Chapter Twenty-One
She’d startled him.
She could tell that now, after a whole day of being with him, uninterrupted: Griffin Testa was not, in fact, a column of mysterious smoke that muddled your mind, not a fae prince who stole a part of your soul with a kiss, not a black-bronze statue that broke your heart in half.
Not even, really, the best man.
He was just a man.
A complicated man. Bold but cautious, demanding but flexible, stubborn but still curious.
He would say things like, No phones, but then he would—instead of demanding to stop—just slow his steps outside a shop window displaying model trains, waiting for you to say, You like those?
He’d say, We’re going in here, when you were halfway to starving but overwhelmed with where to stop and eat, but then he’d wordlessly switch plates with you when it was clear you wished you’d ordered the same as him.
He would declare that he had no interest in fashion, and then—like Fitz, not that Layla would ever make the comparison aloud—would read every display text he could in a museum devoted almost exclusively to clothing and accessories, seemingly memorizing every detail so he could mention them to you later.
He had a face you could read, if you really paid attention—if you let yourself stop worrying about what happened on the one side, if you recognized that the tense set of his jaw and the straight line of his mouth were distractions from the dark expressiveness in his eyes.
There, you could see all sorts of things.
Confusion, and then delight, when he bit into a raspberry macaron.
Loving respect when he spoke about his mother; a false, flippant dismissiveness when he talked about his background in product design.
Leashed but feral frustration when you told him about your own family: the one you were born to, and the one you married into.
Grudging defeat when something started to hurt. Grim determination when he was trying to ignore it.
Desire when you got close in the right way. When you lingered against him, nothing sudden: light touches on the left side, if at all, more freedom on the right.
Hope when you slowed your steps along the Seine, when the sky was Paris-purple, lights turning on and the city transforming into something else: not a wandering place now, but a destination place—a specific spot, a reservation, a fresh red lip, a set of people you were going to meet.
And then, when you tried to say—clumsily, okay, you’ve never tried to say something quite like this before—what destination you might have in mind, before time ran out on the best day you can remember having, maybe ever…
Disappointment. Sadness. Loss.
And now, in trying to be less clumsy, Layla had startled him—her it’s not tomorrow yet making him blink and stare in disbelief, in whiplashed surprise.
She took a breath, shifting on her feet, and thought of last night, tucked into that stone archway, into the privacy Griffin had stolen for them. She could try something like that, something stark and stripped down, whatever tonight’s version of It made me think of you might be.
I wanted to invite you back to my hotel room, or I think I might die if you don’t kiss me again.
But no. It was more complicated than that now.
And she was desperate to tell him why.
“When I came here before,” she said finally, and there—from startled to something else, the frustration again, anytime she got close to something about Jamie, or the MacKenzies.
She liked it. It was complicated.
“When I came here before,” she repeated, “I was trying so hard to become something. Someone, I guess. Someone who belonged here. Someone’s wife. A MacKenzie.”
He made a noise, deep in his throat—a rumble that made the I think I might die feeling come back, a pulse between her legs that had her wanting to take a step toward him. But even with the rumble, his eyes on hers were still cautious, holding something of himself back.
“I wanted to know Paris like they do,” she continued. “I wanted to love it like they do. To make their memories of it mine. Their favorite places would be mine, too. It was another way to be part of their family.”
He came closer, his eyes softer. He knew the contours, at least, of this wound now—knew what it meant to her, to feel like she was part of a family, when her own had been so incomplete and fractured and distant.
He knew that the Paris of her honeymoon—the Louvre with someone who’d seen it so many times, the best restaurants from the MacKenzie family lore, the tempting, clichéd souvenirs she felt too embarrassed to buy—could be full of terrible pressure.
Too much to see, too beautiful, too sophisticated, too delicious.
“But today, I just loved it. I love it like I do.”
They both blinked when she said those last two words: the vow they’d come all this way to witness, and the one she’d once made with someone else. No covenant now, no becoming something other than what she was.
He came even closer. Like this, she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze; she had to lift her eyes to see everything there. To see how he understood her.
“Layla Bailey,” he said quietly, his breath drifting across her lips like a sealing kiss, as good as any pronouncement.
She nodded.
Desire, hope: She could see it in him again, or maybe now that he was closer she could feel it, warming her straight through. She wanted to say the hotel thing, the I might die thing, but there was still the trepidation in him, keeping him slightly apart.
“Tomorrow,” she said again, hoping to go back to that moment where he’d turned himself off, to explain better this time. To get rid of that trepidation. “I know I’ll need to be Emily’s sister again. But for tonight, I was wondering if—”
“I’m afraid,” he said, cutting her off. Airplane-aisle sharp. A white-hot blade through the warm night air.
But now she knew that, too, was complicated. The first time she heard him speak, his cutting Be quiet. The Don’t tell Michael you saw me moment in the elevator; the Let’s talk about something in a candlelit restaurant.
All of it, a version of this. All of it to carve around this truth.
I’m afraid.
Slowly, she extended her left hand—not much distance between them, not much at all to reach him.
She set the tip of her index finger against the knob of bone in his right wrist, the easiest place to touch with his hands still in his pockets.
She let it linger there, watched his eyelids lower, his nostrils flare gently.
This could not be like last night: This could not start with his angry, desperate impulses, could not end with her careless, grabbing hands.
This had to be different.
She moved. The pad of her finger sliding down that knob, to the outside of his hand. She felt that touch all the way up her arm, a delicious, warm tingling that was entirely unrecognizable to her from such a subtle movement.
Then he moved, too: pulling his hand gently from his pocket, as though he wouldn’t risk jostling that one point of contact—her finger resting against his skin.
When his fingers were free, he followed her lead—he moved with intention.
One slow twist of his wrist to capture her finger, cupping it first against the pad of his warm palm, then catching it, hooking it with his pinky, using it to turn her hand, palm faced up.
He curled his pinky around her index finger, dragging it slowly around and into the space between it and her middle finger, then across the faint calluses at the base of each digit.
Her pulse thrummed. In her neck, in her belly, between her legs. Everywhere.
When he slid that finger between her pinky and ring finger, her knees wobbled. When he braided the rest of their fingers together—the most careful, erotic handhold she’d ever experienced in her entire life, she had to tip her head down, dizzy and unstable.
And when he took another step forward, she rested her forehead on his sternum, feeling the space beneath throb with the beat of his heart.
He lowered his head to speak, and Layla held her breath as she realized how he’d done it: his left side, his scarred side, against her hair. The crooked part of his lips against her ear.
“You don’t know how bad I want to go through this door with you,” he said.
What door? she thought, because the thing was, they were close enough now that she could feel how bad. Could feel, against her belly, the hard ridge of him, insistent and irresistible.
But then she remembered: the sculpture garden. When he said the word heaven. How it felt for him to be with her.
“But if I hurt you again—” He broke off, and she lifted her head—slowly, she knew she had to move slowly—to meet his eyes. She’d thought his fear was for himself: the pain, The Three Shades, The Gates of Hell.
But those dark eyes on her, the knife-edge of his voice like a caress now…
The fear was for her.
She thought it was almost all for her now.
“I can’t ruin this day for you,” he finished. “Not after everything you just told me about what it means to you. If I get—if what happens last night happens again…”
He trailed off, his throat bobbing, his eyes closing as his length pulsed desperately against her.
She was, without realizing it, stroking her thumb up and back along his.
She was thinking a thousand complicated things as she watched him struggle through this: that it would hurt if it happened again, but also it would somehow hurt worse if nothing happened at all; that he was right that it would be horrible to have the day end with his pain, but also the truth was, he was what this day meant to her, he was the day; that she’d told him it’s not tomorrow yet, but also she thought that when tomorrow dawned she would still feel this exact way, forever snapped out of the post-divorce fog of dully moving through her days according to a schedule—