Lilah took a deep breath, her body pressing closer to his, as though she needed strength to go on. “To get the story, the editor-in-chief of Culture had made a number of promises. The subject got to choose his interviewer, location, approve a list of staff and colleagues who would be the only people Culture could contact.”
Fury flared. “And you.”
She nodded. “I wanted the gig. I’d worked with the magazine before. I liked the team there. They respected me . . . or so I thought. So I didn’t really think twice. He chose the photographer for the piece . . . and the location, date and time for the shoot.”
Max cursed, low and dark, his hand going wide over her shoulder, tight, as though he could protect her in hindsight.
“It’s funny, how you see it. I didn’t. I should have known when they said they were willing to triple my fee. I’m not exactly cheap to begin with. But I was at the top of my game, and hubris is real.”
No. Whatever this story—however it played out, it wasn’t her fault. “Lilah—”
She cut him off before he could argue. “I’d shot the Bonfire Hollywood issue earlier in the year and I had the Finezzi Calendar scheduled. This cover—it would be a hat trick.” She paused and looked up at him. “A hat trick is when—”
“I know. It comes from cricket.”
“It does? Cool.” She smiled and he would have matched it if he wasn’t resisting the urge to book a flight immediately to wherever this man was and do damage.
“Lilah . . . ”
“He chose his house in the Hamptons. His wife would be there, his staff, his kids, probably. But if I came in the evening, things would be quieter. Would that be fine?”
“Fucking hell.” Not damage. He’d do murder.
“I drove out from the city,” she said. “I borrowed a friend’s car—this nonsense convertible that half the time wouldn’t even start—but it was a beautiful spring day and I spent the drive out going over the ideas that I’d had for the shoot. His staff had sent me photos of this mansion—it was bananas. All white walls and chrome and steel and built right on the edge of the Atlantic. I’d been in houses like it before—it was my job not to be impressed. But this house—” She quieted. “Well. It was bananas.”
“He was alone.”
She nodded. “He was used to photographers, but not artists, he told me, and he thought it would be easier if it was just the two of us. Gross, right?” She paused. “I really thought it would be fine. I’d dealt with slimeballs before.” Max growled, and she looked at him with amused surprise. “What was that?”
“Me, resisting the urge to ask you to make me a list.”
She let out a little laugh, like he had made a joke. It wasn’t a joke. It was truth. This story was turning him into pure vengeance, and he probably shouldn’t like it but he was too busy imagining how much he’d enjoy putting his fist into this man’s face.
“I handled them just fine,” she said, stacking her hands on his chest and setting her chin to them. “Athletes, actors, talk show hosts, princes, every kind of egomaniac you could come up with . . . billionaires are the worst. Here’s the thing—they’re all the same. They want the power play, but they want the great picture more. So I get in, get the shot, find a way to turn them down, and get out. No problem.”
She stopped, the air between them heavy with the story, Max’s jaw aching from the clench of his teeth. If this man had hurt her, he would move every mountain he could to punish him. He’d use every inch of the dukedom to ruin him.
“Lilah,” he said, her name coming out like gravel. Sounding like he was in pain.
“He didn’t touch me,” she said quickly, as though to soothe him, and a twist of relief curled through Max, though not enough. He might not have touched her, but she’d been harmed. She’d stopped working, for Christ’s sake, and she loved working.
“He went to get something; he claimed to have a folio of unseen Helen Levitt shots that he’d bought at auction—his staff must have done some research, because Helen Levitt is one of the few people who could have made me stick around. Anyway, when he came back, he was naked.” She scoffed. “I should’ve taken a picture of that. But I didn’t. I took off.”
“The car started.” There. More relief. More fury.
She gave a little laugh. “Thank God. And I thought it was over. I called my best friend and told her the whole story on the drive back and I still remember coming over the bridge into the city and saying, clear as day, ‘But I got the fucking shot.’” She looked at him. “And I did. I had this vision of that shot on the cover of the most respected magazine in the world—revealing what a creep that guy was.”
He didn’t doubt she’d gotten the shot. Of course she had.
That was her job, and she was remarkable at it.
He stroked his hand down the soft skin of her back, pride warring with a dozen other emotions, not the least of which was fear. The photograph hadn’t been enough. Something else had happened. “Then what?”
Sadness clouded her beautiful eyes, and Max’s chest tightened. He already hated what was to come. “Three days later I got a call from Culture. They were going in a different direction with the story. I’d be paid, but the images wouldn’t run. ‘Please deliver the files to the magazine and delete any copies.’” She spoke to his chin as he continued to stroke down her spine. Back up. “A few days after that, we got word that Bonfire had decided to reshoot the Hollywood issue with a new photographer. A different direction. Literally weeks before the issue shipped. It was unheard of.”
Fury threaded through him. Hot and angry and foreign. “And Finezzi?” He didn’t know much about the calendar, but he knew it was an enormous win for art photographers.
She shook her head. “Different direction.”
“Christ.”
“It was going to be great,” she said, her eyes meeting his. Max heard the urgency in her voice, as though it was important she say it out loud. And it was the truth. He knew it. It would have been magnificent. He knew, without question, that Lilah Rose would have made sure the whole world knew about that calendar. “I had this plan to play with hard and soft—I wanted to go back to the original erotic pinup style, but really change the gaze. Shoot the whole thing centering women and pleasure and power. Twelve women who were unashamed of passion. Upend the whole thing.”
“That sounds perfect,” he said. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing this glorious woman would do.
“It would have been. It was the dream, and I could reach out and touch it. And he robbed me of it.” There was anger in the words, along with frustration and sadness and fury. She gave a little wave of her hand. “Like that. He robbed me of my career. And the rest of the world helped. My agent—who’d signed me when I was twenty years old and not even out of art school—she stopped calling me. My mentors, who I thought would stand by me. All those people I thought were my friends . . . ” She laughed, the sound without humor. “A few months ago, I was in Ghana?”
Max nodded, hating this story and wanting to hear all of it. Every word.
“I pulled out my phone and scrolled through it, and deleted two hundred and seventy-three contacts. Dozens of people who would make you starry-eyed.”
“I promise you they wouldn’t make me starry-eyed.”
She shot him a look. “They make everyone starry-eyed.”
He shook his head. “Not me.”
After a while, she said, “Weirdly, I believe that.”
But it didn’t help, he could see. It didn’t soothe the furrow at her brow that had come with the memory. He touched that furrow. Smoothed it.
“They were supposed to be my friends,” she said, softly, and his heart broke a little bit at the words. “But they didn’t care about me. They cared about what I could do for them. Ironically, Bonfire ran a piece about me once.” She smiled as she remembered the headline. “Kiss from a Rose. Lilah Rose, whose photos could turn a star into a supernova.”
She shook her head, seeming not to
be able to find the right words, and he wanted so much to give them to her. “You weren’t just good at it,” he said. “You cared about it. You loved it. Your work meant something.”
“Yes,” she said, softly. “I know what it looks like from the outside. I know it seems frivolous and silly. Who cares about the photograph? We all have cameras in our pockets and we’ve all taken a decent picture now and then. But I really thought . . . ” She trailed off, and Max couldn’t bear it. The loss. “I built it. It was mine. I was good at it and I gave up everything for it. No real friends, no real love life, no real life in general. Nothing outside of this one thing that I did well and that I loved. And then . . . it was gone.” Her eyes met his. “And then . . . I was gone too.”
He ached for her. He ached for what she’d suffered and what she’d lost and for how hard she’d worked and for how hard she fought, still, for this world that should have lowered itself to its knees and thanked the heavens that it had her.
Just as he would lower himself to his knees if he might have her even a fraction as much.
And he ached for himself, for the keen, clear understanding that the only thing she desired was the thing he would never be able to give her.
His silence had stretched too long, until Lilah pulled back from it. “I’m sorry,” she said, pushing up off his chest to move away, her eyes gone liquid. “That was a lot.”
“No.” He rolled with her, cradling her face, running his thumbs over her cheeks, refusing to let her go until he told her exactly what he thought of her. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “No problem.”
He couldn’t help his small smile. She was so strong. “Now I have to tell you something.”
For an instant, he considered doing it. Telling her his truth, a secret for a secret, and finally having it all out in the open between them. He wanted it so badly, the words burned in his throat—but this moment was not for him. This moment was for Lilah, and what she’d been through, and the fact that she’d shared it with him, and no one else.
He waited for her to look at him. “You are the finest person I know.”
Her eyes went liquid with tears.
“No, Lilah.” He brushed the hair from her face, searching it, memorizing it. “You are strong and clever and you play darts like a professional, and you are a brilliant artist with—somehow, though I cannot understand how—a spine of pure steel.”
“Thank you.”
The tears spilled, and he leaned down to kiss her, sipping the words from her lips, before he pulled back and said, “Now. Who was it?”
She exhaled on a laugh. “Why, are you going to go punch his lights out?”
“It’s a damn good start.”
She reached up and pulled him down for another kiss. “You’re really very sweet, you know.”
“I’m not feeling very sweet right now.” He was feeling murderous right now.
“I can take care of myself. Remember? Blade in my kirtle?”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “Save it. Let me bloody my sword instead.”
She tilted her head, her gaze narrowing on his. “Why is that so hot?”
“It’s not meant to be.”
She ran her fingers through his hair and traced the high arc of his cheek and the straight edge of his jaw, still twitching with anger. “I’m already fighting.”
He understood, instantly. “Four days.”
She nodded. “Four days. I return. And the pictures—they’re a good opening salvo.”
God, he was so proud of her. “They’ll get you what you want.”
“The return of Lilah Rose.”
Four days. Four days, and she would be gone.
Four days, and Lilah would head back to her glittering life and her glamorous parties, and she would leave Max here and the farmer she’d once known would fade away as she returned to London, or New York, or Los Angeles or whatever place she needed to be.
He’d tried that life before. And he’d ruined a marriage with his inability to love it. He’d disappointed Georgiana, but somehow the idea of disappointing Lilah was worse.
“Max?”
He looked down at her, this woman he loved, strong and clever and so beautiful she made him ache. “Yes?”
“Do you own a suit?”
He froze, knowing what was to come next. Knowing it would be the most difficult thing he’d ever done to reply.
She smiled. God, he loved her smile. “Come to London with me.”
He hesitated, and she waited, ever patient.
Yes.
Christ, he wanted to say yes.
But he hadn’t fallen for her. He’d fallen in love with her.
The only thing that mattered was her happiness. And he knew, without question, that he could not make her happy. Not forever.
And he couldn’t bear the thought of anything less.
“I can’t.”
10
“I bollocksed it.”
Simon considered Max through the small crack in the door of the Fox and Falcon the next morning, before letting him in, wet and bedraggled, Atlas on his heels. Peering out into the torrential rain in the street beyond, the owner of the pub said, “Must have done if you’re out in this.”
Closing the door, the pub owner turned to his new guests, wincing when Atlas shook the rain from his coat and went to lie down by the fireplace. “My pub is going to smell like wet dog.”
“Think of it as an improvement,” Max said before getting to the important bit. “Simon . . . she left.”
Simon nodded to a stool at the bar and Max moved to sit. “We knew she was leaving, didn’t we? Back to America, no?”
“I had three more days.” Max rubbed a hand across his chest, hating the ache there—one he hadn’t felt in a lifetime. “We were supposed to have three more days, and she left.”
“Because you’re naff at women.”
“I’m not naff at women.”
“All right, I’ll play.” Simon checked his watch. “Why are you here at twenty past eight in the morning? Instead of abed with your pretty dartsmistress?”
“Because my pretty dartsmistress is gone.”
“Because you’re naff at women.” Simon slipped behind the bar and said, “Pint?”
“It’s twenty past eight in the morning, Simon.”
“Coffee it is, then.” Simon turned away. “So, what, you told her you were duke and she took to the hills, afraid of a long line of aristocratic inbreeding?”
“No.”
Simon stilled and turned back. “Shit, Max. You told her you were Duke eventually, didn’t you?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t think it would matter in the long run. Not if she was leaving. Not if we were just . . .”
Simon stilled. “You didn’t think it mattered that you owned the house she was staying in.”
The house they were both staying in.
“And half of Devon,” his friend added.
Max rubbed his face with both hands, shoving his fingers through his wet hair.
“And a large swath of London.”
Christ, he was an ass.
“You didn’t think she might like to know that you’re one of the richest men in Britain?”
That got Max’s attention. Simon and he never talked about the dukedom. They talked about the pub and the sheep and the land, about Lottie’s art and Simon’s mother’s ailments. But they never talked about Max’s money.
Simon gave him a half-smile. “You think I grew up in the back room of this pub, in the shadow of Salterton Abbey, and didn’t know that my best friend was rich as royalty? Richer than royalty?”
“Christ, Si.” Max dipped his head, loathing the conversation. “Come on.”
“I didn’t invent Google. Take it up with your fellow billionaires. Look. You are a good friend, and a great partner in a brawl, and I’m fairly certain you bailed out this place when my father ran it into the ground.” It was t
rue, but Max had promised Simon’s father that he’d never admit it, and he wouldn’t. “The rest doesn’t matter. Just as I’m guessing it wouldn’t have mattered to her.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” he said. “She’d still be gone. She would always have left. Nothing I could say would change that—telling her the truth would only have hastened the inevitable.”
There was a long pause, like an eternity.
“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” Max said, filling it. “She’d still be gone.”
Simon watched him for a stretch, and then said, “You look like you’ve been rolled down the hill and into my pub. How long has she been gone?”
Max shook his head. “I don’t know.” He’d left her after she’d fallen asleep on the other side of the bed, out of his arms for the first time since the first night. Gone back to his apartments. Woken at dawn without her and returned to the cottage, ready to explain everything, even if it meant losing out on those last few precious days—and nights—at her side. But it had been too late. She’d left.
As he’d always known she would.
“A few hours.”
He filled Simon in, telling him the story of their arrangement, designed only to last until Lilah went back to London and returned to her life, filled with celebrities and superstars and leaving no room for Max, who—even if she knew the truth—would never be able to give her what she wanted.
But that wasn’t all Max told his friend. He told him about Lilah—about her brilliant photographs, and her easy laugh, and the way she’d won him again and again, and made him believe, more and more, that it was possible for him to be Max forever. And her to be Lilah forever. And for them to live in farmhouse idyll forever.
“When she asked me to go with her, I told her I couldn’t,” he said. He’d watched as disappointment and resignation had clouded her gaze, even as she’d promised him she understood, hating it even as he told himself it was for the best. That it was the best way to keep her from a larger, more devastating disappointment.
To keep from disappointing her.
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