by R. K. Lilley
I felt ill. Literally. I thought I might throw up. I'd been so sure he was in the clear, that it was completely behind us, and now this . . . "Why are you telling me this?" I asked Harris carefully. His motives, as usual, were baffling to me.
"I think you can help him. Come into the station. Give a new statement. We can go over every word that creep said to you. You remember all of those unsolved, violent rape cases in the county, the disappearances? I think your attacker was our guy. Help me fill in some blanks. The more dangerous that bum looks, the more innocent your boyfriend will be."
I was wringing my hands, looking at him uncertainly. I really didn't want to go anywhere with Harris, but I wanted to help Dante more. I felt myself caving.
"I know it's a pain the ass," Harris said with a friendly smile, "but it won't take long, and it might make all of the difference. At least you get to ditch school for it."
I agreed to go to the station with him.
On the way out of school, we saw only one person as we walked through the halls to the exit.
Tiffany was at her locker, fishing something out. She stopped and watched us as we passed her.
Harris was walking just in front of me, but I slowed and let him get farther ahead as we came even with her.
"If you see Dante, will you tell him that Harris took me out of school? Tell him I need to talk to him as soon as possible." I said the words in a quick jumble, not wanting Harris to hear.
Tiffany nodded solemnly, looking back and forth between my earnest face and Harris's retreating back. "Will do," she said. She looked sincere.
It was the most civil exchange we ever had. And the most damaging.
I hurried to catch up to Harris before he realized I'd stopped to talk.
I didn't trust him, but apparently, I trusted him too much.
In my defense, I did not think he would do or could do what he did in broad daylight.
But I did get into his car without a fight.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
"I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
~Rumi
PRESENT
SCARLETT
I woke up feeling rested and almost . . . peaceful. Crying yourself to sleep apparently made for a good night's rest.
It didn't hurt that my head was pillowed tenderly against a familiar chest. That I could hear the deep, throbbing beat of Dante's heart. It was so comforting that I had myself half convinced I was still sleeping.
It was one thing to wake up with him, another to be comforted by it.
What strange new world was this?
I couldn't believe he was real, that this was. That after all of the war we could have a moment of real peace.
Or that we were looking at trying to carve out some kind of a future together.
But was this even that? Or was this just another temporary reprieve?
I didn't know and I didn't want to think about it. Instead, I allowed myself a moment, a few, a dozen, a hundred, to revel in the arms of the only man who would ever own my heart.
His bare torso was warm, firm, and very real, but I ran my hands over him like he might disappear.
I could touch him now, and not as a way to hurt or wound. My hand on his chest spoke of the ownership I had been denying myself for five rough years.
Five hopeless years. Five hateful years. Five lost years.
"Morning, angel." His voice came out of his chest in a touchable rumble that spoke of deep affection. He kissed the top of my head, his familiar hand stroking over my hair.
I shut my eyes, letting myself enjoy it, letting myself acknowledge just how much I needed it.
This would take some getting used to. I was still afraid to even hope I might get the chance.
"Mm," I mumbled into his chest. It didn't mean anything, just a general sound of contentment.
He shifted me onto my back, propping up on one elbow close to my side.
I touched his face. Part of my mind was still in that fuzzy place between sleep and full cognizance. "Are you real?" I whispered it like I was afraid someone else might hear the silly question.
He grinned, shifting closer. His free hand grabbed one of mine, bringing it to his lips. He placed a soft, open-mouthed kiss on my palm. His eyes smiled as he dragged the hand down, cupping it over his very happy morning erection. "Is that real enough for you?"
I glared at him.
He threw his head back and laughed.
His laugh was wonderful, touchable. I set my hand to his throat just to feel closer to it.
His laughing eyes came back to mine, and his face sobered in one quick fall. He touched my cheek. "Jesus. That look. What are you trying to do to me here?"
I let my eyes answer that question. With a groan, he leaned down and kissed me. It was a tentative contact at first, his talented lips feeling at mine with utmost care, his own way of validating that I was real.
It was almost sweet and finished too quickly.
He started to pull back, but I stopped him by grabbing his face, crushing his mouth to mine.
The need came sudden and dark. I had to have him. Had to. On me, in me.
I craved that most intimate connection, him in the deepest part of me, with ravenous simplicity.
When he pulled back again I let him, my breath coming short. "Now." It was a plea, an order, a curse—all in one.
"Well, if you insist," he muttered. He was such a fake. He'd lost his senses several thumping heartbeats earlier and we both knew it.
He descended on me again, mouth on my jaw, kissing down to my neck, over my collarbone, moving down.
He peeled off my oversized cat T-shirt, lips coming back to my bare skin.
When he sucked my nipples, my back arched off the bed, my toes curling in delight. I was so primed that I thought he might bring me over with that contact alone, but he didn't linger there long, moving inexorably lower, and lower, nuzzling between my legs, eating me out like I was a feast and he was starved.
That made two of us.
When he'd—put a fork in me, done—finished me, he laid his cheek against my inner thigh, his drowning blue eyes aimed up the line of my body at mine, and managed to look winsome.
I shut my eyes and stroked his hair. I was having a battle with myself, feeling too emotional, wanting to tamp it down, to reprimand the part of me that lived for this, that thought my entire reason for existing was wrapped up in it.
In the end, emotion won, aided by sensation. He was licking his way up my stomach, nuzzling, kissing, touching everything with his fingertips like he would memorize me, though I knew he'd burned every detail of me into his brain a very long time ago.
This was just a refresher course.
By the time his mouth made its way to mine I was near incoherent with need again.
He raised his upper body over me, bracing with his arms, his lower body pressed against me, staring down at me.
The look on his face then was hard to describe.
His blue eyes were filled with a dark light. There was desire, yes, hunger, of a certainty, but also there was disbelief, reverence, hope. Fear. So much fear.
But above all, there was need. It was like the sun, so brilliant it was blinding.
I wondered what he saw in my eyes at that moment, if my desperation was as transparent as his. God, I hoped not. It was too much just having to witness his. Overkill.
He took me with ferocious delight, reveling in me, our hands clutching, every finger entwined.
He drove in and out of me with fast, solid strokes, kissing me, then pulling back, his eyes delving into my soul as his body plundered mine, then kissing me. Again and again.
In spite of my better judgment, if I had such a thing, I didn't hold back any more than he did, taking fervent joy in every touch, every contact.
Every possession—physical, spiritual.
When I came, it was with our eyes locked and
his name on my lips like an invocation.
My name on his lips was more like a prayer.
I thought I was finished, vanquished, filled up, satiated, but he was far from done with me.
He was indefatigable. Insatiable. A tireless machine.
This had been the nature of our separation. It was always a flood or a drought for us. I wondered if we'd ever get past that.
Certainly not today.
*****
We had ourselves a lazy morning. I was off until the next evening, and Dante's schedule seemed to be completely aimless.
Eventually we had to eat. He was the first one to scrounge up the energy to rise from the bed.
My smitten eyes were all over him. He was naked, prowling the room on his way to the closet.
I just lay there, enjoying the view. The symmetry and grace of his body would never get old for me.
It took a bit of effort on his part, but he did talk me out of bed.
It was a strange turn. Usually he only ever talked me into it.
We had croissants and coffee outside in the sun. The house had a heavy amount of decking, all of it private.
We ate silently for a time, and I studied him to my heart's content.
It wasn't always noticeable, the strange mixture of color in his eyes. But as the late morning sun hit them, the blue came alive like a flame, and another color, a rogue little circle of gold around his iris, was revealed. There were three colors if you looked closely. That strange gold around the middle, an almost pale aquamarine that bled into a darker blue at the outer edges. They reminded me of where sea met sand, but they were deep. Drowning deep ocean blue.
God, I was a sucker for his eyes.
I realized right then just how much I'd missed such a simple thing as looking at him without restraint. Without artifice. Without hiding what I was feeling as much as I possibly could.
"What are you staring at?" he asked, clearly amused.
"Your eyes. Your beautiful eyes." Tears were running down my face. God, he turned me into a sap. I hated it as much as I loved it.
With a helpless, exasperated little moan, he pulled me out of my chair and onto his lap. He started stroking my hair, his mouth at my cheekbone, lips tracing the tears, and murmuring, "Oh, angel," over and over.
After some time I found my composure again, and we went back to acting like things were normal and okay, because we were both starving enough to eat that lie.
"I know why you love to act," Dante told me. He was distracting me from heavy with light.
"I crave the escape. I long for it."
He nodded. He had known. "Who do you want to be right now?"
"Right now? Myself." It was sad how floored I was by that. And a little exasperating how every subject seemed to be an emotional landmine if you spent any time at all treading over it.
I had more questions for him, of course I did, but I had no urge to ask them. More truths could come later. I needed to keep some of my fiction for a time.
There's only so much a heart can take.
Also, the deeper I delved with him, the more inevitable it would be that he began to do some delving of his own, and I did not want that. It went beyond want. I could not take it.
"You have to find a cover story for where you're at when you're with me," he told me later that night.
That was easy. "Anton will be my cover."
I watched as his face went stiff, something dreadful and cruel crawling across it.
Jealousy, of course.
I watched his lips purse. I swear the more mean his mouth twisted the handsomer he was. It was out of hand. I squirmed in my seat.
"Not him," he said, tone hard. "You'll break it off with him, of course. I don't want you to stay tied to him for any reason, not even as an excuse."
"There was nothing going on between me and Anton. Never has been." I saw his face. "I was messing with you. Again." I caught his expression. "I don't know how you can be surprised. I'm not going to say it's your fault that I did it, but you made it too easy. Irresistible for me. And do you have any clue how angry I was?"
"That hurt," he said simply.
"Yes, it did," I agreed, just as simply. "And Anton's perfect as a cover, if I need one. No one ever wants to believe that we really are just friends."
His mouth twisted bitterly. "That's understandable. You are a very convincing couple.
"I told you, we are strictly friends."
"You think that doesn't make me jealous, too? I see how close you are."
"Would you rather I not have had anybody when I didn't have you? Did you want me to be alone?"
I saw I'd gone too far, as I tended to. I corrected the behavior with a quick and necessary subject change. "What do I need the cover for, anyway? Is your mother having me followed?"
"Worse and better."
I cocked my head to the side. "How so?"
"You've been living with one of her spies."
"Excuse me?" I asked him slowly, carefully, as though the way it came out might affect the answer.
"My mother has had someone close to you for quite some time. She knows things that only one of your roommates could know. So we have to be very careful. All of your living habits are being reported to her. That's why you still have to stay there some nights. Why you have to have a cover for the nights that you spend with me. It could be worse. At least they're all gone half the week with work."
It could be worse? I gave him a look of accusing bafflement. "One of my closest friends has been betraying me to your mother?"
He sucked in a breath, punched it out, and said, "Yes, I'm afraid so. Any clue which one it might be?"
I shook my head. I only knew one thing. No matter which one it was, if he was right, it would hurt like hell when I figured it out.
And in the meantime, there was the hurt of doubting three women who had each come to mean the world to me in their own ways.
Farrah, who made me laugh every day, rain or shine. Demi, who made my heart lighter and less cynical. Or Leona, who had taught me what it meant to have girlfriends, to need them, to know the power of being supported by other women.
It was only after a while that I realized Dante and I had been staring at each other. His expression mirrored mine exactly, a moment of perfect understanding, that I'd only ever had with him, where I realized that we were taking the same information and doing the same pragmatic thing with it, processing it identically.
His mouth twisted up bitterly, but his eyes were affectionate on me, and I realized he'd just come to the same conclusion.
It was just another thing I'd made myself forget: The way we dissected life, with a razor-sharp cynicism that held just the perfect amount of shining optimism peppered in. Who else could ever love that about me the way he did?
What was a partner, if not someone who made you feel less alone in the universe? Someone who validated your existence just by understanding you completely and loving you anyway?
Jesus, I was in trouble.
"Just be careful," he finally said. "You can't let any of them know that you suspect them. You have to behave as if each one is the culprit."
I hated that, hated it, but I knew he was right. It was too much to risk if he was that certain one of them was spying on me.
"We'll know who it is soon enough," he continued. "If they're on my mother's payroll to spy on you, they'll be quitting the airline job soon. Adelaide wouldn't be satisfied with a part-timer."
"It can't be Leona," I said finally. "She and I go too far back."
"I'd say she's the least likely, but better to be safe. Like I said, we'll know soon enough."
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
"Love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature."
~Plato
"I'm home," I called out as I closed the massive front door behind me. My voice seemed to echo through an empty house.
It was surreal to be doing this, to be coming home to Dante. If you'd asked me just weeks ago if there was a possibility that I'd be shacking up with the bastard, I would have never even entertained the notion.
I hadn't seen him for more than brief stretches, stolen moments, for the past three days. My roommates had been off work, and that, combined with fourteen hours of shooting each day, meant there'd been almost no spare time.
I missed him like it'd been months, not days.
My friends were off on another trip, and I rushed to him the first possible second I could.
It was truly getting out of hand.
"Dante?" I called out loudly, thinking for a brief moment that he wasn't there.
But he emerged a few seconds later, from a hallway to the right that I hadn't even noticed before. I really needed to get a tour of the place.
I eyed him. He was shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of athletic shorts and running shoes. He was holding both of his hands behind his back in a strange way, but I didn't notice the strangeness so much as the way it made his glistening muscles jump and skitter under his deliciously tanned skin. "You've been out running," I observed.
He bit his lip and nodded. He looked like he was trying to hold in a laugh.
It made my heart feel light to see that smile. God, how had I survived even one day without it?
"Do you not have a job of some sort?" I asked him. Last I'd heard he (predictably) worked for the Durant department store chain. He was the heir apparent to the family fortune and one of the bigger shareholders. He was filthy rich, so I supposed he could just spend his days playing around, but even in college, he'd always worked for and with his family.
"I'm taking some time off. Leo is giving me shit for it, but I don't give a damn. I'll go back soon enough."
"And you'll be able to do it . . . from L.A.?"
"Yes. But enough about that. Aren't you curious about your surprise?"
I'd completely forgotten. He'd said something about a surprise the day before. I gave him a probing look. So that's why he had his hands behind his back. He was holding something. "You know I hate surprises, right?" In my life, they had rarely been a good thing.