Chapter Fourteen
BETTINA’S WORDS HAVE me packing without sense.
Two things go in. Three things come back out.
I honestly don’t know what I’m doing, just that I’m crying too hard to do it well, and that my heart is bleeding faster than my hands can fold, and that when I catch sight of his ring still on my finger I have to stop and breathe.
I’m crying harder as I wrench at it, the old stone biting my knuckle, and it’s while I’m fighting it off that I hear him.
“Blythe.”
The sound of his voice has me jerking, but I don’t turn toward it. I can feel him in the doorway, looking at me, and the wanting to turn around is so strong it frightens me.
Don’t, Sensible Blythe warns. Don’t you dare.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” I tell my open bag. Looking at him is more than I have left in me. It just hurts too much. “You were right this morning. It was an arrangement, and I forgot myself, and now I’m doing the sensible thing the rest of the way.”
I hate that I’m babbling. I just want it over, want him gone, so I can get back to crying without an audience.
“Blythe, that’s not—”
I feel him step into the cabin. Toward me. And I panic.
“Don’t!”
I round on him as the word tears out of me, and I regret it the instant my eyes find him, because I have never seen Loukas Karalis like this. He looks wrecked, like a man who hasn’t sat down in hours.
Stop feeling sorry for him, Sensible Blythe snaps. He betrayed you. He betrayed you.
And the thought rips fresh pain straight through me.
“I know what you’re thinking—”
“It’s not what I think, Loukas. It’s what I saw.” My voice splinters on it. “And I saw you. She was kissing—” You.
That’s the word I can’t get out. I saw Bettina’s mouth on his and I can’t say it, not with my voice breaking and my heart breaking on the same beat, and before I can turn away from him he’s already talking.
“She’s lying.”
Fast. Almost clumsy with how fast.
“Whatever Bettina told you, every word of it’s a lie, and I can prove it. Artie heard the whole of it and had her put off this train tonight.”
Like he can’t get the words out quickly enough.
“I’ve never touched her, Blythe. Never. She kissed me in the dark and I put her off me, and you walked in for the one half-second of my life I’ll spend the rest of it wishing you hadn’t seen.”
But I can’t let myself believe it, so all I do is shake my head and wrap both arms around myself, holding myself together before I can reach for the very man who broke me.
“You’d say anything now,” I whisper. “The deal’s nearly—”
“There’s no deal. Artie’s buying my share.”
What is he saying?
“I told the consortium this morning I was finished. The Yume runs without me.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “There’s no business on this earth worth losing you over, Blythe, and the only thing I was ever really selling on that train was a lie about myself.”
I’m caught somewhere between shock and pain and pure confusion, and before I can find my feet he’s crossed the cabin, his hands closing hard on my shoulders like he means to hold me in place until I hear him.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” He paid me to close a deal. He told me this morning I was scenery. And now— “You’re not making sense.”
“What I’m saying—” Loukas swallows, a man bracing to say what could end his world.
“—is that I panicked. A grown man, forty years old, and I panicked. The moment I understood I was falling for you, I couldn’t stand it, so I decided to hurt you first. Cold, over breakfast, the way my father would have.
I said it meant nothing. It’s the only lie I’ve ever told you, and I told it out of terror, like a coward. ”
Did he just—
“Devon warned me.” His voice drops. “That first week. He told me a man who swears he can’t love you is most often a man already terrified that he does. I thought I’d slipped the trap. I hadn’t. He read me like weather, and I fell exactly where he said I would.”
My tears are coming faster now, and faster still as Loukas cups my face in both hands, like he’s holding something fragile, something he couldn’t bear to see broken twice.
“I kept the line, that night, and every night,” he says.
“Not out of indifference, whatever I let you think this morning. I kept it because it was the one true thing I had in a whole week of pretending, and I wasn’t going to spend it cheaply on a woman who deserved to be wanted out loud, in daylight, by a man brave enough to mean it. ”
His hand shifts against my cheek, and I feel the tremor in it.
“Marry me, agapi. No cameras, no investors, no money left to make it convenient. Marry me, and we can argue forever.” My own invented proposal, the lie I dressed up for a dinner table, handed back to me made true.
“I love you, Blythe. I’m in love with—”
He doesn’t get to finish, because I’ve already thrown myself into his arms.
I’m crying and laughing and kissing him all at once, and I feel his mouth break into a smile against mine, just for a second, before he sweeps me up off my feet entirely.
“I love you, Loukas.”
I have to say it. I need to say it, out loud, in daylight, before anything else happens, before the kiss he’s already lowering his head to give me—
Oh.
Before this.
This being Loukas kissing me so deep and so sure that the cabin and the train and the whole long pretending journey simply fall away, since none of it was ever the real thing.
And this, finally, is.