Chapter Ten
“HAVE YOU DECIDED what you’ll do?” Rafael asked her the first morning after their somewhat subdued return from Venice later that frigid morning, smiling at her in that mocking way of his over the breakfast table. “The Dolomites themselves await your answer, I’m sure. As do I.”
It was the feigned politeness, Lily thought, that made her want to fling the nearest plate of sausages at his head, if not at the mountains themselves. As if he was truly interested in her answer instead of merely needling her for his own amusement.
“Go to hell,” she mouthed over Arlo’s head, and only just managed to restrain herself from an inappropriate hand gesture to match.
But that only made his smile deepen.
It didn’t help that Lily didn’t know what she was going to do.
There was no way she could ever leave Arlo, of course.
Surely that went without saying. The very idea made her stomach cramp up in protest. But how could she marry Rafael?
Especially when the kind of marriage he’d mentioned in Venice was a far cry indeed from the sort she’d imagined when she’d been young and silly and still thought things between them might work out one day.
Well, this was one day, and this was not at all what she’d call worked out, was it? This was, she was certain, pretty much the exact opposite of that.
“Perhaps we should make a list of pros and cons,” he suggested on another afternoon even closer to Christmas, coming to stand beside her.
She was on the warm and cozy side of the glass doors overlooking the garden, where Arlo and two of his nannies were building a legion of snowmen in what little gloomy light there was left at the tail end of the year. “Maybe a spreadsheet would help?”
Again, that courteous tone, as if she was deciding on nothing more pressing than which one of his wines she might choose to complement her dinner. It set her teeth on edge.
“Is this a game to you?” Lily asked him then, amazed that she could keep her voice so even when she wanted to take a swing at him.
When she thought she might have, had that not involved touching him—which she knew better than to do, thank you.
That way led only to madness and tears. Hers.
“This isn’t only my life we’re talking about, you know.
I get that you don’t care about that. But it’s Arlo’s life, too, whom you do claim to care about, and you’re messing with everything he holds dear. ”
She didn’t expect him to touch her—much less reach over and take her chin in his hard hand, forcing her to look deep into his dark, dark eyes.
Lily had to fight back that sweet, deep shudder that would have told him a thousand truths she didn’t want him to know, and all of them things she’d already showed him in detail in that bed in Venice.
“We both made the choices that led us here,” Rafael said softly, his hard fingers like a brand, blistering hot and something like delicious at once, damn him. “I can’t help it if you don’t like the way I’m handling the fallout, Lily. Do you have a better solution?”
“Anything would be a better solution!” she threw at him.
He dropped his hand, though he didn’t step back for another jolting beat or two.
That was her heart, she understood, not the world itself, though it was hard to tell the difference.
She couldn’t look at him—she couldn’t bear it—so she directed her gaze out through the glass again instead, where the best thing they’d ever done together rolled a ball of snow that was bigger than he was across the snowy garden.
This is about Arlo, she reminded herself. This is all about Arlo. Everything else that happens is secondary.
“Name one, then,” Rafael said, dark and too close. Daring her, she thought. Or begging her—but no. That wasn’t Rafael. He didn’t beg. “Name a better solution.”
She shot him a look, then looked back toward their son.
Their beautiful son, whom she’d loved hard and deep and forever since the moment she’d known he existed.
Right there in that truck stop bathroom.
She’d been terrified, certainly. And so alone.
But she’d had Arlo and she’d loved him, long before she’d met him.
“You can think whatever you like,” Lily said, low and fierce. “But none of the choices I made were easy. Not one of them. They all left scars.”
“None of that changes where we are, does it?” he asked, his own voice quiet, and yet it still tore through her. “Our scars are of our own making, Lily. Each and every one of them. I find I can’t forgive that, either.”
Lily didn’t answer him. And the next time she glanced over, he’d gone.
She told herself that was just as well.
And maybe it wasn’t entirely surprising that the nightmares came back that night. And the next. And the night after that, too.
The screech of brakes, the sickening spin.
That horrifying, stomach-dropping, chilling understanding that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—correct it.
Then the impact that had thrown her from the car and left her sprawling, or so she’d pieced together afterward.
She’d found herself facedown in the dirt, completely disoriented, scraped and raw in only a few places while around her, the northern California night had been quiet.
A little bit foggy around the edges. Pretty, even, especially with the sea foaming over the rocks down below.
It hadn’t been until the car had burst into flames some ways down the cliff that she’d realized what had happened. How close she’d come to death. How narrowly she’d escaped it, completely by accident.
Lily sat up too fast in her bed—again. This was, what?
The fourth night in a row? Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might punch a hole in her chest. The same way it had felt that night five years ago, when she’d finally comprehended what had happened.
She’d almost forgotten the terror, all these years later.
The insane what ifs that had galloped through her head.
The smell of brake fluid and burned rubber and that thick, choking smoke from the fire so real in her nose she took a few deep breaths before she understood it was a memory.
It had already happened. It wasn’t happening now.
“It’s only a dream,” she whispered. “It isn’t real.”
Though the shadow that detached itself from the darkness near her doorway then was. It moved, it made her jaw drop—and then it was Rafael.
“What are you doing?” she gasped when she could speak, though she’d huddled up in a tiny ball against the ornate headboard. “You scared me!”
“That is going around,” Rafael murmured.
He looked rumpled and irritable and something else she couldn’t identify when he came to a stop beside her bed.
She stared at him, the sight of his gorgeous body in nothing but a very low-riding pair of athletic trousers as soothing, oddly, as it was thrilling in the usual way.
And his bare feet against the old carpet struck her as some kind of benediction.
“Rafael?” she asked, before that fire in her took over and made her do or say something she knew she’d regret. “What’s the matter? What are you doing here?”
“You screamed,” he said gruffly.
She swallowed, and took the time to uncurl her hands so they were no longer balled into fists. She felt cold, even under all of her blankets. And because she couldn’t make sense of that—of his presence here. Had he come running?
“Oh,” she said.
“Lily.” There was none of that sharp politeness in his voice then. None of that mockery. And she couldn’t see so much as a trace of either one on his face when he moved to the bedside table and snapped on the light. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened that night?”
“That night?” she echoed, though she knew. Of course she knew. It was still reverberating in her head, still oozing around in the corners of the room. She frowned at him instead, because that was easier. “How did you hear me, anyway?”
“I have a gift,” Rafael said, sounding dry and grumpy at once, which Lily realized was comforting, somehow. Though that made no sense. “I can hear two things with perfect clarity anywhere I go. The screams of terrified women, and irritating evasiveness at three twenty-seven in the morning.”
He didn’t reach for her, as she’d half expected. He leaned against the side of the bed, crossed his arms while he fixed that dark gaze of his on her, and waited.
And this was the story Lily had never told another living soul.
Maybe, she thought now, because he was the only person on earth who might understand what had happened and what she’d done—and she wasn’t even sure about that. Not any longer.
“Are you sure you want me to tell you?” she asked him. “You’ve really been enjoying vilifying me. I’d hate to ruin that for you.”
His dark eyes grew sterner and his jaw tightened, but he didn’t say a word. He only waited—as if he could stand there all night, no matter what she threw at him.
Lily sighed and shoved her hair back from her face, moving to sit cross-legged there at the head of the bed.
And then she’d run out of ways to stall.
And he was so dark and so beautiful, and he was so wrapped up inside her that she felt him when she breathed in, and she’d never managed to get him out of her head or her heart. Not then. Certainly not now.
And she still didn’t know what that made her. What that meant.
But it was the middle of the night. And the only light in the world seemed to fall in that tiny little circle from the side of her bed. She told herself it was the only confessional she’d be likely to get. And she took it.
Maybe all of this—from the moment he’d seen her on the street in Charlottesville all the way across the world to that night in Venice—had been leading them straight here. Maybe this had been the destination all along.