Chapter 20
DEVLIN
Resting on a small sofa at the far end of the living quarters, Devlin took a sip of hot chocolate and felt it melt in his mouth. He may very well know that it wasn’t the most conventional way to recuperate, but the sweetness of the drink made that thought fly right on out into the mountains. He’d strapped his arm up in a sling he’d found in the medical box and taken some more pain killers to dull the ache. He’d also finished his share of a meal of rehydrated noodles and was starting to feel more human.
Sweet things aside, he was infinitely grateful to be here. He couldn’t stop thinking about how close he’d come to falling into the crevasse, and the spectre of death still haunted him. Of course, he was no stranger to extreme sports, and there had been countless occasions he’d had to sign an indemnity waiver just in case something terrible happened to him on the ocean or the slopes or in the sky. But in those situations he’d been surrounded by friends, professionals who knew what they were doing and equipment to keep him safe, so he’d never really felt like he was in danger. He’d always been in control of his own life, and his own fate.
Today had been very different. He hadn’t been in control of anything. If Darcy hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t had the idea of using her jacket to pull him up, then there would be no more Devlin Storm.
No more Devlin Storm. The idea wasn’t as awful as he’d thought it might be. Not the idea of dying, of course, but the idea that the man the world knew as Devlin Storm wasn’t around anymore. That man didn’t care about anyone but himself, and he wasn’t afraid of people knowing it. Sure, people wanted to be with him, but only because he was famous, and handsome. But take away the money and the looks, and nobody would want anything to do with him.
He thought back to when he’d been a kid. His dad had been all the things that Devlin was now, but Devlin hadn’t wanted to be like him. He’d always wanted to be like his mum, who would have given the shirt from her back if somebody asked her to. He couldn’t think of a single time she’d done anything purely for herself, or anything out of greed. She had been the most selfless person he’d ever known. She’d hated the way the world saw her only son, and had hated the way that Devlin had behaved.
But maybe there is no changing now , he thought. This is me. This is who I am.
Groaning, he leaned back into the sofa and closed his eyes. He’d never been in this much pain before. The agony wasn’t just in his arm, but in every single cell inside his body. He knew it would be worse in the morning, too, when his battered muscles woke up.
But he was alive. He was still here.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Darcy as she walked out of the bunkroom. She was wearing a bath robe, too, a towel wrapped around her hair.
“Oh, you’re going to need a lot more than that,” he said, patting the space beside him on the sofa even though it made his eyes water with the pain. “How was your bath?”
“Divine,” she said, sitting down. Her cheeks were rosy, her skin glowing as if she’d spent the weekend at a spa. Her huge eyes regarded him with such intensity that he had to turn away. The heat in the building had kicked in, but he wasn’t sure if that was the reason he felt roasting hot, even in just a bath robe.
But he didn’t move. He wasn’t sure if he could. He was so exhausted and there was a magnetism with Darcy that he had no strength to pull away from. Not that he wanted to. She smiled at him, a smile that melted his heart and lit a furnace a little further south.
“This is nice,” he said, trying to think of something to say to take his mind off the way his lungs didn’t seem to be working properly. He shifted on the sofa, adjusting his position. Darcy didn’t need to be scared away by his uncontrollable urges.
“Really?” she said with a laugh. “Crashing a helicopter, spending the night in the ruin of a cabin, falling into a ravine, almost dying in not one but two storms. But you might have stopped hating me somewhere along the way, which is nice, I guess.”
“That’s not really what I meant,” he said, trying not to stare at her lips, wondering if they would taste like the hot chocolate she was drinking or something even sweeter. “And I never hated you.”
“Really?” she raised a brow at him. “Well, I certainly got the feeling you hated me at least a little to start with.”
“That’s unfair,” he said, though she had a point. He hadn’t hated her. He’d hated the situation he’d found himself in. And when he was annoyed, he made sure everyone knew about it.
Darcy sipped her drink and peered at him over the top of her mug.
“Well, can I say I hated you a little bit?” she said.
Devlin turned that thought over in his head and decided he didn’t like it.
“Did you?” he asked. “Hate me, I mean?”
Darcy didn’t reply, not feeling the need to placate him, maybe. And when she did reply, her answer surprised him.
“Perhaps,” she said.
They sat there in silence for a moment, the wind howling, fistfuls of snow hitting the windows like grit.
“Just perhaps? I thought I was the most awful man you’d ever met,” he said, his lips tugging into a smile.
“Oh, you were,” she replied, a little too quickly. “Are . . . Without a doubt. But . . . but at the same time, you’re not. I’m still trying to figure out which one is the real you.”
This one , he thought, although the truth was he was still trying to figure it out too.
“Do you want to know what I really think?” she said.
He looked at her, and she leaned into him, bringing a scent of coconut shampoo and something a little more dangerous. She was close enough to touch, close enough to kiss, and the thought of it was so loud inside his head that he almost didn’t hear her when she started talking again.
“I think you’re like a frozen lake,” she said. “Back in Wisconsin everything used to freeze over in winter. We lived a way out of the city, and the farms around us all had lakes that would freeze solid. At least, you thought they were solid. We used to skate on them. I remember one time one of our neighbours even rode their truck on the ice, it was that thick. When I was a kid, we used to think there was nothing in those lakes but ice.”
She paused, obviously thinking back to her childhood. It sounded happy, he thought. It sounded a world away from his own.
“Then one day we were out on the ice and I saw something moving beneath it. I couldn’t believe it, these little flashes of colour darting in the dark. They were fish, and I couldn’t understand how they were alive in the ice. I asked my dad and he just smiled at me. He told me the water doesn’t freeze all the way down, there’s this little core of heat that keeps it liquid. He told me that the ice actually insulates the water, keeping those little fish alive in the winter, stopping them from being picked off by predators too.”
“You’re saying I’m a fish?” Devlin said, smiling.
“No,” she replied. “I’m saying you’re a lake.”
“I’m not sure if that’s any better.”
She laughed, the sound like a playlist of his favourite songs.
“You had a bad run of things when you were younger,” she said. “At least, that’s what it sounds like. You went through some cold, dark times, and you froze over. That’s what the world sees now, this cold, unfeeling guy frozen inside his own never-ending winter. People don’t like you because you make them feel cold.”
“People do like me,” he said, but his voice was quiet.
“People like the idea of you,” she went on. “And I’m not saying this because I want you to feel bad. I’m saying it because I think it might help you. You’re frozen, but you’re not frozen solid. There’s something in those depths — I can see those little flashes of colour darting in the dark. You’re still in there, Devlin, and that ice is keeping you safe, keeping you warm.”
He thought about this for a while, chewing on her words.
“If that’s the case,” he said eventually, pulling away from the heat of her. “Then isn’t it best to stay cold, stay frozen for ever?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because if you do that, then it will be the end of you. Those lakes thawed every spring, and those fish went on to live their lives. The really cold years, when the water stayed frozen for month after month after month, those poor creatures suffocated. The ice killed them.”
Devlin took a deep, shaky breath.
“How did you get so wise?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just lived, I guess.” A tiny laugh escaped her. “Not that I’ve really done much living.”
“Hey, that’s not true,” Devlin said, angling his body towards her. “You’re an American girl living in Europe. What’s that if it’s not an adventure?”
“It’s less exciting than it sounds,” she said, sighing. “I was an idiot for coming here. It was a job, one that sounded too good to be true. It was too good to be true. It was a brand-new company set up to help promote women’s businesses, to help give women the confidence to set up on their own, to do something amazing.”
“That sounds great,” he said.
“It was, it really was. I was so excited. I thought that working someplace like that might give me the confidence to do something amazing with my life, too. It might help me feel less scared about everything.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing,” Darcy said. “I got the job, used all my money to fly me and my life over here. When I arrived at the place we were supposed to be working they were boarding it up. Turned out the woman who founded it had decided to use the cash for a permanent holiday in Hawaii. I was stuck here, no money, no family to call on. Luckily, I knew some people on Heartbook who put me up in Geneva while I sorted out enough cash for a place of my own. I’ve been drifting ever since.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Devlin said. “That was a very unfair and cruel thing to do to somebody.”
Darcy shrugged.
“I’m used to it,” she said. “Life can be unfair, and it can certainly be cruel. But I survived. Just like this.” She gestured at the window, where the storm raged. “It hurt, but I survived. We survived.”
“You could do a lot of good with ￡100,000,” Devlin said, but she waved him away.
“I don’t need your money,” she replied. He was about to argue with her, then decided not to. He intended to give her every penny of the money he’d promised, but he didn’t want to make her feel bad about it. Not here, and not now.
“Tell me something about yourself, Devlin,” she said, tucking her legs up under her and fixing him with those amazing eyes. “Something that I won’t have read in the papers.”
He drew breath. The story he was going to tell her came straight to mind.
“I only started designing clothes because of my Mum. I was sixteen, and she had a job interview. Dad had just been sent to prison again, for trying to steal a car. We were broke, and Mum went for a job at a supermarket chain. All she had to wear was this moth-eaten corduroy suit that looked like it was older than she was. I remember seeing her in our kitchen, just standing there, trying to get in the right frame of mind for this interview. But she looked beat. She looked like she’d already accepted she wouldn’t get it.”
“I know that feeling,” Darcy said when he paused. “The right clothes make you a different person, don’t they?”
“Not quite,” he said. “It’s the wrong clothes that make you a different person. They stop you from being you.”
“So you made her something else to wear?” she asked.
“No, I was just a kid. I didn’t know the first thing about designing, or making clothes. But that’s the moment I decided I was going to do it. Mum didn’t get the job, and we stayed poor. But I spent my schooldays in the library reading about tailoring, about stitching and cutting, about the history of fashion. I immersed myself in it.”
He smiled, but the happiness of the memory was tinged with an inescapable sadness.
“And I started making something for Mum. I didn’t have much to work with, but I took that suit and altered it, and dyed it jet black. I stitched designs into the collar and hems with silver thread that I’d pulled out of Mum’s wire dishwashing brush.”
“Seriously?” Darcy asked, wide-eyed. He nodded, still smiling.
“Oh, yeah, seriously. The librarian at our school, Mrs Wallis, was this amazing woman who’d been watching me learn about all this stuff. She had this little jar of antique buttons, all shapes and sizes, all different colours and materials. She gave it to me, bless her heart, and I replaced the frumpy brown buttons of Mum’s suit with these new ones. Little mother-of-pearl fasteners, and these silver buttons on the sleeves. I mean it was such a mix of different styles it never should have worked, but it did.”
“Did she like it?” Darcy asked, leaning even closer. Her hand hovered close to his, like a butterfly about to land on a blossoming flower.
“She was . . . she was blown away,” Devlin said, remembering her face, the way it had opened up in delight and surprise. “I gave it to her one morning — six months and goodness knows how many job interviews after I’d had the idea. She couldn’t believe I was giving it to her. She couldn’t even speak. She thought I’d bought it, and it was only when I told her I’d made it that she really started to cry. She couldn’t accept that anyone could just make something like that. I had to show her the dishwashing brush before she believed me.” He laughed again. “She was mad about the brush, though. She had wondered what had happened to it.”
Darcy laughed, too, and this time her fingers brushed against his hand. It was light, barely there, but it may as well have been a livewire straight to his bloodstream and other places he had no control over. His pulse spiked, heat sliding over his skin. She didn’t pull away. Neither did he. Instead, he felt the ghost of her fingertips against his, teasing and tentative.
And then she did it again. This time, more deliberate.
A slow, delicious ache uncurled in his stomach, spreading lower, the kind of heat he hadn’t expected tonight, not with her, not like this. He let out a quiet breath, his fingers twitching before he made a decision and opened his hand.
She laced her fingers through his, the movement so natural, so intimate, that it knocked the breath right out of him. She didn’t say anything, just studied their joined hands with those amazing eyes, as if trying to decide whether or not this was real.
Adorable. Exceptadorablewasn’t the word anymore. Not with the way her thumb brushed against his, sending another shiver rushing through his body, not with the way her smaller hand fit so perfectly in his, like it had always belonged there. This felt different from the last time he’d held hands with a woman, because this time, he wanted more. Craved it.
Maybe he really had fallen down that crevasse, bumping his head hard enough to cause a wave of welcome hallucinations.
“What is it?” Darcy asked him.
“I just . . .” He swallowed. He didn’t really know how to explain it. “I feel . . . I don’t know.”
“Like maybe you’re starting to thaw?”
She smiled such a big, beautiful, kind smile that it was as if the storm outside had cleared. He couldn’t help himself. He moved towards that smile like a frozen man moving towards the warmth of the sun. Darcy leaned in, too, her lips parted, her tongue wetting them.
“You’re good with words.” His voice was husky. “Or maybe I’m just finding it hard to think with you so close.”
Darcy opened her mouth as if to speak, then quickly shut it again. She shook her head, leaning away.
“We should go to bed.” She stood up from the sofa, dressing gown flashing Devlin a whole lot of leg. “I mean , I should go to bed. It’s been a day. We’re tired. It’s bedtime. I should sleep.”
And she darted from the room like one of her favourite rabbits caught in the headlights.
Devlin sat back, resting his head on the back of the sofa. He’d scared her away. He’d been too much. Darcy wasn’t here for a holiday. She’d been forced into a trip she didn’t want to take. She didn’t want him, she’d made that clear. And as he shut his eyes and let the quiet of the outpost envelop him, he wished she’d come back out and fill it with her wonderfully cute, and only a little bit annoying, chatter. He missed it.