him being hunted, hurt, shot or worse made her feel panicked. She reached up and clasped his face in her hands and pressed a desperate kiss to his mouth, needing to feel his breath, his heartbeat, to prove that he was real.
He kissed her back, his hand moving, his touch firm, compelling, sliding slowly up to cup her breast, palms grazing her already taut nipple, shaping her ribs, her waist, her hips.
She pulled him closer, her breath suddenly staccato in her throat as he lowered his body onto hers and she felt the press of his erection, hard and as thick as her wrist. Helplessly she arched up against him, opening her legs wider, and then he slid inside her and she moaned softly, her pulse frantic against his skin, meeting each thrust of his hips with one of her own until there was nothing but heat and need and their quickening breath.
The sun was starting its downward descent when they finally headed back to the villa. Valentina was in the kitchen, preparing the evening meal. She turned towards Lily and smiled warmly.
‘Did you have a nice afternoon?’
Lily nodded. ‘We did. We...’ She hesitated, dry-mouthed as the events of the afternoon unfurled in front of her eyes in all their naked, unfiltered glory so that she could almost feel Trip’s hands on her belly and waist, his fingers light against her hips and between her thighs. She was hardly going to share that version of events with the housekeeper, but she was a terrible liar, particularly when put on the spot like this.
‘We—’
‘Yes, we did.’ Trip cut across her smoothly. ‘I showed Lily around the vineyards and then we went for a walk in the woods. To cool off,’ he added, his eyes finding Lily’s. The slide of blue heat across her skin made her shake inside.
‘Do you think she guessed?’ Lily asked as they made their way upstairs. ‘That we weren’t—I mean, that we were—’
Trip’s eyebrows pulled together a fraction. ‘What? That we were having al fresco sex?’ Shaking his head, he reached out and picked some grass seeds from her hair. ‘I’m going to go with no. But even if she did, so what? We’re engaged. We’re allowed to have sex.’
They had reached her bedroom now and he followed her through the door quite naturally, almost as if they were the couple they were pretending to be.
And could be for real?
The romantic part of her that she had always suppressed, or, rather, smothered after the mess she had made with Cameron, unfurled a little and she felt the world rearrange itself into a place of possibilities. In this new world, Trip would tell her that they no longer needed to pretend that they were engaged. That a year wasn’t long enough because he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
Abruptly Trip leaned forward and wrapped his hand around her head and kissed her hard.
He straightened then, his fingers still tangled in her hair. ‘You worry too much. Do you want to take a shower before we eat? Because I’d be happy to join you—’
‘No—’ She shook her head, the word rushing out to cover how her body had stiffened at his suggestion. Her body was still rippling from his touch. The last thing she needed was to be up close and personal with a naked Trip rubbing soap over her.
‘I’ll have one later. But I might just go and sort out my hair.’
‘Why?’ She felt another seismic shimmer ripple across the room as he dropped down onto the bed and stretched out his legs. ‘I like it like that.’ That remark, or maybe the slow, assessing gaze that accompanied it, followed the suggestion about sharing a shower to press against a point low down in her pelvis.
‘It’ll get all knotty if I don’t brush it through,’ she said quickly. ‘I can meet you downstairs.’
Inside the bathroom Lily closed the door and leaned against the wood. If only she could go downstairs and climb into the refrigerator, let the chilled air cool the smouldering flame Trip had lit inside her. Because that was the trouble when you played with matches in a heatwave—you started a fire and there was no water to put it out.
Pushing away from the door, she walked over to the sink, giving the mirror a perfunctory glance as she leaned forward to switch on the tap.
She felt the skin on her back prickle.
As she gazed at her reflection, her cheeks grew hot. It had taken a long time but, after they had finally broken apart that last time, Trip had helped her get dressed. But his mouth had kept finding hers so that she hadn’t really been paying much attention and now she saw that, not only were some of the buttons on her top in the wrong holes, but others had simply disappeared.
The heat in her cheeks intensified as she remembered Trip ripping open her blouse.
In that moment she had simply wanted him. Even afterwards as they had lain with their bodies overlapping, she hadn’t thought of what came next. Neither, she was sure, had Trip. But for him, the past, their past, was not so very different from this new arrangement. What was it he’d said?
‘We’re engaged. We’re allowed to have sex.’
And they had. And she had loved every febrile second of it. Only this ‘engagement’ wasn’t real. It was a pretence, so sex was superfluous.
Then again, a year was a long time for a man like Trip not to have sex, she thought dully. She felt oddly fragile then, and exhausted.
But then it was a lot, connecting with him like that, not just physically, but hearing him talk about what had happened in Ecuador. Before, with her anger buffering them, it had been easy to hold back other feelings. Confusing, contradictory feelings that were as reckless as Trip’s decision to visit a smuggling route used by drug cartels.
Only out there in the woods, something had changed.
Or maybe she had changed. She didn’t know if it was the sex or because she understood now how close she had come to losing Trip for ever, but her anger was starting to lose shape, to crack and crumble, and other emotions were starting to seep through.
This engagement couldn’t work, she couldn’t make it work if she let Trip get under her skin. She couldn’t change what had happened but that didn’t mean it had to happen again.
Even if she wanted it to.
Her fingers pressed against the cool porcelain of the sink.
And she did want that.
She might be lying to the rest of the world, but she couldn’t lie to herself, and when he’d leaned over a few moments ago and fitted his mouth to hers, the desire to keep kissing him, to touch his face and press her hand against where she knew his body would be hardening, had been nearly impossible to resist.
And the intensity of that struggle proved to her that she had to stay within the lines because that was the trouble with sex. You had to be intimate, and intimacy combined with hormones fed into that biological need all humans had to be held and touched. But this arrangement was already complicated enough. Casually, carelessly introducing another layer of complexity for something as transitory and self-indulgent as sex had bad idea stamped all over it.
His hand moving against her cheek, the potent blue of his gaze holding her still, captive as his body sank deeper into her in the dappled light...
She blanked her mind.
It didn’t matter that it had felt so right and so real and so perfect with Trip, her judgement was flawed. Cam had taught her that, then Trip had hammered it home and she was still living with the collateral damage from both of those miscalculations.
Staring at her reflection head-on, she rebuttoned her top correctly and smoothed her hair back into another low ponytail and, then taking a deep breath, she opened the bathroom door.
Her pulse skipped a beat.
Trip was still lying on the bed. The book she had been trying to read for days now lay open in his lap.
‘Ms Lily Jane Dempsey. BA Amherst, MBA Oxon.’ Trip shifted against the pillows. ‘You have a lot of letters after your name.’
It was then that she realised he was holding out her invitation to the scholarship reunion dinner she had been using as a bookmark.
‘You have them too.’ He had been to Harvard.
‘True.’ She saw something flash across his eyes, too fast to catch, like a fish darting away from an unseen predator in an ocean of blue.
‘So did you have fun?’ His eyes were clear and blue and fixed on her face as if he cared, which seemed unlikely but today was turning out to be a day where little, if anything, made sense and so she simply shook her head.
‘I didn’t go. I had a lot on at work,’ she lied.
His gaze held hers, jaw tightening infinitesimally. ‘And that’s the only reason you didn’t go? Because of work?’
No, it wasn’t. The dinner had taken place the weekend after he’d come and ended things with her and, for days after he’d left her, her body had felt tired and achy as if she’d had flu. But there was no reason to share that with Trip now. No reason to ever share it with him.
‘Not completely. I was worried about you.’
‘But you wanted to go—’
She nodded. ‘I had a great time in England and I made friends there. I don’t often get a chance to catch up with them so, yes, I would have gone.’
‘Is that why you were going to London? You wanted a trip down memory lane?’
What she had wanted was to get away from him, this man sprawled on her bed, before he could take the wild rapture of their time together and turn it into something ugly. Before he made it so that all she could remember was that he had named her as his fiancée because he thought her dull and sensible enough to reassure his jittery shareholders.
‘You mean, the other day when you tricked me into coming here?’ She watched that mouth of his flex into something not quite a smile.
‘In part. But it’s also because England isn’t New York. London can be tricky but in Oxford it’s not that hard to have a normal life.’
‘You mean, no press?’
In short, yes. No press meant no photos, which meant no humiliation, no jeering headlines, no mocking memes.
She shrugged. ‘To an outsider, all students look pretty much the same so it’s easier to be anonymous.’
‘Easier?’ He frowned.
‘People think they can say things. Because of my father.’ She could feel his gaze, curious but a little baffled because, of course, what did he know about being belittled or deemed inferior? ‘And I know that how they talk about me, what they say, is because they’re angry, and that anger kind of spills out. But sometimes it’s hard—’
It had been bliss. For the first time in as long as she could remember she had fitted in seamlessly. And she had loved it. Loved the old stone buildings. The book-lined libraries. The seriousness of it all. She had felt accepted, felt safe.
It was one of the reasons why returning to the US fifteen months later had been such a shock. Suddenly she’d been back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The brutality of it had left her winded, then angry, and angry people were vulnerable to manipulation. Which was why she hadn’t seen Cameron Carson for the danger he was. Why she needed to remember how that felt and not let herself get lost in a pair of blue eyes. She couldn’t be trusted. More importantly, he couldn’t either.
Suddenly she felt close to tears as she made a different, more painful journey down memory lane, back to when she had found Lucas on the floor of his bedroom, the pill bottle beside him. It was her fault that had happened. Blinded by her own neediness, she had placed her trust in someone who was a literal walking, talking red flag.
And this neediness she was feeling now meant that she couldn’t trust herself, trust her judgement. In fact, it was a reason to do the polar opposite of what she wanted to do. So there would be no more giving into that hunger that had stormed the barricades of her common sense and self-preservation out there in the woods.
And she would tell Trip that.
But it would be easier to have that conversation when he wasn’t lying on her bed as if he were her fiancé for real, rather than an ex she’d had sex with for reasons that frankly had made sense only in the heat of the moment.
Needing space from that thought, from him, she glanced down at her watch.
‘Is that the time? We should go down for supper. It’s past seven.’
Glancing across the table, Trip licked the spoon clean and rested it in his bowl. Something was different, he thought, his gaze leapfrogging from Lily’s shuttered grey eyes to the pulse beating out a staccato rhythm at the base of her throat.
‘Was everything okay?’
Valentina had come to clear the table.
‘It was delicious. I wonder if I might be able to have the recipe. Bunet is my father’s favourite dessert.’
Watching Lily smile up at the housekeeper, he felt an unfamiliar pang of envy, both for that smile and the way her eyes softened when she mentioned her father. It was the same, he noticed, whenever any of her family called or texted. Her face, her voice would alter because, despite the part they had played in getting her here, her love for them was clearly unconditional. And they loved her, too, and he felt uncomfortable at having so casually exploited that love.
Uncomfortable too with that hunted look on her face when she talked about people saying things about her, presumably on the Internet. He had no idea what mud they could throw at Lily. She was smart and hard-working and loyal and brave and passionate. Not that she was perfect, he told himself, feeling his body twitch in response to just how passionate Lily could be. She was stubborn and snippy too. But still, he didn’t like knowing that she had been picked on in that way.
‘Prendiamo il caffè in salotto, per favore,’he said quietly to Valentina, then, pushing back his chair, he turned to Lily. ‘Shall we?’ It was a question but also an assumption and he took a step back to allow her to pass.
It was four hours since she had taken his hand and led him into that clearing and his body was still flushed with post-orgasm dopamine so that it had taken a little while for him to register it, but at some point between then and her walking out of the bathroom, something had changed.
She had changed.
At first, he’d thought it was just her blouse. She had done up the remaining buttons in their correct order, which was a pity. How Lily looked after sex was one of the things that gave him the greatest pleasure. Ever since that first time, he had loved knowing that he was responsible for her hair tumbling loose over her shoulder. Loved, too, the contrast with how prim and poised she normally looked.
But there was more going on than a few adjustments to her blouse.
On the way back to the villa she had got quieter, and, even though they had been holding hands, he had been able to feel her retreating from him so that every time he’d glanced over at her, she had been a little more out of reach. And now she was so distant and distracted it felt as if she were behind glass.
His eyes rested on the faint red marks on her bare shoulder where, earlier that day, his stubble had scraped against her skin.
And it didn’t take a genius to work out what was on her mind.
She looked up at him then, her grey eyes resting on his face then moving past his shoulder as if it hurt her to look at him.
Which was ridiculous, he thought, with a flicker of irritation, given that her body had been fused to his for most of the afternoon.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine. I think I caught the sun earlier.’
He glanced over at her pale face, his chest tightening. Now she wasn’t just holding back, she was lying. And it didn’t make any sense that he should mind. This whole arrangement was a web of lies, but that was hard for him too, although he doubted that she’d believe that.
Somewhere in his head he could hear his mother’s voice as she made up yet another excuse.
Of course, she had plenty of practice, he thought, his eyes moving past Lily’s face to the classical acoustic piano at the other end of the room. His father had often been late or he would change his plans at the last minute. Nothing was sacred. Not anniversaries or school sports day or birthdays.
There were so many to choose from but one in particular stood out. He and his mother had flown to Italy for Spring Break. It had been the weekend of his father’s birthday, but Charlie had been studying for his exams and had stayed on at grad school to revise, and Henry Sr had been due to join them but then, inevitably, he had called to say that he would be delayed.
Trip felt his gaze drift back through the house, seeing his eleven-year-old self. He had been out riding all afternoon and come back hungry, and feeling guilty because he had left his mother on her own. But the house had been so quiet that for a moment he’d thought it was empty.
And then he’d heard it. A tiny catch of breath, like a gasp.
She had been sitting at the piano in this very room and at first he had thought she was singing softly to herself as she had sometimes when it had just been the two of them. Then he’d realised she was crying. Which had been the other, more likely option. But no child wanted to find their mother weeping.
Not that his mother had seemed to realise that. Her face had stiffened but it had been several moments before her hand had risen like a brushstroke to wipe away the tears.
‘Everything’s fine. It’s this melody, it always makes me weep.’
His childish self had accepted her explanation. But then six weeks ago he’d found the letters and the first one he’d picked up had made it clear that his father had been with his mistress that night. Had chosen to be with her instead of his family.
He felt the shock of it reverberate through him as if it had only just happened. For so long he had chased the perfection his father had demanded. But all the time Henry had been presenting a perfect front, he had been lying, cheating, deceiving. And constantly calling his youngest son to account.
The memory of his father’s cool, excoriating gaze made his spine stiffen. Or maybe it was that he felt like a hypocrite for getting so out of shape with Lily for lying to him when he’d made her an unwitting and unwilling accomplice to his lies.
His jaw tightened. But her lying to him was different from the two of them deceiving other people. Her lies were personal, and it hurt because, confusingly and without precedence, he found that he cared about what she thought of him.
‘Why don’t you just say it? Whatever it is that you want to say but aren’t.’
His voice was harsh, too harsh. He knew that even before Lily’s eyes pulled back to his.
As Lily’s forehead creased, he made an impatient sound. ‘I’m disappointed, Lily. It’s not like you to play dumb. In either sense of the word.’
There wasn’t a flicker of reaction on her small, pale face but, as a silence settled between them, her cool grey eyes fixed on his and he saw the truth. She was angry.
‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘You want to talk about what happened earlier? I don’t regret it—’
He shifted back against the cushion, his heartbeat suddenly and unaccountably running wild beneath his ribs because he didn’t want to hear the end of her sentence. Didn’t want to hear her tell him that it was a mistake. Or worse, imply that he was a mistake.
‘That’s lucky.’ He cut her off. ‘Because it’s a little late for regrets.’
She blinked as if she were momentarily blinded by the blindingly obvious then. ‘But it shouldn’t happen again.’
Not happen again? He stared up at her, seeing that moment in the clearing when he’d let the rope drop to his feet, feeling the pulse in her throat leap towards him, each beat, separate and vivid like the first heavy drops of rain from a thundercloud.
‘Any particular reason why not?’
‘You know why,’ she said after a moment, as if she’d needed a breath or two before she could speak. There was another sliver of silence and then she frowned. ‘It’s not what I want.’
‘Not what you want?’ He held her gaze, not seeing her as she was now, pale and stiff and hostile, but as she had been earlier, arching against him beneath the quivering leaves. ‘And what do you want me to say to that? Other than I don’t believe you.’
Her eyes darkened and a flicker of lightning split the irises. ‘I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen. For once.’
The ‘for once’ scraped against his skin like a blunt blade.
‘I am listening, and you’re lying.’
She was shaking her head now. ‘Just because someone says something you don’t like doesn’t mean it’s a lie, Trip.’ Her jaw jammed out at an angle that made him want to lean in and fit his mouth to hers, and prove her wrong.
‘My liking or not liking what you’re saying is irrelevant to its veracity, Lily.’
He got to his feet at the same time as she did and now they were inches apart, close enough that he could see her chest rising and falling. See a brightness in her eyes that she wouldn’t share with him.
‘In other words, you don’t care what I want, but then I knew that anyway.’ There was a second of silence. ‘So what happens now? Are you going to try and manipulate me into thinking your way is the only way?’
He clenched his teeth. ‘What the hell are you talking about? Is that who you think I am?’ The thought angered and appalled him. Maybe it did her, because her chin jerked up.
‘No, I don’t but—’
‘So why are we arguing about this?’
‘Because you make assumptions. Back in New York you assumed I’d just go along with what you wanted, what you needed, never mind what I felt, and then when that didn’t work you brought me here and assumed I’d give in. And now you’re assuming that because we had sex, it’s going to happen again.’
He held her gaze.
‘I was assuming it would happen again because we both enjoyed it. Or are you going to lie about that too?’
That caught her off balance. She swayed a little as if she was going to fall into his arms but then her body stiffened.
‘No, I’m not going to lie about that.’
There was a shake to her voice that made the air hiss at the edge of the room. ‘I did enjoy it, and I know it felt like it did before and if we had sex again, it would probably feel the same way. But it’s not the same. None of this is real. Acting like we can just pick up where we left off will just complicate things, and it’s not fair of you to assume that can happen. Because it can’t. Because back then we were honest about what we wanted, and I don’t want to take that truth and mix it up with all these lies.’
‘It’s not all lies—’ he protested.
‘You’re not that man that I waited for after the auction, and I can’t pretend you’re him—’
He tried to set his face to blank as he had done so many times in the past, but it felt as though he were dissolving. But why should he be surprised? Even before he’d lost his whole family, there had been nothing solid in his life. Not as Lily had. No core of love and understanding and acceptance. The nearest he’d got to it was Mason Cooper, who had at least sat him down and talked to him.
But Lily had listened. Talking to her earlier about what had happened in the jungle, he had felt as if he could tell her anything, felt as if she cared, so that just for a moment he’d forgotten that this was supposed to be a charade for the shareholders.
He had to clear his throat to speak. ‘It gets easier with practice.’ His mouth twisted into an approximation of a smile. ‘You know, all my life I’ve been the runner-up, but this is the first time I’ve come second to myself.’
Lily watched him turn and walk away, her head still trying to make sense of the expression that had skidded across his face. Not anger this time, but pain, and a kind of exhaustion.
The room felt cold all of a sudden. Her heart was beating crazily fast, as if she had been sprinting for a finish line, and she had in a way. Only now the prize-winner’s medal looked cheap and tarnished.
What had he meant, saying he was always the runner-up? It made no sense. Trip had everything. Looks, charm, brains, money...
And yet there had been an emptiness to his voice that was as baffling as his words. She glanced furtively across the room towards him. A lock of hair had fallen half into his eyes and he blew it away in a gesture that was so unselfconscious and familiar that she had to look away. It would be so easy to give into temptation, and Trip was the definition of temptation. But she had been tempted before by another not quite so beautiful or charming man and look at how that had ended.
Not with any attempt to explain his behaviour, she thought, replaying Trip’s words from earlier.
On legs that shook slightly, she walked over to where he was sitting on the piano stool, his fingers splayed above the polished ivory keys.
Her heart was beating with clumsy little jerks.
‘I didn’t know you could play,’ she said quietly as he raised his head.
‘I can play a bit. Charlie was the musical one. I think he could have been a professional, but he was already lined up to take over the business.’ There was that same depth of loss to his voice and she shivered, imagining a world without a brother. How close she had come to that happening.
‘He seemed kind.’
Charlie Winslow had lacked the precision-cut features and seductive, curling mouth that made Trip shift the gravity in any room, but she could still remember him and she wondered what kind of hole his death had left in his younger brother’s life.
‘You never said you knew him.’
‘I didn’t know him. But I dropped my ice cream once at a polo match and he went and bought me another one.’
Trip nodded slowly as if picturing the scene. ‘He was a good son. A good guy, I think,’ he added. ‘We weren’t close. He was much older than me.’ A catch of breath lifted his chest and she felt her ribs squeeze around her heart.
‘It was supposed to be him running the business.’ His gaze dropped to his hands. ‘I’m just the understudy. Or that’s how my father saw me.’
The air in the room seemed to gather and tense. She stared at him uncertainly. ‘You were running the Far East division of one of the biggest corporations in the world,’ she said finally. ‘That’s hardly being an understudy.’
Trip turned his head. There was that same exhaustion on his face as before, but now it was tinged with a self-mockery that pulled at her. ‘My father liked that my company was touted as a unicorn, so he invited me into the family business. But we never really saw eye to eye. I found his management style too constrictive and cautious.’ He reached out and pressed two keys down together to make a jarring, discordant sound. ‘And, well... I wasn’t exactly what he had in mind for a son.’
Was that true? She realised she and Henry had discussed his wife a couple of times and he had mentioned Charlie in passing, but he had never once mentioned his younger son.
Trip had turned away and had begun to play the opening bars of an aria she recognised. He was wrong, she thought, gazing at his profile. He could play, and more than a bit. And he must be wrong about his father, too, but she couldn’t think of a way to say that without sounding either patronising or dismissive.
‘You don’t believe me.’ He straightened then, blue eyes narrowing on her face.
She shook her head. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you. I just don’t understand why you would think that.’
‘Join the queue,’ he said with a smile that contradicted the edge to his voice. ‘Nobody understands anything I think or do. My incomprehensibility is part of who I am. You see, I have letters after my name too—’
Was he talking academically? ‘I know.’ She frowned. ‘You went to Harvard—’
‘I never got my degree. I didn’t finish. I dropped out.’ That note in his voice was one she had heard so many times before—mocking, careless, with a shadow underneath that made his face seem older, wary and weary.
He took a long breath and she watched his profile tighten. ‘My letters aren’t like yours. Or Charlie’s. And my father hated it because he couldn’t change them, and because he couldn’t change them, he ignored them.’
There was a taut, humming silence.
‘What letters?’ she said quietly.
He hesitated then, and for so long that she thought he had unilaterally ended the conversation but then, finally, almost imperceptibly, his shoulders shifted.
‘ADHD. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.’
She felt as if he’d slapped her across the face. ‘I—I didn’t know—’ But how? How could she not have known? She felt confused and ashamed.
‘Outside the family and a couple of therapists nobody does officially. My father didn’t want me to have a label. But I didn’t need one anyway. He made it clear that I wasn’t ever going to be good enough.’
The ache in his voice made her feel as though she were turning to stone. She had been so sure before that she knew who Trip was. Had readily accepted, in fact, that he was like Cameron. A beautiful, but unscrupulous, self-serving charmer. It was why she had kept her distance, kept it strictly physical. But this man was more than a pretty face. He had been hurt, badly, been judged and found wanting, and she understood how that felt. Only it was worse for Trip because her critics were strangers. His were people who should have loved him unconditionally.
Her chest was so tight now it was hard to breathe. She knew how hard it was to trust, how hard it must have been for him to talk about himself. But he had trusted her.
Glancing up at him, she saw that the last rays of sun were flooding through the window, blazing so brightly that he seemed to be losing shape, and she felt a rush of panic that he would dissolve into the light just as he had disappeared into the darkness of the rainforest.
‘When did you get diagnosed?’
‘When I was about ten, but I think my mom suspected way before that. My teachers, too. But my dad didn’t want to hear it, and besides, he had Charlie, and Charlie was always first and top.’
His mouth twisted into a shape that made her breath catch in her throat.
‘You know, I think it killed him that we shared a name. It’s probably why I was always “Trip”. And because, deep down, I think he thought it suited me. He was always so precise, so absolute and I was impulsive, reckless, a risk-taker so sometimes I’d trip or stumble.’
She reached out and covered his fingers with her hand. ‘We all stumble sometimes.’ And sometimes you ran into the spears and arrows willingly, stupidly, selfishly, she thought, remembering Cameron’s sly smile. ‘And when you set your mind on something, you make it happen.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean like abducting my ex?’
Her fingers tightened around his. ‘Actually, I was thinking about your company. Nobody builds a unicorn business by luck. You need expertise, drive, optimism, an understanding of the customer and the market.’ She hesitated. ‘And I’m not your ex. You’re stuck with me, remember?’
‘I wanted to be, remember?’ he said, his gaze moving over her in that way he had that made everything inside her feel sweet and slow-moving.
She bit her lip. ‘Are you on medication?’
‘Not any more. I was when I was younger, but some of my symptoms stopped when I got older and some of them I manage with coping strategies and therapy.’
‘Like tapping?’
He nodded. ‘Tapping and CBT.’ Turning her hand over, he stared down at it as if he was making up his mind about something. ‘And natural lifemanship. That’s where you work with horses to regulate your body’s energy. I’d always ridden and one of my therapists mentioned it to my mother. I tried it and it really clicked with me.’
So that was what she had seen in the barn.
‘How does it work?’ she asked.
‘It helps develop your understanding of non-verbal cues. You see, horses are highly selective about who they trust so you have to learn how to control the chaos inside. That helps you deal with what you see as the chaos around you.’
She could see him standing, head bowed, trying to steady his breathing. ‘Is that why Acrux walked away from you?’
He nodded slowly. ‘After we argued, I was spinning out. Angry with you. Angry with myself too. He could feel it...’ His voice trailed off and she could feel his regret pulling at her like a tide. ‘I’m sorry, Lily, for making this your problem. For making assumptions and for lying to you. And your parents.’
He was apologising? Staring down at him, she felt that same quiver of petals opening in spring sunshine. Trip had hurt and manipulated her and the closeness of his behaviour to Cameron’s had struck a still raw nerve. But they were not the same. She knew that now.
‘I was angry with you too.’
‘You had every right to be. You still do.’ He made a small, tense gesture with his other hand. ‘I’ve messed everything up. I thought it would be easy, but I don’t know how to do this either. But I do know I can’t do it on my own.’
‘You’re not on your own. We’re in this together,’ she said, suddenly fierce.
His blue eyes locked with hers and she stared up at him, mesmerised, thrilled almost by the expression on his beautiful face, as if they really were together.
‘I think you mean that.’
‘I do,’ she said, and it was hard to hear her voice over the clattering of her heart.
He touched her cheek near the hairline. ‘You were right earlier. About me. I did make assumptions. About what would happen. Because I’m used to people falling in line with my wishes. But also because I wanted you. Always. Right from that lunch meeting when you gave me such a hard time.
‘I know I’ve hurt you, and I regret that more than anything, but I can’t regret bringing you here, Lily.’
The softness in his voice made her name sound like a poem and she wanted to bury her face in the crook of his neck.
‘I can’t regret being with you, being inside you, because it’s real. What happened in that wood was real. And what we have together is the simplest, realest part of me.’
It was too much of a risk to tell him she felt the same way. It would be an act of wanton recklessness and she opened her mouth to tell him that nothing had changed. That what happened in the wood should never happen again. But she couldn’t somehow. It was as if something had changed between them. It wasn’t only the sex. It wasn’t even his apology.
It was him. And she didn’t want to think about what that meant. She just didn’t want to lie to him.
‘For me, too,’ she whispered, and his pupils flared, and when he slid his hand along her cheek she leaned into it and then he was pulling her against him and his mouth found hers and he took, and took and kept taking as the light turned to darkness around them.