Her expression doesn’t change. “No. You can’t.”
I look over her shoulder—there’s nobody left in line. “Come have a cup of coffee with me. Just a few minutes. Please.”
“I’m actually in a hurry.” She takes a step away from me, then another. No. I can’t let her get away that easy.
My hand shoots out, curls around her arm. She’s definitely lost weight. “Please. Just a few minutes. Just once, so I can explain what happened.”
One eyebrow rises. “There’s an explanation?”
“Of course.”
“I suppose you’ve had enough time to think one up.” She glances over her shoulder, where a girl is waiting behind the counter to take her order. I realize I’m holding my breath, waiting to see what she’ll do.
“Come on. What can it hurt to hear me out?”
“I’ll take a latte,” she tells the girl, then, she looks at me. “And I’ll be sitting with this gentleman.” There is sarcasm in the way she said the word gentleman, but my body sags with relief at her announcement. I lead her to the table and she sits opposite me, her spine ramrod straight.
“So what are you doing here?” She tucks her purse between her body and the wall and lays her leather gloves on the table. Her left hand is empty—I have to stop myself before I pump my fist in the air. Not even engaged. Is it possible that she’s been thinking about me these last two years, the way I have?
“I had a meeting with a potential buyer, just a block from here. I thought I’d stop in for a bite before heading back. I’m staying at a hotel nearby.”
“I guess it’s lucky you came in,” she murmurs. She won’t stop fidgeting. Her fingers drum on the tabletop. She keeps craning her neck to look up and down the street. What’s she so nervous about?
“From where I’m sitting, yes. It’s very lucky.” I reach for her hand to quiet the drumming. She pulls it away like my touch burns.
She gives a nervous, breathy laugh. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Two years.”
“Yes. Almost exactly.”
“You look wonderful,” I say softly, drinking her in with my eyes. She’s thinner, but even more beautiful than I remembered her. Memory’s a funny thing—it tends to paint a prettier picture than ever existed in reality. Not in her case. If anything, her hair is even more golden, her eyes a deeper green. Her skin is porcelain. Her lips are full, parted. I know what they feel like. She bites down on her lip and blood surges into my cock, making it twitch and thicken. Good thing there’s a table blocking her view.
“Thank you.” Her cheeks flush, making her even more delectable. Almost like a doll, but a very passionate one. I’ve never forgotten the passion she showed me that night. I’ve never been able to find it anywhere else, in anyone else.
I can’t sit here and make small talk anymore. “I feel like I owe you an apology or an explanation,” I blurt.
She shrugs. “No, you don’t. It’s been a long time. A lot of water has passed under the bridge.”
What happened to her? That’s not what I expected—especially the attitude, the almost bored tone of her voice. Either she had never really cared or I’d hurt her so badly, she was putting on an act. Could her pride still sting after two years? “Then please, do me a favor and let me explain for my own sake.”
“All right. Go on then.” The waitress brings her latte and puts it in front of her. She looks up and thanks the woman. Her hand shakes when she picks up her glass of coffee. That gives me hope. She is not as unaffected as she pretends to be.
“For starters, it was stupid of me not to get your phone number right away. I can’t tell you how stupid I felt when I realized we hadn’t exchanged them. It wasn’t deliberate, believe me. You were in a hurry and I was … well, I was so happy I wasn’t thinking clearly,” I admit.
“Yes, you did want my phone number,” she whispers, frowning.
“Oh, god, yes. Of course I did. I asked you to give me a missed call remember? You never did and I didn’t know how to contact you.”
She nods, a sad, faraway look in her eyes. She must be remembering that day.
“Anyway, after you left, I got a phone call. My best friend’s girlfriend called me. He was dying back in Ireland. The doctors didn’t even think he would make it past the night. He was the only brother I ever knew. We grew up together, went through everything together.” I can talk about it without the hurt choking me anymore. There was a long time when I couldn’t. “He had cancer. Lung cancer, and he never told me because he didn’t want to ask for my help. I had to fly to Ireland. I had to help him.”
Her frown deepens. She stares in my eyes, her gaze searching. She doesn’t know whether to believe me or not.
“I still remember charging around my hotel room, wondering how to contact you so I wouldn’t have to wait. I left a note there for you with a waitress in Costa. When you didn’t show up ...”
Her head jerks back. “But I did show up.”
It’s my turn to frown. “No way. I called five times. You never showed up.”
“That’s impossible. I waited until closing time.” She’s still unsure, though. I don’t blame her. It all sounds ridiculous.
Then it hits me. Oh fuck. “Which Costa did you go to?”
“I … uh … couldn’t remember the name of the street, so I told the taxi driver the Costa on the same street as Le Coq club.”
I close my eyes. It was that simple all along. “There are two Costas on that road. You said the one we passed.”
She leans back, pale, sad. “I didn’t know there were two Costas.”
I cover her hand with mine. “Why didn’t you give me a missed call?”
She shakes her head as if to clear it. “I lost my phone in the cab.”
“Why couldn’t my private investigators find you anywhere, not even on Facebook?”
“I don’t use it much anyway, and if you were looking for an Izzy you wouldn’t have found me. I’m registered under my full name, Isabella Faraday.”
“All these things couldn’t keep us apart. We ended up here together today,” I say in wonder.
She frowns.
“Oh, Izzy. You have no idea how long and hard I looked for you.’
“You did?” Her eyes are enormous. We stare at each other. Then something happens to her. A mask comes over her face. “What happened to your friend? Is he all right now?” Her voice is still shaky, but her face is still, composed; that of a stranger.
“I took Liam to Norway to a specialist hospital. Some kind of DNA mapping treatment. We spent more than two weeks there while he received treatment. He did well—very well. The tumors started shrinking and he made a tremendous turnaround. Energy, weight, appetite, it all started coming back, but it didn’t last.”
“Oh,” she breathes.
“I’ll never understand what happened. Sometimes I think it might have been better for him and Vanessa if I had never stepped in. Better for me, too. Hope can hurt. It fucking crushed us. We had such hopes when he started coming around. So when he died anyway …”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” she says. “Truly, I am.”
I stare into her green, green eyes. She’s just as beautiful as ever. Maybe more. Maybe it’s two years of wanting that makes her look even better than I remembered. “I never forgot you, Izzy. A day didn’t pass without me thinking of you.”
Her eyelids flutter down. “It doesn’t matter now.”
I frown. “I want you to know I’m sorry you thought I stood you up, that I never cared. I did care. It ate my heart out, knowing you went to the hotel. I left a message at Costa, but with the shock of Liam’s illness, I just never even thought about the hotel …”
She holds up a hand and closes her eyes. “Don’t, all right? Just don’t.”
“I’m not trying to dredge up old hurts—”
She opens her eyes and they’re hard, cold. The way I’ve never seen them. “But you are. You are. Right now, you are.” She leans f
orward. “I’ve gotten past it. Truly. It’s not the same as it used to be. I don’t feel angry or hurt. And now that you’ve explained yourself I understand the situation better. It’s good … having closure.”
“Closure? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I never understood what happened and now I know.”
I wait for more. Nothing more comes. “And that’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
She blinks once, twice. “Why should I have anything to say?”
I have to admit, she has me at a complete loss. I watch her face and hope for some sign of encouragement. Anything to hang onto, work with. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. Did you never think of me?”
She looks down at the table. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you, either.”
Yes. I knew it. “You mean that?”
A casual shrug—or a shrug that’s meant to look casual. “Of course. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.”
“Then you can’t pretend that being here with me doesn’t mean anything to you. That Fate bringing us together like this doesn’t mean anything.”
“It does mean something. It was horrible when I thought I had misjudged you. That you never meant to meet up with me. That you had gotten what you wanted and were moving on. That you didn’t know how to let me down easy back at the hotel.” She shrugs. “It took me a long time to get over you. Then I grew up. I appreciated that it was just part of life. Hurts that we have to go through to become the people we are. It’s all in the past now. I’m sorry things turned out the way they did, for you, your friend, and us, but that’s the way it was. We can’t change anything now.”
I watch closely. She can’t mean it. It’s not in the past. I refuse to accept the idea that we didn’t run into each other to give us the second chance we deserve.
The bell on the door tinkles and she jumps, her eyes flying to the door and again I see the unguarded fear in her eyes, but it disappears so fast it is almost as if I imagined it. You can’t work with horses and not have great intuition. Something is not right. I wonder who or what makes her so afraid?
Chapter Twenty-One
Izzy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzIE3mRFypQ
Baby Can I Hold You Tonight?
I can barely hear him over the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears. My heart is pounding so hard it is like a drum in a marching band.
Why did he have to come back into my life?
I don’t need this complication. For two entire years, I’ve gotten by without him. I don’t need him. I don’t want him, but my palms are sweating and I can’t get my heart rate under control. Something else too. Butterflies. Hundreds of them in my stomach. Making me feel nauseous with anxiety. I should leave. He is so big and distinctive. Anyone could see me here.
“Izzy …” he calls urgently.
I look up into his eyes. I can stand sitting here across from him as long as I’m not looking in those impossibly blue eyes. They’re just as beautiful as I remember, but there is something else in them. A bitter sadness. A sadness that makes me want to hold him close and rock him as if he was my baby. It isn’t right for us to sit together the way we are.
It definitely isn’t right that I feel exactly the same right now about him as I did when we first met—only now, I can’t blame the giddy, dizzy feeling, the breathless excitement, on alcohol. Worse, I can no longer hate him for taking advantage of me, of being a coward and a user of the worst kind.
He will never know how difficult it is for me to shake my head and say, “It doesn’t matter. Life has moved on for both of us. We’re not those people anymore. I’m not that girl anymore.”
“I don’t believe you.” His voice is soft, low, but deadly serious.
I wish he would. It would make things so much easier. His food arrives, but he doesn’t touch it. He just keeps on staring at me.
“That’s too bad. Because it’s the truth.” I shift in my chair, suddenly extremely uncomfortable. I’ve never lied to him before. Also, I’ve been sitting here too long. I look out the window again, just to be sure nobody’s watching. The coffee sours in my mouth.
“Why do you keep looking out?”
I whirl my head around. “Because I’d rather be out there than here, with you.”
“That’s a lie, too.”
“Don’t call me a liar,” I warn, my voice unsteady.
“But it is a lie,” he says calmly. “You don’t mean it. You want to be with me just as much as I want to be with you. I can feel it, and fuck anybody who says different.”
I bite my lip, angry with myself for being so transparent. “You’re so full of yourself. Doesn’t it hurt, being that full of yourself?”
“It’ll stop hurting when I’m inside you.”
My mouth opens in a gasp of shock. I can put on a show to everyone else, but I can’t try to hide the desire his words produce in me, there is no hiding from him. He could see right through me. From the very first moment we met.
Desire and dread fight back and forth in my heart. I don’t know which is winning, but I don’t wait to find out. I stand so fast I almost knock the chair backward. He stands too, his movements quick as a cat.
“I need to go now. Please, please don’t follow me.”
I leave the coffee and hurry to the door before he can stop me. I need to get out of here. I can’t breathe. I can’t think straight. For a second there, it almost seemed like a good idea to let myself fall for him again. He’s tempting. As tempting as the Devil himself, but that would have been the worst mistake imaginable.
I’m halfway down the street, rushing and weaving between people casually strolling along, when I hear him calling to me. “Izzy! Izzy, wait!”
Shit, I can’t have him following me and yelling for me like that. He must be crazy. Just to stop him from shouting my name, I come to a halt and whirl around. He’s running, holding out one hand. He comes to a stop in front of me.
“Please, leave me alone.”
“You forgot your gloves.” He holds them out.
I take them from him, feeling confused and saddened. He only ran after me to return my gloves. I shouldn’t feel sad. I can’t have him, anyway. I take the gloves from him. “Thank you. I love these gloves.” I tuck them into my purse rather than put them on. “And thank you for explaining what happened. I hope it’s made you feel better. It’s definitely made me feel a lot better.” He doesn’t say anything so I plough on. “Right. So I’ll be off. I really have somewhere else I need to be.”
“You can bullshit yourself, but not me. You gave up the most precious thing a woman can give, and you gave it to me. That means something. Nothing can ever change that. There is nowhere else you need to be but with me. Now.” He takes a step closer and I know I should push him away. I need to. I ought to. But I don’t. I let the magnetism of him pull me in all over again.
“Please, don’t do this.” It comes out as a weak, pitiful whisper.
“Come with me.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
His smile is just as bright as I remember it, just as sexy, and warmer than the sun. It warms me from the inside out. “Yes, you can. You know you want this as much as I do. We deserve this. Both of us.”
He is another step closer to me. I feel his warmth and smell his cologne. I want to fall into his arms here and now and never leave. What is the spell he has on me? I wish I could break it.
“I shouldn’t …”
“You should, and you will.” He is inches from me and I’m drowning in his eyes. I can’t breathe. There’s nothing in the world but him—nothing at all. Him and me. Just this once, Izzy. For everything you have suffered.
I’m in a taxi before I know it. His arms are around me and he’s crushing his mouth to mine. Everything else is disappearing. I want him to do more. My body melts against him when his arms tighten. I never feel so wanted, so safe, as I do when I’m in his arms. I sense his heart pounding under my hand when I
slide it over his T-shirt. He’s just as firm and strong as I remembered, but no memory is as good as this. The sheer bliss of his lips pressed against mine—moving, demanding, taking. And I want to give. I need to give.
His tongue slides into my mouth, and from the back of his throat comes a growl. I remember the growl. I used to hear it in my dreams. I used to wake up with a rush of raw heat between my thighs. Heat and wetness. My body starts singing a song it forgot the words to. He knows my body, he knows what I need.
We don’t say a word as we hurry through the lobby of his hotel towards the elevator.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Izzy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLUBxLMMio
Lost on You
There is a feeling of deja-vu as we wait for the lift. I remember the feeling of his cock inside me and desperately need that again. I know I shouldn’t indulge myself like this but it’s all so good, so right. Nothing has ever felt so right as it does when I’m with him. I stare at the lift doors remembering our first night. I’ve replayed every moment of it so many times. Even last night.
Nothing has changed. Everything has been perfectly preserved.
He barely waits until the door of his room closes before grabbing me and pushing me up against it. Pressing his body to mine, he devours my mouth. With one rough movement he strips off my coat. I don’t hear it fall. The blood is pounding so hard in my head.
I let my palms slide over his broad, powerful shoulders. God, I’ve missed him. My fingers around his neck. His hands run up and down and all over me until every nerve in my body is screaming.
Uncorking the passion I’ve kept bottled up since that night so long ago, I hook one leg around his and pull him in until his thigh is between mine. Fire races through me, lighting me up, reminding me how dead I’ve been without him, what life is really all about. I moan as I grind myself on his thigh.
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