Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I stare up at him, aware that my mouth has dropped open, but it’s as if he transforms before my eyes as I look at him.
At first, I think he doesn’t look like himself at all.
But then I realize… It’s that nothing about this man is cold now.
His eyes are ablaze and only getting hotter. It’s as if the bones of his face have rearranged before me as I look at him, as if I’m watching as he sheds his skin.
Or a mask.
It feels as if my heart might explode inside my chest.
Maybe it already has.
“I don’t understand…” I whisper.
“What I told you about finding your firm is true,” he seethes at me. “But it’s only part of the truth. Your picture is right there on that website for anyone to see, Annagret.”
I feel his hands tighten again on my shoulders, just briefly, and then he lets go. He steps back. And I feel winded.
But it looks as if he finally feels…like himself. There’s something majestic in how alive he seems. Nothing cold. Nothing stern.
Somehow it makes me think of that night in the cottage, both of us stripped so bare, and not only of our clothes.
Tonight it feels like we’re standing on a cliff, waiting for a wind to come and not knowing whether it will push me back to safety or send me spiraling off into the unknown.
“I couldn’t get that picture of you out of my head,” he is telling me, this extraordinarily beautiful man, who must have any number of women toss themselves upon him wherever he goes. “It was something about you. Something about the way you held yourself. You know the picture I mean.”
“I do.” I shake my head. “I had Tess take it on a sidewalk to the tune of an entire irritated construction crew shouting at us to move. Not exactly a glamour shoot, Taio.”
The picture on the website, last I checked, is nothing special. We picked the particular building because it was brick. I stood in front of it, and tried to exude Luc Garnier energy into the camera.
I decide not to tell him that. It’s already weird.
“I found myself in New York for work. I need you to know that.” That, then, is stern.
Or maybe solemn. “I did not fly there for the express purpose of locating you. But I was there. And I still had you in my head. So I went to the agency, thinking that I might make an appointment, though I was worried about exposure.”
He shakes his head, his eyes actually seeming to change color, and it isn’t the sunset.
It’s that he’s lost in his memories, like he’s seeing it all over again.
“I was standing outside. It had rained earlier that day and it was still cold and moody, even for March. You came out of a taxi at the curb and walked straight past me, then inside.”
Taio focuses in on me and I’ve never seen a look like this on his face before. Not soft , not really…but open.
Vulnerable, I think.
“I find it hard to believe that I could walk past you and not see you,” I tell him, not exactly surprised that my voice sounds so raw.
“I saw you move,” he tells me. “I saw the way you take up space in the world. You have a specific electricity around you, Annagret. A particular heat. Like a summer storm.”
I want to tell him that he must mean someone else, but I suddenly find that my knees do not wish to support me the way I would like. I go and sit in one of the chairs set back from the railing, feeling shaken straight down to my core.
Taio studies me, and I have no idea what he’s looking for. “You can imagine the temperature of things around here when I was growing up.”
“Chilly, I would imagine.”
“A long, cold ice age, Annagret. It is all I knew.”
He stays where he is, at the rail. I stay where I am, because I’m not sure I could move if I wanted to. But I know that I’m not the only one fully aware of that heat and need that blazes between us, as if any space we even dream to put between us is imaginary.
I was so sure he felt it, too, but hearing him say so feels like a revolution inside of me.
“I have never felt anything like it before,” he tells me.
“You were like a bright blast of sun after a cold winter and, at first, I hated it. I tried to stay away. Instead, I kept finding myself back in New York, catching glimpses of you when I could. And I knew that if anyone were to discover what I was doing it would all be ruined. Because how could anyone learn about it and not insist that I stop?” He shakes his head almost ruefully, but there is still that fire in him.
“But that was when I began to think harder about the Luc Garnier of it all. I deliberately attempted to track him, this man in your life, or so I thought.”
“You said that took years.”
His dark eyes gleam. “It did.”
“Taio,” I manage to get out. “Do you mean to say…?”
“Yes,” he says swiftly, so there can be no mistake.
“It took me three years to decide that the man wasn’t real, and then to plot out a course of action.
I walked into your office that morning five months ago knowing full well that you weren’t there.
I thought Tess would be easier to get past, and I was right.
So I did. Then I waited. And soon enough, there you were. ”
He says that almost…reverently.
“There I was.” I can only repeat that. I can’t process it. It doesn’t make sense. None of this does. “But you… You were…”
“You were magnificent,” he tells me. “You did not back down, even though both of us knew there was no such person as this boss of yours.”
I think for a moment that his tone suggests that this is a good thing—for poor, fictional Luc Garnier.
But he goes on. “I was shaken. Perhaps there was some part of me that hoped that once we interacted, this madness would lose its grip upon me. But if anything, it got worse.”
He moves then, something edgy seeming to inhabit him. He stalks toward me and crouches down before my chair.
“That night. You know the one. I thought that I’d fallen asleep.
That I was dreaming. That you were a figment of my wildest, most fervent fantasies.
” He reaches out and I shiver, then melt, but all he does is tuck a stray hank of my hair behind my ear.
“But in my fantasies, you do not stop. You do not stare at me through glass. In my fantasies, you come to me, put your hands on me, and we both burn and burn.”
I can remember that night distinctly. It lives in me, like its own, low drumbeat.
“I wanted to,” I whisper.
“And then we went to France.” He traces the curve of my ear with a finger.
“I thought that the masked ball would set things right. That it would be immediately clear that you were the sort to get caught up in the game of it. Who knows, maybe even find some other masked man to play with. Then again, I suppose I set myself up for disaster.” He smiles. “That dress was a mistake.”
“It was a beautiful dress.” I can’t seem to tear my gaze from his. “It made me feel like a fairy tale.”
“I think that the sight of you in that dress will be burned into me forever. And to think that when I first saw you come down those stairs, I thought that nothing could be better. But then we went to my mother’s cottage.”
“I don’t understand how she’s connected to that villa. To that party.”
“It is all her land. My cousin lives in that villa now.”
The light dawns. “That was who you didn’t want to recognize you.”
“There were many people there that night that I did not wish to be known to,” he agrees, that gaze still steady on me. “It is as I told you. Any indication that I take the allegations about that diary seriously is as good as announcing my own doubt in my position.”
“That won’t matter now. Your mother will take the test. Soon enough, no one will mention your legitimacy ever again.
” That reminds me of what I was trying to do before he started making all of these extraordinary comments.
“And once that happens, I think you’re really going to want a more appropriate—”
“Annagret,” he says, his voice raw and intent, his eyes so bright they are setting me afire, “I’m in love with you. I am deeply, madly, irreversibly in love with you. You are the only thing I think of, night and day. This obsession has not waned. If anything, it has gotten worse.”
But this is exactly what I most want to hear, and I can’t allow it. I can’t believe it.
“You left me in that cottage!” I burst out. “How can you say all these things and expect me to believe you when your actions point to something else entirely?”
“How could I tell you who I was?” he demands. “I could not tell anyone. I was pretending to be someone I am not. It seemed not entirely unreasonable that I should finally get to touch you while playing that role and then have to leave.”
I lean forward in my chair. “I had no idea you were such a martyr.”
When he speaks again his voice is something like flat. Stripped of anything but the hardest truth. “Those were the worst months of my life.”
“Taio…”
“And then, one day, as I sat in the fallout of my own choices, playing a melody on a piano that reminded me of you, there you were.” That gaze of his is bright again.
Wild and hot. “First I thought that I was dreaming again. And then, when I realized that you were carrying my child, I will admit it. I got greedy. Selfish. I wanted you for myself, and I was willing to do anything to make that happen.”
I frown at him. “But you had to rush it, because you are terribly afraid of your own mother and what she might do—”
“To you, Annagret,” he thunders at me. “I love my mother. I listen to her opinions about my life and my choices out of respect, and then I continue to do as I wish. My concern about her was that she would turn all of that iciness on you and I could not bear it. To extinguish your fire would be nothing short of a crime.”
My pulse hurts in my veins. My heart aches as it pounds. I can feel every part of me, and it is all a riot, and his gaze is like light. Life.