Page 48 of State of Ruin

“You live with your sister?” he asks, sounding sharply surprised.

“Yeah. It’s a long story.” I look out of the window.

“Well,” he says in the upbeat tone that suggests a deliberate change of subject, “I’m ashamed to say I’ve never tried it. I will remedy that as soon as I can. And I’m even more ashamed to say that the lindens in front of my house are in a sorry state. They’ve lost all their leaves now—they’re one of the first to go. My brother’s beech is looking disgustingly good, though.”

I giggle, and he reaches over and squeezes my hand in my lap.

“Let’s go see, shall we?”

Yes. Let’s go see, indeed.

I am in a fever dream, the beauty of which I’ll never get over. Sinclair’s home is the most perfect gem of a place I’ve ever seen—though the word gem implies smallness, which absolutely is not the case. We hit a high hedge at the end of the driveway, which he told me shielded the back of the main house and the pool area from sight. (Apparently, having your pool on full display is a little déclassé—his word. Who knew?) He takes us down a turnoff to the left, which opens up onto a gravel area banked with more trees and the prettiest house I’ve ever seen.

I jump down from the car before he has a chance to grab my door. To one side sits a bank of grass leading to the water, while the main entrance stands in front of me. It’s so adorable, it’s like candy for the eye: a dark gray roof, and lighter gray siding, charcoal shutters, and the prettiest details, especially the little white wooden balcony that stands over the main porch. I can smell earth and salt and goodness, and I sniff hard. Let’s say the Kill van Kull back home does not smell this good.

“It’s so beautiful!” I say, turning on the spot to take it all in. This must be what love at first sight feels like. I want to encase my feet in concrete and never, ever leave.

Sinclair closes the passenger door for me and takes my hand. “Welcome to The Lindens,” he says, a look on his face that feels a little self-conscious. “Let me give you a tour. I’ll grab the bags later.”

He unlocks the front door and leads us into a large, square hallway whose central table bears a giant blue-and-white china vase filled with flowers. The first thing that hits me is how fresh the air smells, even in here. It’s probably the flowers, but this isn’t a house that’s shuttered up and left to fester for weeks on end. I guess he has staff to air it out.

“Kitchen,” he says, gesturing to our left. I catch sight of off-white cupboards and copper pendant lights: the Long Island version of Sinclair’s kitchen porn. But he tugs me through some big white double doors to our right, and wow. We’re in a palatial great room that looks straight onto the water. Its colors are pale, muted: robin’s-egg-blue walls and white woodwork and comfortable-looking beige couches. I guess we’re facing west, because the late afternoon sunlight streams in through the huge bay window and sparkles on the water beyond.

“Wow.”

I may just spend the entire weekend saying Wow, but I have no other words. It’s simply beautiful. Outside, the view to the body of water is unbroken except for a peek of a bare tree that I guess is one of Sinclair’s lindens. I walk over to the window as though I’m under a spell, which I kind of am, and gaze out at the beauty beyond. It’s majestic and serene all at the same time. Sinclair follows, standing behind me and wrapping his arms around me. I feel his entire body sag in this giant exhale as he rests his chin on my head.

“Remind me why you live in Manhattan?” I ask him, reveling in the warmth of his vise.

“Sometimes, I have no clue,” he mutters, his words reverberating softly through my skull. “The only answer I’ve come up with is that you need the pace of the city to appreciate the pace of being out of it, you know? If I were here twenty-four seven I’d probably grow bored.”

“Yeah, but I bet it would take a while,” I counter, and he chuckles softly, dipping his mouth to my ear.

“It would with you around. I bet I could hole up with you here for weeks and weeks and never have a second of anything approaching boredom,” he says huskily. My heart fills with something that feels like warm molasses, because Yeah. What he said. A million percent. I reach up and cover his hands with mine, squeezing as hard as I can.

“Would we have food?”

“So much food. I’d get my housekeeper to leave it all at the door, because, you know, we’d be naked the whole time. So it wouldn’t be proper to let the staff see us.”

“Of course,” I agree, while in my head, another movie montage starts up: a Sinclair-coded take on The Notebook, after Allie and Noah have finally had sex in his beautiful shingle home. We’d fuck, and eat, and sleep, and fuck some more, with only log fires and cozy plaid blankets and each other’s skin to keep us warm.

God, I can see it all so clearly, even if, in this scenario, I’m definitely Noah, the cute but penniless, blue-collar part of the equation, and Sinclair is Allie Hamilton on steroids.

It appears that coming here with him may just have been the most reckless thing I’ve ever done.

I thought taking his money and letting him lock me in a room for an hour was dangerous.

I had no freaking clue—and, it seems, no survival instinct.

CHAPTER 26

Elyse

Ifeel like time should slow right down in a place like this, but instead, it’s going way too quickly. Honestly, I can see why Sinclair’s family guards the privacy of Fairwater so fiercely. It’s heaven on earth.

We had a quiet evening yesterday: a walk around the grounds, colorful leaves crunching underfoot, then dinner—a delicious lasagna that his housekeeper had left in the fridge for us with a smooth red. We soaked in Sinclair’s big claw-foot tub—that got dirty very quickly—and took ourselves off to his bed for a repeat performance.

It was all perfect, but the best part by far?