Travis’s voice is a coarse whisper. “I thought I was emotionally damaged, beyond repair. I never trusted anyone, and that made me toxic. All I could do was have convenient relationships on my terms and my terms only. It was a private hell, Nova. Then I saw your picture on Highest Bidder.”

I slide my hand to the other side of him, embracing him all the more, encouraging him to go on. I kiss his chest, and he takes a deep breath before letting it out. It sounds as if he’s been holding that breath for years.

Then he says, “You had these big, dark eyes that seemed to sparkle with so many things—intelligence, innocence, a little bit of mischief… But there was something else that got to me. I think I didn’t know it at first, but it was sympathy.” He kisses the top of my head. “Even then I didn’t realize that I’d been waiting for someone like you, and I fought it tooth and nail during our entire arrangement.”

I laugh against him. “Yes you did.”

Laughing softly, he gathers me closer to him, then his arms tighten. “I kept losing that battle, because I couldn’t tolerate anyone, even you, getting the better of me. I learned early on never to lose.”

I think he’s about to tell me something he’s never told anyone, and I wait, my pulse jittering.

“People assume that I’ve always been well-off, spoiled,” he says, “but I came from an upper middle-class family who held back one key element from me—attention. My parents didn’t know what love was. They never wanted to raise a child, so one day when I was ten, they packed me off to a second cousin of my mother’s. I overheard a conversation between them saying how they wanted to pay relatives to watch me until I was seventeen.” He pauses, then says, “The truth is that my parents sent me away like something they didn’t need anymore. In actuality, they didn’t. There was never any love there.”

I close my eyes against him. No wonder Travis was so remote, building those walls around himself. He was taught to love.

He goes on. “My relatives were paid to look after me, but there was no love there either. I was a paycheck to them.”

“I’m so sorry.” Had he seen the parallels between himself and myself right off the bat, after I first told him about Gary Summers and how I was his paycheck?

“It was what it was,” Travis says. “I never cared much for them in return. Why humiliate myself? Why grovel?” Another pause, another breath, another few heartbeats. “My relatives had their own two kids, and they showered them with affection while I was the afterthought. So that’s how I started to treat everyone else—as an afterthought. I was a rock when it came to feeling anything for anyone else, and the day I turned seventeen, I left. And even though they and my parents have tried to contact me, I know it’s because I have money. They didn’t pay attention to me when they had the chance, so I shut them out. I haven’t seen any of them since.”

My god. This is why he broke up with me so suddenly and decisively, and my heart crumbles for him and the boy he was.

“I’m always going to love you, Travis.”

As if my words have pierced him, he holds me even tighter. We stay like that for a while, until I notice that he’s breathing easier, as if I’ve lifted a profound weight off of him. It’s as if everything has changed.

“There’s something else you should know. Something else I haven’t told anyone outside of my most trusted manager.” He skims a finger over my upper chest, where he once put that diamond necklace on me, right before he took my virginity. “I was always in possession of the Charity Diamond.”

My gaze widens, and I look up at him.

He’s smiling, his dimples so deep that a trill whirls through me.

“I was constantly moving it from store to store,” he says. “The thieves obviously guessed that much, but they’d never gotten the right location at the right time, so the gem was safe.”

My hand is plastered over his heart, and it occurs to me that the jewel is as elusive as Travis has been. The entire truth dawns on me. “The Charity Diamond is almost like a part of you. Your heart, Travis. Always guarded, always kept away from anyone who could hurt it.” I swallow and lie back down on him. “Or appreciate it.”

He doesn’t answer. He only keeps me closely against him, and soon, I realize that he’s fallen asleep. It’s as if a burden has been lifted, not only from him, but me, too.

I keep my hand against his heart as I drift off, weightless, happy, knowing that everything is as it should be.

* * *

When I awaken, the morning sun is streaming through the jet’s windows. I sit up in bed to see that we’re parked in an airport hangar.

I also see that Travis has left the bed.

A slash of adrenaline makes me flinch, but then I remember yesterday and how Travis told me everything about his painful past, how he clearly trusts me to guard those secrets for him.

Everything is as it should be, I think again, believing it now.

I see that he’s left a filmy robe for me on a chair, and I grab it, then put it on. He’s also set out some orange juice and a cranberry muffin on the nearby table. I don’t realize how hungry I am until I take a bite of the breakfast food and swallow it.

Then I feel the same tickle on the back of my neck that I felt the first night with Travis, when I found him standing in back of me, a tall, distant stranger.

I turn around to see him, the love in his eyes making him anything but cool and remote. He’s obviously showered, his damp hair combed back, and he’s dressed in a fine button down with trousers.

My Travis.

But he seems very serious with his hands stuffed into his pockets. He walks toward me as I tighten the belt around my robe.

I laugh. “You let me sleep in again.”

“I always do. Always will.”

He smiles, and a flutter spins through every inch of my body. Then he grows serious again.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing at all.”

Right. There’s something going on, and I don’t know what it is until he leads me to the bed and sits me down on it. His hands are out of his pockets, but one of them is tightly closed.

He gets to a knee, and suddenly I understand. I press my hands over my mouth as a joyful sob pushes its way up my chest. And when he opens his fingers to reveal a diamond ring, I gasp, but it’s only when I see the deep bluish gray of the gem that I let that sob go.

The jewel looks like a smaller version of the Charity Diamond that I saw online when I researched it.

His voice is gravelly. “You said the Charity Diamond is like my heart, Nova, and you were right. After you refused to accept the diamond necklace I left for you with the cash on our last day together, I realized that it was because those gems didn’t really mean anything. But this…” He lifts the ring toward me, and it catches the light with a wondrous sparkle. “This has a piece of the Charity Diamond in it. As you said, it’s a piece of me.”

He holds it out—the offer of a lifetime. A part of him right there for me to take.

My tears are flowing now. His trust. Himself. He’s giving me all of that.

“Take my heart, Nova,” he whispers. “Marry me.”

I don’t even hesitate. “Yes. Yes!”

With a growling laugh, he pulls me in for a kiss. Then just as I’m reeling and starting to catch my breath, he slips the ring onto my finger and holds me until I think I won’t ever be able to haul air into my lungs again.

His heart, my heart, and the sparkle of all the days ahead of us fill me up like a thousand shimmers, and when he tenderly kisses me again, those shimmers glitter with blue-gray beauty, forever lasting.

Forever us.