An Inconvenient Obsession

by Natasha Tate

  He assured her it wasn’t necessary and then closed the door with a soft, ominous click.

  Unwelcome desire, laced with thawing anger and wrenching pain, rose to flutter against her ribs.

  “Hello, gorgeous.”

  The deep voice sent her senses off kilter, spinning her world off its axis. Could she pretend she didn’t know? She tried to affix a pleasant smile to her face, failed miserably in the attempt, then ducked her head to disguise her unease. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”

  He walked toward her while her thoughts careened like a wild carnival ride. It amazed her that she could feel such a consuming blend of anger, betrayal and need for another person, that having him near sent her heart into such a clumsy, thudding delirium. She had trouble breathing normally, and it required scrupulous effort to appear serene.

  “I missed you,” he said, crossing the muffling carpet and joining her at the window. “What do you say we have lunch together?”

  Cate lifted her eyes while her nerves stretched taut. What do I say to him? Unlike two weeks ago, when the distrustful gleam in his gaze testified to the shield he’d erected between them and warned her to keep her distance, he’d perfected a look of open, unfettered yearning.

  Now, with less than two weeks of practice, he looked as if he truly meant all the things he’d whispered against her damp flesh. Gone was the thinly veiled hatred in his expression. Gone was the sardonic twist to his mouth, the shuttered inscrutability within his eyes.

  With his hard, embittered edge buried too deep to see, his magnetism increased exponentially. She felt herself drawing closer. Yielding. Wanting to believe in him, despite the damning truth.

  But she couldn’t succumb to her insatiable longing for him. She mustn’t. She’d made her mistakes. But she’d never deliberately hurt him just because she could. She didn’t deserve this, no matter what she’d done. So she simply stood silent and still, her throat working with her labored breaths, until his fingers lifted, oh so gently, and the pad of his thumb came to rest on the crest of her cheek.

  “You okay?” he asked. His thumb grazed her skin as if he were testing the satiny marble polish of a museum sculpture, too precious to treat with anything less than reverence and awe.

  She stepped sideways, anything to preserve her resolve, but he caught her easily. Inexorably, he drew her closer, until her knees bumped his legs.

  “Hey,” he said, jostling the side of her neck with one hand.

  Unable to meet his eyes, she kept her face tipped down. Undeterred, he slowly brought her into the cove of his arms, aligning their bodies until her forehead touched his sternum. The heady scent of his skin caught at her lungs, flooding her with an unwanted, blind hunger. She wanted him, for far more than the simple pleasure his touch elicited. She wanted him for the false feeling of completeness he wrought. She wanted the happiness she’d foolishly believed he could provide.

  She wanted him because she’d never, ever stopped loving him.

  But the man she loved was a lie. A horrible, horrible lie.

  Her scarred and damaged body didn’t seem to care.

  Though he’d done nothing more than press his wide, warm hands against her upper back and shoulders, she heated unbearably beneath his touch. Yearning leaked from her heart and lungs into the cells of her skin and bones. She felt his breath against her scalp and shivered, fighting the desire to be closer, to feel him against her skin, to lose herself in him once more. What she wouldn’t give to join with him, to pretend she didn’t know the truth.

  What she wouldn’t give to make love to the only man she’d ever wanted.

  But she mustn’t. She mustn’t.

  “You were right,” she finally whispered after a long, long time.

  “About what?” His lips stirred her hair.

  “Me knowing you,” she managed in a shaky voice. She withdrew enough to meet his eyes. “You really aren’t the boy I once knew, are you?”

  He went perfectly still, his breath suspended against her forehead.

  “I know that now,” she said quietly, stepping from his arms while the knot in her chest grew harder. Heavier. Threatening to swallow her with its oppressive blackness. “I know, Ethan.”

  His arms fell to his sides as his jaw flexed. He swallowed, silent.

  “When were you planning to tell me?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t.”

  Lightning cracked, casting a blinding flash of blue highlights on Ethan’s dense black locks. She resisted the urge to touch the silky strands and laced her fingers into a tight, bruising knot of thwarted dreams. “You thought I’d be so distracted, so in love with the man you’re pretending to be, that I wouldn’t notice?”

  His eyes glittered as he stared at her and she could see his pulse thrumming beneath his jaw, echoing the throbbing cacophony within her own chest. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  His answer was a low, intimate murmur. “No.”

  Cate’s gaze skipped from his to the strong line of his shadowed jaw while hot, black anger coiled in her chest. “Right. And I’m supposed to believe you.”

  A dull red flush stained his neck.

  “Get out.”

  “Cate, I—”

  “Get out!” She lifted her arm and pointed at the door, grateful for the rage that kept her arm steady and her legs strong.

  For a long moment, Ethan stood without moving as silent tension spun between them. Cate stared at him, at the knotted fists at his sides and the ticking pulse beneath his jaw, and wondered how long she could remain upright without falling apart.

  “No,” he finally said. “I won’t leave you again.”

  Her stomach bottomed out and her arm fell to her side. “Why? Because you want to savor your victory?” A strangled bleat of disbelief caught in her throat. “Because you want to watch me bleed?”

  “Because I need to explain,” he said.

  She shook her head, feeling oddly as if she were a witness to her own execution. He wanted to explain? “You think there’s a way that I’ll accept what you did? That some magic combination of words will make this … this horrid, wretched betrayal something other than it is?”

  He swallowed and refused to drop his gaze. “Yes.”

  She wanted to pretend he had an explanation that would make everything better. But she was through deluding herself. Through with finding comfort in lies. “Fine.” She’d listen. She’d let him say his piece, then she’d never have to see him again. “Explain.”

  “Thank you.”

  She backed away from his approach, putting her father’s desk between them. Turning from him, she stared in silence out at the bruised purple clouds. Concentrating on the slanting rain, she prayed for a swift end to her torment.

  Just make it fast.

  Ethan stood two yards from her, stark and unmoving, and the silence between them grew heavy, as thick and toxic as smoke. She couldn’t breathe. And yet silence was safer than speech. Safer than confronting his lies.

  “I never meant for you to find out,” he finally told her in a low, quiet voice.

  “That doesn’t help your case,” she answered without meeting his eyes, “and before you spin me more lies, you need to know that I’m not going to change—”

  “Just listen first,” he interrupted, “and then you can tell me what you will and won’t do.”

  She turned her gaze to his and found him staring at her, his blue eyes glittering from within the shadows of his lean face. Unable to maintain eye contact, she resumed her study of the clouds while her trepidation built.

  He leaned toward her, his hands pressing flat against the incriminating papers strewn atop her desk. “I need to say some things to you, things I should have said two weeks ago.”

  “There’s nothing you can say that will make up for what you’ve done.”

  “Damn it, Cate, I have to try.” He hauled in a steadying breath, and waited until she turned her head to look at him. “You were right abou
t the lies. And you were right about me hating you, wanting revenge. But I’ve changed. You changed me.”

  A dark pain threatened to overwhelm her. More lies—it was the one thing she couldn’t bear. “You haven’t.”

  “I know you don’t believe me,” he said gruffly. “But let me finish. Let me try to salvage our future.”

  She swallowed, the knot in her throat thickening enough to choke her. She had no future with Ethan. No future at all.

  Ethan didn’t move to touch her, though his eyes didn’t release their claim on hers. He just leaned forward, bracing his elbows as he addressed her. “My soul was connected to yours before you even knew who I was.” His gaze scanned her face, his black hair gleaming in the filtered light of her lamp. “Did you know that?”

  She stared at him in silence.

  “You were nine the first time I saw you, skinny and awkward and shining with some inner light that drew me like a moth to a flame. I couldn’t have stayed away if I’d tried. Dad told me who you were, who your father was and warned me that you couldn’t play with me. He said you were to be admired from a distance, like the pictures in a glossy magazine or an actor on television. But I couldn’t keep my distance, no matter how wrong and impossible it was. I wanted to be near you. And we were young enough that you allowed it.”

  Her vision blurred as she recalled the earnest, careful boy he’d once been. Even then, she’d sensed his caution, had yearned to draw him out, to make him carefree and happy instead of so solemn and quiet.

  “And the best part was, the differences between us didn’t seem to matter. You didn’t care that I didn’t come from money. You didn’t care that I didn’t attend a fancy school or wear all the right clothes. You were my best friend, Cate, and I grew to love you more than I think any other man has loved a woman.”

  He stared at her as she blinked back the film of tears.

  “For a long time after you sent me away, I tried to convince myself that what I felt back then was an illusion based on lies. That I hated you for toying with me, for pretending to love me when you didn’t. But I was wrong. No matter how much I wished it otherwise, no matter how many other women I saw, I couldn’t let go of you. And I don’t want to fight it anymore.”

  “Then why?” she began, misery welling in her throat. “Why did you do this?”

  “I told you I wanted to buy the island for my father, remember? I wanted to give him his pride back and I told myself that by giving him the island, the home where he’d lived for years as someone else’s servant, it would help. He’s spent his life believing he wasn’t good enough, that we weren’t good enough, and I’ve spent the last ten years trying to prove him wrong. But nothing ever works, you know? People believe what they’re going to believe, and you can’t change it. At least that’s what I’ve always thought.”

  “Ethan—”

  “But I was wrong, Cate. I was wrong about a lot of things. It turns out I’ve been lying to myself just as much as I’ve been lying to you. Yes, I bought the island for my father. But I also bought it for me. I never really moved past your rejection and I think that buying the island was a way for me to prove that your hold on me wasn’t real, that it was just a carryover from my unrequited adolescent crush and the insecurities of my youth. I thought that if I owned the place you’d sent me away from, I could forget. Buying your island, pursuing you, hell, even making love to you that first time, it was just me trying to eliminate my obsession with all the things I’d been told I couldn’t have, all the things I wasn’t supposed to feel. But when you sent me away again, all those old feelings of inadequacy returned. It was like I was that poor, groveling kid again, trying to earn your love. And it hurt. It made me want to hurt you in the same way, just so I could stop feeling so damn much.”

  “And you did,” she whispered.

  “I know I did, and you’ll never know how sorry I am. I lied when I told myself that once I had you, once I seduced you and ruined you and hurt you, your hold on me would finally dissipate. I lied to myself thinking it would put the past to rest and leave me free to live my life.” His voice dropped to silence for a moment, the pattering of rain against the windows filling the quiet. “But my plans haven’t quite worked out the way I envisioned. The Cate you were before is the same Cate you are now. And even though I’ve screwed things up and destroyed your trust in me, I can’t give you up again. The love I feel for you is real, and I’m going to fight for you. I’m going to fight for us.”

  “There is no us anymore,” she said, the back of her nose pinching with new tears.

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you what I’d done,” he said. “I discovered the truth too late, before I had a chance to stop everything I’d put into place, and I’ve been working like hell ever since to reverse it before you found out.”

  “But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter what you do now. It’s what you did that has destroyed anything we might have had together.”

  “But I can fix it, Cate. I swear, I can. I’ll make it better. I’ll buy it all back, put it all together again. Just marry me. Stay with me. Let me share my life with you.”

  “But you can’t put me back together again,” she choked. “I’ve struggled for ten years to feel whole, to move past my scars and all the internal damage my accident caused. And I believed in you, Ethan. I believed you when you said we had a future. But now, I feel like I’ve been ripped open for a second time. Only this time, it’s worse. It hurts more. Can’t you see that? How can I possibly trust you after this?”

  “I know how betrayal feels, Cate. I’ve lived it for ten years, and it’s miserable. You have to believe me when I tell you how sorry I am that I’ve done this to you. I made a mistake because I didn’t believe in the woman you truly are. I didn’t believe in my own memories of you. I didn’t trust myself around you, and I needed a way to fight the pain of it.”

  “Then how can you expect me to love you when even you don’t trust yourself?”

  “Because I do trust myself now. I trust the way I feel about you. And if you become my wife, I swear I’ll do everything I can to make you happy. To make you love me.” His voice, soft and quiet and careful, held none of the cocky bravado of before. It betrayed the risk he took, the gamble he’d made by placing his heart in her hands. “I know I don’t deserve you, but I swear I’ll never hurt you again. I’ll protect you with my life. Just tell me you’ll have me, Cate, and I’ll fight the entire world to keep you from ever feeling pain again.”

  Every word, every confession brought a new twist of misery inside Cate. Her breath couldn’t fight its way around the knot of despair crowding her chest and her entire body shook with the pain of rejecting him. “It’s not the world that hurt me, Ethan. It was you. What you did, it killed a part of me, the part I’d need to love you again, and I can’t …” She bit her lips, blinking back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her resolve. “We’ve both hurt each other too much. It’s obvious you’ve never forgiven me, and I’m not sure I could ever trust someone who is capable of doing what you’ve done.”

  “If you ever cared for me like you said you did, we can get past this.”

  “No, we can’t.” She firmed her jaw and spoke to her hands, hoping he’d take her at her word and accept her decision. “I’d have to love you in order for it to work, and I don’t. Not anymore. I can’t.”

  “Then don’t love me. Caring for me is enough.” He strode around the desk and collected her icy hands between his own. “Please, Cate. I can be happy with that.”

  “No.”

  He swallowed with difficulty, his eyes searching hers and his grip tightening around her fingers. “Cate,” he choked out, “I swear the love I feel can be enough for us both. And in time, perhaps you’d find a way to forgive me. Perhaps if you tried …”

  Despair spiraled through Cate, tempting her to relent. She wanted so badly to accept his apology, to forget what he’d done and simply accept the love he offered. But the icy prickling of warning along her skin
urged caution. She couldn’t bear to court more pain, to always, always doubt his word. She couldn’t bear to bury her fears beneath desire, his seeds of resentment and revenge always germinating beneath a soil fraught with wanting.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t trust him again.

  So she pulled her hands from his, the sacrifices of her past merging with the heartbreaking certainty of her future. “No. I won’t marry you.” Her fingernails dug painfully against her palms. “I won’t marry without trust and I can’t trust you again. Ever.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?” The question, soft with regret, abraded her skin and made her flinch. But the vulnerable pain lacing his voice made her throat constrict, as well. She knew what he wanted. What he needed. He needed a woman who could love him without reservation, a woman who would never hurt him or reject him. He needed a partner he trusted and who trusted him, a soul mate, a woman who shared his goals, his dreams and his future. Once, she’d dreamed of being that woman. But no longer.

  Her dreams had died this morning, beneath the harsh pummeling of truth.

  “I’m sorry, Ethan, but I won’t,” she said.

  “So we’re through?”

  “Yes. This isn’t about what we’ve done to each other or the pain we’ve endured. It’s about the way you view me. And the way you view yourself. You may have climbed the ranks in everyone else’s eyes and amassed a fortune too large to ever spend, but to yourself, you’re still that same boy who was forbidden to speak to me. You’ll always feel like you have to prove something, and then you’ll lash out when your perceptions of yourself don’t change.”

  “But your love has changed those perceptions.”

  She shook her head. “No. If it had, we wouldn’t be here now. I can’t fix how you feel when you’re with me and you will always resent me for it. We’d forever be stuck with this huge, insurmountable obstacle that you’ve shown yourself incapable of moving past.” Though she knew it was the only thing she could say to convince him, the words tasted like ash in her mouth. “We don’t belong together,” she said raggedly. “We never did. You know that.”