Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
LUCIEN
Tamsyn catches me in that hazy state where I’m drifting along between sleeping and waking. “Lucien,” she whispers, gently brushing my hair back from my forehead and sparking fire. “Time to wake up.”
“Come back to bed,” I grumble, reaching for her. I’m so groggy I can’t even crank my lids open. I feel as though I’m running on a thousand-year sleep deficit. But she’s got my attention now. If I can’t wake rested, I can at least wake wrapped inside Tamsyn’s silky arms and legs. “It’s not time to get up yet.”
A sultry laugh. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now than in bed with you. I missed you, my love.”
The huskiness of that laugh is a dead giveaway, and suddenly the laugh isn’t the only thing that’s off. It’s all wrong. The wrong voice murmuring the wrong endearment. The wrong hand. The wrong vibe . My delicious semi-dream curdles like expired milk left in the sun for three days. I slam into wakefulness with enough force to make my entire body spasm in the wing chair where I fell asleep with a blanket draped over my lap.
That’s when I discover that last night was just the beginning of this nightmarish new phase of my life.
Ravenna sits on my chair’s arm, firmly inside my space. Somehow, she looks worse for the wear, but also much better. The dried blood on her forehead bandage stands out in stark relief against her pale skin. Her black hair has dried into a rumpled halo with all its natural waves. The dark smudges under her eyes tell the story of her mostly sleepless night.
But…
Bright sunlight hits those green eyes at the perfect angle, making them sparkle just right. I never met anyone who had Ravenna’s eyes. Emerald City eyes. She seems focused and alert, with none of last night’s confusion. She seems…energized.
She was back yesterday. But now she’s back .
I jerk away from her touch and stand, turning away from her as fast as I can and working hard to get my feet under me. But I’m having a tough time reconciling the two halves of my spiraling brain. The half that allowed me to believe she really was dead and that I was a free man, versus the half that knew she wasn’t dead at all and that the whole exercise in death was simply an intermission.
That was the smarter half of my brain. The one I should have listened to.
I head for the bar cart in the corner and pour myself a tall glass of water, wishing it was socially acceptable for me to drink a tall glass of scotch instead. But if there’s one thing I know about Ravenna, it’s that I need to keep my wits sharp when she’s around.
So I give myself a second to get my brain back online by guzzling the water and glancing outside. There’s all kinds of storm debris strewn across the driveway—looks like a large portion of my flowers got slaughtered, not to mention a couple of the bushes—but the good news is that a utility truck has appeared on the other side of the downed tree and workers in hard hats are getting started. Hopefully the power will be back soon. As for Tamsyn and Daniel? No sign of them. I assume they went to scrounge up something to eat in the kitchen.
Leaving me alone with Ravenna, who watches me from her perch on her armchair.
I clear my throat and turn to face her, setting my empty glass down. “How are you feeling?”
She thinks it over. “Better. I still have a headache. I’m still confused.”
I hesitate because I know we can push each other’s buttons and because I know that she’s recovering. But we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and we might as well get started. “Confused ? So am I. Where have you been for two years?”
She blinks. Frowns. Stares off in the distance, her mouth opening and closing around an answer that’s nowhere in sight. “I don’t know.”
Right. Like I believe that. I watch her more closely. “How did you get back here?”
More blinking. More casting around, trying to come up with something as her expression falls. “I don’t know.”
She does confusion well. I’ll give her that. And the tinge of dismay is a nice touch. But Ravenna has always been a good actress. I’m betting her skills go back to birth.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” I say.
She presses both hands to her forehead. “How can I do that when my head is splitting open?”
Yeah, okay. I turn away with rising frustration at this waste-of-time conversation, determined not to lose my shit this early in the proceedings. She’s hurt. It’s possible she doesn’t remember. Not likely, but possible. Now is not the time for me to go at her with both barrels.
I glance back over my shoulder at her. “We’re going to take you to the hospital. Get you checked out. As soon as they get the driveway cleared. Matter of fact, I think I’ll head out and tell them we’ve got an emergency. See if they can work a little faster. The sooner we get your, ah, memory issues straightened out, the sooner we can get some answers.”
“That’s what I want, too,” she says, brightening. “The sooner we get answers, the sooner we can get back to our life together. And you can stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” I say, but I already know. I don’t believe a fucking word that’s come out of her mouth since she showed up again, and I’m sure my expression reflects it.
“Like you hate me,” she says, and there’s a wobble in her voice now.
I shrug and decide not to bother denying it. Unlike her, I’ve never had any acting skills to speak of. “I’m having a tough time with a lot of this. You’ve been somewhere doing something for two years. It’s pretty convenient that you don’t remember any of it.”
She looks stricken. “You think I want to have a big gash on my head? A concussion ? Do I look like I’m having fun? Does that make sense to you?”
“Nothing you do has ever made any sense to me. But we don’t need to get into that now. Why don’t we start with what you do remember? Tell me anything you remember about the last few days.”
She hesitates and frowns at some distant point, her gaze slipping out of focus. “It got dark so quickly. Then the rain started. It was so cold.”
I make an impatient sound. Generic facts that don’t tell us anything. What a surprise. “Anything else?”
Her frown deepens. “The waves were so rough. They made the boats thunk against the dock. I didn’t know which way to go. It was like I knew Ackerley was here, but I couldn’t find it. And then I heard a man’s voice and I…” She focuses on me again, shrugging helplessly. “That’s it.”
“So you remember Daniel finding you on the beach last night. Anything else before that?”
A flash of despair from Ravenna. “No. Nothing.”
“How convenient.”
“I can’t believe I’ve been gone for two years, Lucien,” she says, her voice rising. “How’s that possible?”
“You tell me.”
Those bright green eyes fill with tears. “You’re so cold,” she says, wiping one away from her cheek as soon as it falls. “Why are you treating me like this? If I really have been gone for two years, like you say, why aren’t you glad to see me? What’s happened to you?”
I could almost laugh. This is the thing about Ravenna. She twists things. That’s what she does. She takes a set of straightforward facts and reshapes them in her hands like some master potter with a lump of clay on her wheel, crafting something you don’t recognize. Something that makes you wonder if you’re the one who’s out of touch with reality.
I’m done playing this game. Life’s too short.
“Like I said, we don’t need to get into all this now,” I say, heading for the hallway. “I’m going to check on the workers. See when they think they’ll have the road clear.”
She stands and hurries over, intercepting me before I can get too far. But the effort seems to take it out of her, and she sways unsteadily. Instinct makes me reach out and grab her shoulders to study her. And suddenly there she is, in my arms again, the picture of wounded innocence.
“I love you, Lucien. Why are you treating me like this? What’s happened?”
“You need to sit down,” I say harshly, letting go the second I see that she’s not going to fall.
She puts her hands on my chest and tips her face up to mine. “No. Tell me what’s going on. You’re acting like you don’t want me around. Like you don’t want to be married to me anymore, and I don’t understand— Wait a minute.” Dawning horror takes over her face. “There’s someone else, isn’t there? Oh my God. Are you cheating on me?”
Outrage appears out of nowhere and swallows me whole as I push her hands away. That’s what this kind of insane hypocrisy does to a person. I feel myself drowning in it. Choking on it.
I’m cheating?
I suppose she doesn’t remember that time on our honeymoon when she flirted outrageously with the Italian waiter right in front of me. Or the times, too numerous to count, when she said she was going to dinner or clubbing or girls’ night with friends in the city and wound up staying all night or two days or a week without checking in with me or answering my increasingly frantic calls and texts.
She denied everything. I never quite believed the denials, but how could I accept the awful truth about the kind of person I married?
I suppose she also doesn’t remember the endless spending, the recreational drugs or the increasingly debauched parties here at Ackerley while I desperately tried to fix things and wondered how to recover the intoxicating woman I’d enjoyed during our honeymoon period. I tried to expel the demon and get my wife back when I should have realized that my wife was the demon the whole time.
The worst part of it all is that it took most of our marriage for me to realize what I was dealing with. To fully appreciate what she was. What she is. Then it took years after her so-called death for me to recover from the mind-fuckery and begin to feel like myself again. And the very second I find Tamsyn and think that maybe I can build something with a wonderful woman, here’s Ravenna again.
The obscenity of it all threatens to make my head explode.
“You’re asking me if I cheated on you ?” I bark. “Is that what you just said?”
She recoils. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that I cheated on you ?”
I laugh bitterly. This whole situation is so ridiculous that it’s all I can do. “Yes, Ravenna. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
“I’ve never cheated on you, Lucien.” More pretty tears plus a wounded hand on her chest, as though I’ve pierced her nonexistent heart with an ice pick. “I would never cheat on you.”
“How can you be so sure?” I ask. “Having lost your memory and all.”
She blinks. “Because I know how much I love you. I may not remember everything, but I remember that .”
“So I suppose you don’t remember that we had a blowup a couple days before you disappeared. Another blowup, actually. After my investor dinner here at the house. When I caught you coming out of my study right after one of the investors you just met that night. Steve Smithson. Remember him?”
She puts some real effort into looking startled and offended. “No . I was probably, I don’t know, showing him your collection of chess sets or something.”
I choke back a laugh. “Heavy on the or something .”
Strangled sound from Ravenna. “This is your proof that I was cheating on you? That doesn’t mean anything, Lucien. You think you saw something, but I’m sure there was an innocent explanation.”
“An innocent explanation for him adjusting himself?”
A deathly silence follows as she recalibrates, scowling and stiffening her spine.
“So you have no real proof that I ever cheated on you, is what you’re saying,” she says with a tinge of anger.
She’s right, but I hate to admit it. That’s another thing about Ravenna. She’s always half a step ahead of me and of the private investigators I finally hired to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. These things always happened out of the corner of my eye and in the shadows. I never had definitive proof or even a true gotcha moment. That’s how good she is.
But I’m older and smarter now, with plenty of battle scars to show for my experience. “I don’t need proof. I know .”
“Well, I know that I love you and I want this marriage, Lucien.”
“You want my money and prestige. Which is all you ever wanted.”
“How can you say that?”
“Save it. I finally had enough. It took me a long time, but I finally got there. After the party was over that night, I told you I wanted a divorce. You laughed and said you’d never let me go. Does any of this ring a bell? Two days later, you took the boat out and disappeared in the storm. And I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it. It was all too convenient. I hired the best investigators. I did everything I could think of to find you.”
She hurries over again and reaches for my arms. I yank them back, but she keeps coming, undeterred, her eyes aglow with the worshipful adoration that used to fool me back in the day. Now I see it for the manipulation that it is.
“Because you wanted me back. I know you did.” She even pulls out the sex-kitten voice to use on me. It’s like she’s working her way through a list of her seductive greatest hits. “And now I’m back and we can start over again, Lucien. Because we still love each other. We always have. Always will.”
“You misunderstand.” Sneering, I take her cold hands—funny thing about Ravenna; her hands were always cold—and shove them away from me. “I didn’t look for you so hard because I wanted you back. I looked for you so hard because I wanted to make sure you were dead .”
There’s a gasp from the doorway, the sound like a bomb drop in the ringing silence after the vitriol I just spewed. Startled, I whip my head around and get exactly what I deserve for my nastiness: Tamsyn backing away as she stares at me with open shock and horror.
It’s the kind of look I’ve always dreaded from her. The kind of look that tells me she finally sees me for exactly who I am—the kind of twisted man who could never possibly deserve her.