by Jenna Mills
And holding me.
Just holding me, there against his body, his arms around me, his heart slamming into mine.
And for the moment, there beneath the stars, it was enough.
I had no way of knowing it was also the beginning of the end, that in less than twenty-four hours, he'd reach for me again.
But the tenderness would be gone.
#
The email was waiting when I got home.
A.
She wanted to meet.
Finally.
Four days. That's all I had left. Four days to wrap up, finish. Four days to prepare to walk out the door. Of his life.
Four days to find The End.
Trying to make sense of it all, I wrote. I wrote deep into the night. I wrote everything. I wrote because I had to. Because I didn't want to forget. I didn't want time to dim one single detail. I couldn't let the memories fade. I knew I needed to remember...everything.
Everything.
Keeper of the Shadows
He takes me places, but doesn't tell me where until we get there. Sometimes not even then. For all that he plans ahead, sharing intimate details is not his thing. He holds those close, where no one can catch even a glimpse until—and if—he is ready.
There are elements I want to hold close, too. Rare, stolen glimpses. Private moments. Sharing them feels wrong, like a violation. But that is my job. To share not only the man at the party, but the man in the night, surrounded by dark waters and skeletal remains.
There are those who say he's never gotten over losing his wife. There are those who say he was the one who killed her. It's possible both theories are correct. You can kill someone, without ever lifting a weapon. You can kill someone by doing nothing at all. By simply living your own life...if your life isn't the one they want you to live. If they want you to live differently. Love differently. If they want more than you have to give.
When you don't, they don't know what to do, or how to go forward.
So they don't.
They don't go forward.
And you're left in the shadows.
The shadows of what could have been.
Of what never was.
Because that's all that remains.
Shadows.
Day 7
A Thousand Jagged Pieces
Small and unmarked, the envelope lay a few inches from the door. Inside, a key, and a note. With two words.
For you.
Restless to finish preparing for my meeting with A, maybe I should have waited. Maybe I should have showered first, gotten dressed. Looking back, I realize that would have been wiser. But at that moment, in that moment, all those self-imposed rules fell away, and curiosity won. I can't say that I regret what I did, either. Standing. Slipping into the hall. Hurrying across to the first of the four closed doors. Lifting the key to the lock—
"Not wasting any time, are you?"
After six days in his world, the voice shouldn't have surprised me. Stiffening, I stood there a moment, standing so, so still, while everything inside me raced. Then, with a slow breath, I turned.
He stood in a doorway at the end of the dimly lit hall. Open. The door that had always before been closed was open.
"Aidan."
He was dressed, dark jeans and a grey, slim-fit t-shirt. But his feet were bare. "I wondered how long you'd be able to wait."
So much hit me at once, the way he was watching me—the fact he was watching me. That he knew the second I left my room.
That I hadn't taken time to dress.
That I stood there in an oversized t-shirt, my hair uncombed and tangled around my face, not a trace of makeup, my legs bare.
"Everything's a test with you, isn't it?" The realization twisted through me. Every time I pushed closer, he pushed back ten times harder.
"Not everything."
A trail of crumbs. That's all I could think. He doled them out, one at a time, carefully, deliberately, while he watched to see if I would follow.
Maybe they were real—maybe they were pretend.
Maybe they led where I wanted to go—maybe they led where he wanted me to go.
Maybe the two were one and the same.
Or maybe that was only a fantasy.
Mine. My fantasy.
"Nervous?" he asked, glancing at the key clenched in my hand. "Just what are you hoping to find behind those doors?"
A soft glow. That's all I could see. A soft light filtering out from behind him. "You."
I don't know what I expected. For him to pull the door closed. Step toward me. Block me.
Stop me.
But he did none of that. He just stood there, right there where he was, dominating the doorway while I stepped closer.
"Pieces of your life," I added, keeping my eyes on him. But it was hard, crazy hard, when shapes began to take form in the room behind him. "Of you." All that he worked so hard to keep hidden behind the walls, the control he exerted every moment of every day. "Pictures. Knick-knacks. A vase. A book." Grey. I could tell the walls were a soft grey. "Anything personal." A bed. Big. Dominant. Even without letting myself look beyond him, the image formed. "Something you picked out when the world wasn't watching."
Something he'd locked away—when the world was.
He shifted, lifting an arm to brace his hand against the doorjamb. "So tell me...is that what you think you'll find?"
Once, I thought that. Before. "Only if you want me to." Because now I knew. Now I knew there was nothing casual or unguarded about Aidan Cross.
Nothing random.
"You gave me the key," I said. "You know I'm writing the article." The laugh just kind of happened. "For all I know, you put something in these rooms last night after we got back, specifically for me to find."
His eyes flared, ever so briefly, before the bored sexuality returned. "Are you suggesting this is staged?"
His life was about plotting and curating and crafting, controlling each and every moment. Every breath. He was always on guard. Always careful. I wasn't sure he remembered any other way.
But I did know this—if he didn't want me to see inside, the key would not be in my hand.
"I have no illusions you're going to let me find anything you don't want me to," I said. Mama Dauphine. The abandoned mansion. The boat. Those were all things he wanted me to see.
Close. We stood so close now, so close he lifted a hand and slid a tangle of hair from my face. "Maybe you already have," he said hoarsely, and his fingers, they lingered along my cheekbone. "Last night. We both know not all research is willing."
My breath caught. My throat burned.
"Go ahead, Kendall," he said, and then he was gone, just like that, stepping aside to clear my view into the room.
His room.
"You know you want to," he said.
I did.
I did.
More than anything.
And yet something I didn't understand burned through me. Questions...caution. "Why?" I wanted to know. "Why now?"
Nothing changed. Not the light. Not how we stood. But I would have sworn the shadows deepened. "There's not much time left."
Three days. "But you didn't have to do this," I pressed. "You didn't have to give me a key."
"No. I didn't."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, stepping away from him and into the room. Cavernous, sparse, masculine, as miserly with its secrets as he was with his own.
But it was his room. I knew that, even without one picture on the wall, one knick-knack on the dresser. Without one book or magazine or even a shoe on the floor. The muted scent of sandalwood and soap told me that. The warmth. The low current zinging through the air.
His room.
His big sleigh bed.
His dark grey comforter and light grey sheets.
Where he slept.
"That bad?" he asked, and his voice, low and thick and entirely too close, jarred me back into the moment, and the realization that he stood a
whisper behind me.
I made myself breathe. "Why would you ask that?"
"The look on your face," he said, stepping closer still. "Sad. Like you want to cry."
Classic Aidan Cross. Deflect. Redirect. Control. "That usually works for you, doesn't it?" I refused to step back from him. Refused to put more space between us. "Shift the focus to me, so I don't focus on you?"
There was a stillness to him. The same stillness from the night before, the stillness I felt rather than saw. "Is that what I'm doing?"
Totally. Completely.
Always.
"Maybe it's such a part of who you are, you don't even realize it anymore," I said.
His mouth curved. "Does that mean I shouldn't ask if this," he said, gesturing around his room, "is what you expected?"
No, he shouldn't ask.
And no, it wasn't.
And yet, standing there in the wash of grey, I realized maybe I should have. "Expecting anything is dangerous," I whispered.
"What about wanting then?" The blue of his eyes gleamed. "Did you find what you wanted?"
Him.
I'd wanted to find him.
"Maybe," I said as much to him, as myself. But that was the thing about wanting. It was also dangerous. It could take over. Blind you to everything else. "But it's too soon to know for sure."
Outside, the sun shone, but little light made it through the drawn curtains—grey—casting the room in a soft, shimmery shadow. "Ready to move on then?" he asked, "or do you want to spend more time here in my room?"
The slide of heat was automatic, an invisible caress that made everything inside me hum. I looked at him, looked at the dark light in his eyes as he shifted his focus from me, to the bed.
His bed.
"Maybe you want to see how soft my sheets are?" he suggested. "Find out what kind of mattress I like. Soft—or hard...."
I laughed. I had to. The glimpse of vulnerability from the night before...it was all gone. "How about door number two?" I asked.
"Whatever you want."
I made myself turn, I made myself walk away. Away from him, his bed, his room. Across the hall, to the original door I'd approached. There, I inserted the key, turned, and pushed inside.
Bright. That was my first impression. Unlike his room, a stark white bathed the walls. No curtains framed the window. Here the harsh light of early morning illuminated everything.
Except there was nothing. That hit me second. The absolute emptiness. Nothing. Not one single thing in the room. Walls and floors bare. No furniture. No boxes. No anything. Only emptiness.
Emptiness closed off since I'd arrived, locked securely away.
A mistake. That's what hit me third. The enormity of my foolishness. I'd been so sure. I'd convinced myself there was some big secret to Aidan Cross. Something of consequence hiding behind the locked doors. Something he wanted to protect—or hide.
But that was all an illusion. My illusion. There was nothing, I realized. Nothing hidden here behind the closed door. Nothing that needed to be protected.
Nothing.
Except, a quiet part of me whispered, a part that hurt in ways I didn't understand.
Sometimes, nothing wasn't a lie.
Sometimes nothing was all that remained.
Sometimes nothing hurt more than everything.
I didn't turn to look at him. I couldn't. I didn't want to lift my eyes to his. I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't want to see, or maybe it was him who I didn't want to see. Him...who I didn't want to see me.
Blindly, I whirled around and made my way to the third room. I pushed the door open, fully prepared to again find nothing.
The rose glow stopped me.
Because I knew. The second I saw the gorgeous antique furniture in rich, dark woods, the ornate poster bed and velvet settee, the brocade drapes framing the window...I knew.
Not nothing.
It wasn't nothing that Aidan kept locked away in this room.
It was Laurel.
Woodenly, I stepped forward, deeper into the lingering scent of lavender and baby powder, running my hand along the plush comforter as I approached boxes stacked near a gorgeous old roll-top desk. Along the top lay a pair of sunglasses, large and tortoiseshell and cat-eye. A row of small white votives. A primitively carved wooden cross. And...a framed picture.
Of Laurel, and Aidan.
The needle of cold was automatic.
Young. They were so young, laughing on a beach somewhere, the water a shimmering turquoise, white clouds dotting the blue, blue sky, the sand sugar white.
Her eyes.
His.
I don't know which hit me harder.
"She was beautiful," I said, because I knew he stood there behind me. I could feel him, could hear the rasp of his breath.
"She never thought so."
My throat worked.
"She wasn't strong like you," he said. "She wasn't confident. She'd come in here and lock herself away—"
I turned without thinking. "Why?"
"Because it was safe."
"But why?" I pressed. "Why did she need safety—what was she afraid of?"
Him. The answer he'd given me the night before flashed through his eyes, ever so briefly, before the familiar wall of nothingness slid into place. But I knew. I knew the truth he lived with, the reality: a wife should turn to her husband, not away.
"You didn't sleep together?" I asked, cringing the second the words left my mouth. They obliterated every line between in and out of bounds, between public knowledge, and insanely private.
But Aidan gave no indication, no flicker in his eyes, no tightening of his face, no jolt of stillness. If anything, one corner of his mouth curved. "This room wasn't where she slept."
The cold kept seeping, but against it, heat rushed.
"It's the room she grew up in," he said before I could ask anything else. "She recreated it after we got married, said she didn't want to lose herself in my world."
His.
World.
This. It was what I wanted. Answers. Insight. Glimpses into the shadows of his life. And yet, the sense of being a voyeur, no different than the tourists who crowded his sidewalk, twisted through me, and wouldn't let go.
Mechanically, I turned and stepped toward Laurel's desk, seeing her belongings with new eyes. I'm not sure why I reached for the picture. I'm not sure why I wanted to touch, draw it closer. But the second I saw the necklace, everything else was forgotten. It lay at the base of the frame, delicate and ornate, puddled against a feather encased in amber.
I moved without thinking, scooping up the rosary-like beads and watching them slide between my fingers—cobalt identical to those hidden beneath my sleep shirt.
For your protection, Adelaide had said the day before. You must never let his shadows touch you.
"What's this?" I asked, turning toward him. My heart was slamming crazy fast, but I kept my voice calm. "I've seen similar—"
"Dauphine," he said before I could finish. "She makes them. It was a wedding present."
I wasn't the first.
The realization rocked me.
"Did...Dauphine like her?" I made myself ask.
Aidan stood there so very, very still. "She didn't want us together." The words were cold, stark. "Said it was wrong. We were wrong. That it wouldn't end well."
"Is...Dauphine always right?"
No, I wanted him to say. Not always.
But that's not what I got. "I trust her."
"Then why didn't you listen to her?"
He turned away, turned away fast, toward the boxes stacked along the wall. "Maybe I wanted to prove her wrong."
But she wasn't.
"...That there's no such thing as fate."
I should have stayed where I was. I knew that. But I couldn't. I couldn't just stand there. "And now?" I asked, stepping toward him.
He turned back, the strangest light in his eyes.
"What do you believe now?"
"Now I d
on't think about it anymore." With the words his fingers brushed mine, and the beads were gone. "Tell me, Kendall. Have you had enough fun and games yet? Are you ready to go?"
I watched him slide his wife's necklace into the pocket of his jeans. "Why?" I asked. "Does having me in here make you nervous?"
"Not the room," he said with a dark laugh. "Here. New Orleans. My world. Are you ready to go back to your life?"
Yes or no. I knew that was what he wanted. Yes, he had succeeded in making me want to leave.
Or no...he had succeeded in making me want to stay.
In his world.
With him.
"I have three more days," I side-stepped.
My sense of victory was short-lived. "You're counting." His smile was as amused as it was knowing. "But just because you have more time, doesn't mean you want it."
Deflect, deflect, deflect. It was all he knew. "Maybe you're the one trying to get rid of me..." I countered.
"Does it seem like that's what I'm doing?" He stepped closer. "I thought I was giving you exactly what you wanted."
Don't step back, I told myself. Don't step back. Because he was. That was true. He was giving me everything I wanted.
But that was also a lie. I wanted him to let me in. But I could never want this, the shadows in his eyes, the cold seeping through me. "No—"
"Because you can tell me if something has changed," he rolled on before I could finish. "If I'm giving you too much, if you want me to stop...."
No. Nothing's changed, somewhere inside me insisted.
But that was another lie.
Everything.
Everything had changed.
"Because I will," he said, so, so quietly. Too quietly. "We can stop right now if that's what you want—"
This time it was me who didn't let him finish. Me who spoke in a voice so quiet each word hurt as it ripped free. "I don't want to stop."
And with that, with one last look around Laurel's room, I turned and made my way down the hall. I didn't know what time it was, but knew I didn't have much longer before I needed to slip off to meet with A. At the fourth door, I made quick work of the lock and pushed inside—
The crib sat in a wash of sunlight, the rich rosewood a striking contrast to the soft gold walls. Next to it, a stuffed lamb sat in an old rocking chair.