It’s better to lead than follow, but if you must follow, follow your instincts.
—Paige
He’d expected her to walk out, and he wouldn’t have blamed her. Maybe it was even what he wanted.
Why else would he have told her the truth?
For a long moment she said nothing and he watched a range of emotions cross her pretty features. Only a few hours before he’d seen ecstasy and passion in those eyes. Now he saw shock and confusion, followed by compassion. Of course, compassion, because this was Eva and it wasn’t possible for her not to feel compassion.
It was the last thing he wanted.
He stared down at his hands, disgusted with himself for spoiling her perfect night but instead of walking out, she sat down next to him.
“But she—” She stumbled over the words. “She was the love of your life. You knew her from childhood—”
“That’s right.” He watched her process all this new information. Watched as her glowing picture of the perfect love affair, the perfect marriage, changed shape into something distorted and ugly.
“I saw pictures of you together—at premieres, walking through Central Park. I saw the way you looked at each other.”
“And that simply proves that you can tell very little about a person by looking at them. A point I’ve been making since you first broke into my apartment.”
She didn’t appear to hear him. “You say you loved her and I saw her in the photos. She loved you, too.”
“She loved me. As well as she could. But love is complicated, Eva. That’s what I’ve been telling you. It isn’t all hearts and smiles. It can be pain. Sallyanne couldn’t handle being in a long-term committed relationship. She kept waiting for it to self-destruct, and when it didn’t she destroyed it herself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I.” And he blamed himself for that. For not looking closer. He, who prided himself on always digging deep, had failed to even scratch the surface of what was going on with his wife.
“Does anyone else know the truth?”
“That she was leaving me? No. If she hadn’t slipped on the ice getting into the cab, the world would have found out that night, and it would have been as much of a shock to them as it was to me.”
Look, Lucas, look what I did to us. I took what we had and I broke it. I always told you I’d break it.
He reached for the bottle of whiskey but his hand was shaking so much he missed the glass.
Eva quietly mopped up the amber pools with a napkin left over from one of the lunches she’d brought him.
Then she took the whiskey bottle from him and poured two fingers into the glass.
“Aren’t you going to lecture me on drinking? Tell me it isn’t going to help?”
“No.” There was no judgment there, only kindness and friendship. “What happened that night, Lucas?”
He’d never talked about it. He’d never wanted to. Until now.
Why? Why now?
Was it because she made it easy to talk? Or was it because there was a new intimacy between them? Evidence of that intimacy was visible in the faint reddening of the skin on her neck and the tumbled strands of her hair. And then there was the invisible. The connection, the closeness that hadn’t been there before. It had cracked open something that had been sealed inside him for three years.
“She told me she was leaving. We had an argument. I told her I loved her, and her response was to tell me she was having an affair. At first I didn’t believe it—” He broke off, unsure how to describe the magnitude of his confusion. “I thought I knew her so well. I’d known her since she was five years old. We lost touch for a while when we went to college. I stayed on the East Coast, she went West. I wanted the adventure of the big city. I suppose you would have called it my bad boy phase. We met up again by chance at a reunion and this time she was interested. Turned out she liked my bad boy side. We were together when I sold my first book. We celebrated by getting blind drunk and having sex on—” He glanced at her. “Never mind.”
She took his hand. “You don’t have to edit what you say, Lucas.”
“We renewed our friendship and it was as if we’d never been apart. Marriage seemed like a logical step to me. She was reluctant. She didn’t see why we should change what worked, but I persuaded her. I never even questioned whether it was the right thing for her.”
“But you knew her really well.”
“I thought I did. Her parents separated when she was young, and it was a bitter, acrimonious divorce. It left her with a deep-seated belief that marriage couldn’t last. I didn’t know it at the time, but the moment I put that ring on her finger, I signed the death warrant to our marriage. It was over before it had begun.”
“But you never suspected she was having an affair?”
“No. She didn’t love him, she told me that.” He lifted the glass and drank, trying to block out the memory of that last conversation. “She did it because she thought it would drive me away. She wanted to ‘set me free.’ She told me she’d done me a favor. She thought by making me hate her, I’d find it easier to move on. It was her ‘gift’ to me.”
“Oh, Lucas—”
“I’m not sure what would have happened if she hadn’t slipped on the ice that night. Maybe she was hoping I’d make a grand gesture and win her back to prove my love. Or maybe she really did mean to leave. What happened would have been tough to fix. She said a lot of things she shouldn’t have said, and so did I. I was angry. So damned angry—” And the guilt gnawed at his insides like acid.
“Of course you were.”
“She tried to make it as bad as possible, to stop me loving her, but it didn’t work that way. After she died, the feelings were almost intolerable because I had no way of talking to her and getting to the truth. I truly believe she did love me, but she was too scared to trust it. It was as if she was so afraid of how she’d handle the ending, she wanted to just get it done and control it herself. But I still loved her. I’m not sure if that makes me crazy, delusional—” He put the glass down, saying, “possibly both.”
“Loyal.” Eva’s voice was quiet. “I think it probably makes you loyal. Love isn’t something that you can switch on and off. At least, it shouldn’t be.”
“I wanted to.” It was something he’d never admitted to anyone before. “When you’re wrong about someone, you go over it in your head. You think back to everything you ever did together, you examine everything that person ever said and you try to work out if anything at all was real. You unpick it, like a sweater, stitch by stitch, until it all falls apart and all you have in your hands is a pile of wool. Loose ends. And you have no idea how to put it together in a way that makes sense. Do you have any idea how it feels to think you know someone, really know someone, and then realize you don’t know them at all? All those facts, those moments that you thought of as intimacy, suddenly blur and you don’t know if you were ever really close or if you imagined it all. If you can’t trust the person in life who is supposed to be closest to you, who can you trust?”
“You should be able to trust the person closest to you. That isn’t asking too much.” She moved closer to him, instinctively offering comfort.
Her thigh brushed against his and then she took his hand and cupped it in between hers.
“I thought,” she said slowly, “that it was your work that made you so suspicious of people. I thought it was because you spend your days delving into the darker side of human nature. I never thought the reason stemmed from your own experience. I never suspected it was personal. I hate the thought that you’ve been carrying that all by yourself.”
“I didn’t want her memory to be all about gossip. I had her family to think about. Her parents and her sister were devastated. There was nothing to be gained by telling them the truth.”
“But how did you keep it a secret? What about the guy she—”
“He was married. He never would have left his wife for her. That’s probably why she chose him. She didn’t want the commitment, just the adventure. Or maybe she really did just use him as a tool to destroy what we had. I’ll never know. He was only too happy to keep it quiet because the truth would have put his marriage at risk.” He heard her soft sound of sympathy and felt a flash of guilt. “I’ve destroyed your shiny view of love.”
“No. I know love can be flawed, and messy. I know all those things.”
“And you still want it?”
“Of course. Because in the end, love is the only thing that matters.” She made it sound simple, and he’d only ever found it to be complicated and painful.
“I disagree. There have been so many days since she died when I wished I’d never met her.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “I couldn’t handle that she’d hid so much from me. I was as deluded as you were when you looked at those photos. A picture can be faked, but I was living with her and I thought what we had was real. If you can’t trust a person you’ve known for more than twenty-five years, who can you trust?”
“It’s no wonder you’ve steered clear of relationships ever since.”
“Fortunately people make allowances for grief. I focused on my work. My output tripled and the stories I was writing were darker and deeper. My sales numbers rocketed. Critics said my writing had reached a whole new level. Sallyanne would have said it was her last gift to me. Ironic, don’t you think? I’m a global bestseller because my wife screwed me up so badly.” He picked up the glass and drained it, the whiskey scalding his throat. “So that’s love, Eva. That’s how it looks. You should go back to bed and I should write.”
“Write? It’s four in the morning.”
“I won’t sleep. But you should. You’re bad enough in the mornings without having hardly any sleep.” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, wondering what would have happened if he’d met her at a different time of his life. He dismissed the question because the answer was that there hadn’t been a single time in his life when he would have been the right man for a woman like her.
“Will you come with me?”
Part of him wanted to, but he reminded himself that at the moment all they’d shared was one night. That was all. People walked away after one night all the time. He didn’t intend to let one night become two nights and two nights become three.
“No.” He curled his fingers into his fist so that he couldn’t be tempted to touch her again.
Her gaze searched his and then she straightened her shoulders and stood up. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t regret what we did. Don’t start examining it and unpicking it. And don’t start worrying about where I might think this is going. I know what last night was. So don’t feel you have to give me explanations, or excuses or, worse, apologies. I’m going back to bed now. With no regrets. And I’d rather you didn’t have any, either.”
She walked away, leaving him to his self-imposed solitude, and he stared after her, seeing her slim curves silhouetted through his shirt and wondering how it could feel so bad when someone had just done exactly what you’d asked them to do.
He’d sent her away, but now he wanted to follow her. He wanted to thaw his frozen heart on her warmth, but he fought the impulse because he knew it was wrong of him to use her as a sanctuary when there was no way in a million years he could live up to her dreams.
If he didn’t care about her, it would have been easier. But he cared. He cared too damn much for his own piece of mind. So he forced himself to stay where he was, his only companions regret, guilt and a whole lot of other emotions he couldn’t begin to unravel.
* * *
Eva lay curled in a ball in the cold bed, staring into the darkness.
She’d contemplated going back to sleep in Lucas’s room, but decided that would be intrusive, because where would he sleep if she was in his bed?
Someone is sleeping in my bed and she’s still there.
She didn’t want to be like Goldilocks, so she’d returned to the room she’d been using as her own.
The bed felt huge, cold and empty, filled with just her and her thoughts.
It had been an incredible night right up until the point she’d found Lucas in his study and he’d shared his secret. And now that secret lay inside her, heavy as stone. It had never once occurred to her that his relationship, his “perfect” marriage, might not have been so perfect.
She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.
He was right when he’d said he’d tarnished her dreams. In a way, he had. She’d looked at those photographs, at the depth of his grief, and envied what he’d shared with Sallyanne.
She hadn’t thought to look deeper. She’d thought that once you found the right person, love was simple.
He probably thought she was a dreamy fool.
She thought she was a dreamy fool.
No wonder he shut himself away. No wonder he rejected people’s calls for him to move on. He wasn’t just dealing with the loss of someone he loved, he was dealing with the discovery that something he’d believed in had never existed. She was beginning to understand why he never judged by appearances.
He’d lived it, discovering that what he’d seen on the surface didn’t reflect what lay underneath. It wasn’t just fiction, it was his reality.
And it was no good wishing things were different, or pretending that she was going to be the one to drag him from the past into the present. Maybe she was a dreamy optimist, but she wasn’t stupid. He had a lot to process, and until he did that he wasn’t going to be able to have a relationship with anyone. And the last thing she wanted was to lose her heart to an unavailable man.
She felt a tearing, aching pain in her chest and knew it was already too late for that. She was falling for him, and it was hopeless.
She could cook him delicious food, and make his apartment festive, but she couldn’t do anything about the way he was feeling. Only he could fix that.
But that didn’t stop her wishing she could fix it for him.