Page 123 of Marcus

He was who he was, and he needed to be that person even when it was the last thing he wanted to do.

The clearing of Cara’s throat brought Cella’s attention back to her. With the kids making a ton of noise and having all sorts of fun while ignoring their parents’ pleas to be careful it was easy to be distracted from the handsome man just twenty feet away who still had her whole heart, even if he didn’t know it.

“I was you once,” Cara said quietly.

“I’m sorry?”

“Walls so high. I couldn’t let anyone over those walls. That meant I might get hurt again. This life … it might take from me again. And if it did, would the next thing it took from me be something I couldn’t afford to give?”

Cella’s inhale rattled in her chest. “You had a twin, didn’t you?”

Marcus told her that once when she noticed a picture in his home. He’d never explained in detail about how Cara’s twin died, just that she had when she was young.

Cara nodded once. “People couldn’t tell us apart unless they knew us very well. We lived together from the time we were born up until the day she died right beside me on marble steps. Every time I look at marble now, I see blood in the grain. It’s not the same, I’m sure, as losing your husband because of this life, but it still felt like a piece of my soul was taken from me until I met Gian.”

The woman shook her head, turning to watch the kids come down the big red slide one by one as she continued with, “People called me silly—naïve. They expected me to just understand I couldn’t not be who I was. I couldn’t walk away from this life, and this person it turned me into. And so it terrified me. I was scared to death of what it meant to want a man like the one I have. He stayed, though. Just like a pillar in a hurricane. Nothing moved him, and I kept going back for safe shelter.”

Cella didn’t quite know what to say to that, so she opted to say nothing at all. Cara didn’t seem to mind because the woman turned to her with another one of her soft smiles. The one that felt like a mother’s smile. It spoke of a woman who had watched life evolve around her, and she was proud of all that had become of it.

God.

Cella wanted to be that woman.

Ready.

Unafraid.

Strong.

“There came a time,” Cara said quieter, “where I began to realize that I needed to stop looking at Gian as though he was the one who had to be worthy of me. He’d already been that. Stood by me when I turned him away. Loved me when I swore I didn’t love him. And I didn’t need to be worthy of him, either, when he already showed me that I was. See, it’s once you start demanding that this life be what you deserve that it starts to give back to you, Cella.”

“I think I knew that,” Cella replied, fingering the thin shoulder strap on her dress just to give her something to do. “From the start, he was just there.”

“When you didn’t expect him to be?”

“Exactly like that.”

Cara nodded. “And falling never felt so natural, hmm?”

“Easy, really.”

Because it had all been easy with Marcus. Maybe so much so that she found it just as easy to run away. Things that didn’t take work could sometimes be the simplest things to leave behind. It was only now that she had learned maybe it had been this way for them together because life was finally starting to give her something back after all it had taken from her.

He was what she deserved and that’s why she was here. Because Cara was right. Lucia had been right. She wanted to be happy. Would be. And she was ready to fight for it.

“Go,” Cara told her as music started to play from somewhere else in the penthouse, and Gian called out for the woman of the hour to come dance, “and take what you deserve, Cella. Don’t you think it’s time?”

She did.

“You know, gold really does suit you.”

Cella felt those words just as much as she heard them. Strange how that worked, but then again, it had always been like that with Marcus.

In her determination to find him after everyone gathered in the large sitting room to dance and share drinks—because he seemed to just disappear—she hadn’t realized he’d done that purposely. He left the crowd to hide in the shadows, and it was almost disconcerting how well he blended into them as she nearly walked right on past. She figured maybe he’d slipped away from the rest of the party to take a phone call, but considering she found him standing there as though he were waiting for her … well, that changed everything.

She admired the sight of him in his three-piece suit, the red vest and tie he’d opted to wear bringing out the golden tan of his skin even more.

“What are you doing back here?”