15. Atlas
15
ATLAS
I can’t sleep.
Many things are bothering me.
First and foremost, who broke into Elena’s room?
The obvious answer is Mrs. Cross. She surely resents Elena’s presence as the new woman in Ronson’s life, as well as Elena’s alliance with Ivy.
But would she risk angering her master? Especially with such an ineffective taunt?
I’d expect something sneakier from her. Something stolen from Lorne and planted in Elena’s room…some drama concocted with Ivy…
Mabe it was Ronson himself. I know he’s fucked up; I’ve seen it in his eyes. Is he tormenting Elena? Testing her? Trying to scare her to drive her deeper into his arms?
I don’t think it was Olivia. All she’d admit to when I grilled her the other night was flirting and free lattes.
“I just poured the wine he gave me! Where the hell would I get roofies?”
Which points the finger right back at the author for drugging Elena. Or someone else with access to the kitchen.
I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on under my own roof. There are rats running around inside my house.
And maybe something a lot worse than a rat…
I’ve been looking into Lorne Ronson. The Grimstone gossipers like to think they know everyone’s dark secrets, but they may have been blinded by their desire for a homeborn celebrity.
Because our hometown hero moved away for eleven years. And what he did while he was gone…doesn’t quite match his story.
I turn it all over in my head, everything I know, the scraps of information I’ve gathered. I’m putting a puzzle together with only some of the pieces.
Four times in the night, I scale the stairs to the sixth floor and walk down to the end of the corridor to stand outside Elena’s door, listening.
I’ve never put cameras in the hotel. I use a staff I trust and my own eyes to keep track of what’s happening.
But now, for the first time, I’m wishing I had more.
I want my eyes on Elena always.
She’s a guest in my house, and I will protect her.
Even from another guest.
When she comes down in the morning, she’s pale as milk.
“Are you all right?” I say, touching the outside of her arm.
I was close to her room, to the stairs, all night long. Now I’m thinking I should have stayed on her floor. I could move the guests around, sleep in the room next to hers?—
She pulls me into a sheltered space.
“Please, Atlas,” she begs, snapping me straight to attention. “I can’t talk to you anymore.”
That’s worse than a slap to the face. I’m jolted to this exact screaming millisecond.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” I have my hands on both her arms now, holding her steady. But she steps back, shrinking away.
“I’m making him angry. He’s jealous.”
“What did he say? What did he do?” She’s tense and shaking. I rub the outsides of her arms to calm her. “It’s all right, Elena. You can tell me. I’ll help you.”
Her body trembles like a note so high it could break glass. Someone comes down the stairs, and she shrinks away farther still.
With her eyes on the carpet, she says, “I mean it, Atlas. I’m here to marry someone else. It’s wrong of me to look at you or speak to you that way.”
God, I fucking wish she’d look at me right now.
I want to touch her again, but I know she doesn’t want me to.
Carefully, I say, “Usually, I’d be on your side with that. But under the circumstances…I’m going to have to respectfully disagree.”
Her eyes flick up; she can’t help it. “What circumstances?”
“I’m crazy about you. And you can’t trust him for shit.”
Elena flushes deeply, her eyes shining with something so bright and brilliant I think that I’ve already won.
But then she falters, shaking her head.
“You don’t know what?—”
Another fucking guest comes down the staircase. Her mouth closes, cutting off whatever I don’t know like someone hit a mute button.
And that person, a rabbi named Joshua Stein, is an eagle-eyed hunter. He hurries over to speak to me, making Elena disappear like a startled deer.
Three hours later, I’m not looking for her. But I am unusually motivated to take a walk in the rose garden.
Sometimes you can just feel where someone will be. And I don’t like to give credence to things I can’t prove…but sometimes I’ll act on them anyway.
I know where to find Elena. It’s a pull, a drag below my skin, gravity tugging on my bones.
I walk through the rows of bare, thorny branches, everything cold and asleep. Except for her. I turn a row, and there she stands, bright as a vision, too vivid to actually be real.
The sun burns on her hair in every shade of melting orange. She holds her camera up against one eye, red lips laughing at me as she snaps a picture of my face.
“You’re following me!” She’s accusing, but I know she’s glad to see me. It’s all over her face when she lowers the camera, her eyes bright with much more than sun.
What shade is that blue? Those are the kinds of stupid things you think to yourself when you stare at the woman of your dreams and can’t say anything out loud.
I finally manage, “I hoped you’d be here. Is that a crime?”
“I can’t?—”
“What? Speak to me while you’re staying here as a guest in my hotel?” I say it lightly, and it pulls a smile out of her. But the smile goes to my head. I lose all strategy and rush on with, “Are you afraid of him?”
As soon as I say it, her face closes up. She changes entirely, drawing in, pulling away. Inches are everything in conversations. Invisible barriers spring up, and they’re all the more dangerous to cross if you can’t see that they’re there.
“I don’t want to talk to you about Lorne,” she says, coloring and looking away.
“Then I won’t mention him,” I promise rashly because that’s what she does to me. The smell of her warm skin in the cold fall air is sweet as smoke and apple cider.
If a thousand people walk through my hotel and only one of them smells like this…well, it’s hardly a choice at that point.
“Where did you get that camera?” I don’t know much about Ukraine, but I’m pretty sure they have technology a little newer than that. The loving way she cradles the battered lens screams sentimental attachment.
“It was my dad’s. He was an artist. He always took a photo before he painted anything.”
“You like using it?”
“I like developing the photos afterward. The first time I saw it, it was like magic, the way the images appeared on the paper, like ghosts in reverse…” Elena gets that dreamy look of someone remembering the moment they discovered a passion. “There it is, exactly what you saw, but never quite like you remember.” She smiles at me, the camera lens glinting in the sun, as she shrugs helplessly. “I never get tired of it.”
“Where are you going to develop that picture of me stalking you?”
I finally get to hear her laugh. It’s just the tiniest bit haughty, which is sexy as hell, especially when she gives me that look. Eyes narrowed, she says, “That’s exactly how you look, you know…like a villain in a play.”
I shrug. “I’ve always looked like a bad guy. It’s useful—if I do anything nice, it’s a pleasant surprise.”
Elena stops smiling and becomes serious. “You’ve done lots of nice things for me. The clothes were too much.” She lifts her hand, palm out, like a warning.
I grab that hand and pull her into my arms.
“There is no too much .”
To prove it, I kiss her exactly how I want. I crush her against me and make her feel what I’m feeling, from her skin all the way down to her bones.
Some people you’re meant to kiss and hold. There’s harmony in the skin, in the breath. The barriers dissolve, and you slip inside each other’s flesh.
Elena knows it now; she’ll never forget it, how right it feels when she’s in my arms.
But I do let go of her in the end. Because I’m not all the way a bad guy.
My fingertips throb from that last touch of her bare skin. “I meant what I said…only wear that green dress for me. ”
Elena’s eyes dart left and right, confirming that we’re alone in the tangled labyrinth of rose bushes. Just that look, that silent confirmation that she wants to be alone, flushes me with heat.
Low and teasing, she says, “Here in America, you tell someone how to use a gift?”
She’s baiting me on purpose. She wants me to grab her again.
That’s exactly what I do, but this time I don’t kiss her. I hold her tightly in my arms. Tightly enough for her to feel how much harder I could squeeze her if I wanted to.
Her heart races against my chest. Her face glows with color.
“Tell me to kiss you.”
I won’t do it again until she asks. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want her. And she’s not going to pretend that she doesn’t want me.
“Fuck it,” she says. “One more time.”
Since it’s only going to be once more, I kiss her deeply and I take my time.
I don’t feel guilty, not for a moment of it. It’s too obvious that she was meant to be mine.
She pulls away finally with a nervous glance at the hotel windows. Her breath comes out in a silver cloud—it must be colder than it looks.
I can’t feel the chill at all. My body’s on fire. It might as well be the Fourth of July just from kissing her.
“That was the last time,” Elena says. She tucks her camera carefully back into her bag. Her hand is slightly shaking.
And that’s when I see something I can’t believe I failed to notice before. I was blinded by those fox eyes and the sun in her hair.
Elena has a diamond ring on her finger—as huge and gaudy as the author’s castle.
Quietly, she says, “I’m marrying him, Atlas. That’s what I’m here to do. And I don’t want to be the kind of person who…acts like this.”
“Okay, I get it.” I’ll never fucking get it. I’m going to continue to respectfully disagree. “But just answer me…do you love him?”
The time it takes her to reply is the answer.
Elena turns away, shaking her head. “Don’t…love grows over time, it’s not an on-off switch?—”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
I seize her and kiss her again. I never agreed to this one more time bullshit, and I’m not that great of a guy.
She kisses me back, hands slipping under my shirt to touch my bare chest. Without gloves, her fingers are freezing, burning like ice on my skin. She’s just as hungry as me, her tongue in my mouth.
But then she shoves me away, twice as mad as before. “Stop that! I told you, I don’t want to be a cheater.”
It’s not cheating, not when it’s with me. And not when it’s against him.
Lorne Ronson is false down to his core. I can feel it. And I know Elena does, too. She just won’t admit it because…
She’s afraid. Of something…or someone. The shaking hands, the pale lips, the nervousness…what is it? The author or something else?
I grab her hand one more time but now just to hold it, hating the feel of that gaudy ring.
I make her look me in the face as I say, “What’s going on? You can tell me, Elena. You can trust me. I want to help you.”
Her lips press together, emotions battling on her face, fighting, swimming to the surface. Her eyes tear up, and she turns her head, ashamed. “You don’t know me, Atlas. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“Tell me.” When she won’t look at me, I squeeze her hands and pull her closer, insisting, “Tell me, what have you done?”
She looks at me with her whole face flushed and open, her lips poised to speak. But at the last moment, she shivers and draws into herself and will only say, “I meant, you don’t know my situation.”
“Elena—”
“No, please.” She bites her lips, turns away. She won’t look at me at all now. “I’m with Lorne. That’s the end of it.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“That’s how it is.” She slings her bag over her shoulder, bowing her head like a penitent. “Some things can’t be taken back.”
At first, I think she means her word in the engagement.
But as the long night wears on, as I smoke and drink by the fire, I start to believe that it’s something far worse than that.
I think Elena did something bad back home in Lviv.
And now, in some shadowy way, perhaps without meaning to or wanting to, she’s punishing herself.
But here’s the problem:
The punishment she’ll get from Lorne Ronson will be more than she can handle.