Page 115

I woke up Monday morning and remembered I hadn't murdered my mother.

The thought arrived before I opened my eyes, not with the violence of last night before but with a strange, almost tentative sense of wonder, as though my brain had spent the hours I was asleep examining the evidence Doryu had shown me and had finally decided it was prepared to accept what my eyes already knew.

I hadn't deliberately pushed her. My sneaker had caught on the step, I'd fallen forward, and my hands had struck her back because she'd been directly in front of me. What happened afterward had been a terrible accident involving a frightened seven-year-old boy who'd been running after his mother because he didn't want to lose her.

I lay still beneath the covers and waited for the familiar voice to argue.

It had been there for so long that I knew exactly what it should say. I'd heard some variation of it after every important moment of my life, reminding me that my mother wasn't there because of me and that I didn't deserve the good things that happened afterward.

This morning, there was nothing.

Instead, I saw the little boy from the video with skinny legs, an oversized T-shirt, and a backpack bouncing against his shoulders. Watching him from the outside had changed something I still didn't completely understand, because I'd spent more than twenty years remembering what it felt like to be him without ever really seeing how young he'd been.

The relief that moved through me was almost painful, and I drew a deeper breath before immediately discovering that my ribs had strong opinions about emotional breakthroughs before breakfast.

“Fuck.”

The arm around my waist tightened, and Max's sleepy voice came from somewhere behind my ear. “Your ribs?”

“Yeah. I forgot about them for a second.”

“That seems optimistic considering half your side currently looks like an eggplant.”

I smiled into the pillow, partly because of the ridiculous comparison and partly because his accent was much thicker when he'd just woken up. “Good morning to you too.”

“Bonjour,” he murmured, pressing his face briefly against the back of my neck before his hand shifted cautiously over my stomach.

Only then did I become properly aware of the way we'd slept. My back was tucked against Max's chest, one of his legs tangled loosely with mine, and his arm curled around me as though we'd been doing this for years rather than a couple of nights.

I couldn't remember moving toward him.

Given how completely I'd crashed after returning from Ignatius's suite, it was entirely possible Max had pulled me close after I fell asleep. It was equally possible I'd gone looking for him without waking, and oddly enough, that possibility didn't frighten me.

For weeks, every intimate moment between us had carried some sort of complication. Wanting Max had been followed by worrying about why I wanted him, while touching him came with questions about whether either of us would regret it afterward. Even Vegas had been followed by me wondering whether I'd been another notch on a bedpost that, as far as I now knew, didn't actually exist.

This morning there was no immediate disaster waiting on the other side of waking up beside him.

Maybe that wouldn't last.

For once, I didn't care.

I shifted carefully until I could turn toward him, and Max immediately loosened his hold so I could maneuver without twisting my injured side. His hand settled at my waist again when I was comfortable, and I found myself staring at him.

His hair was a disaster.

Max Renaud was irritatingly put together most of the time, even after sixty minutes of hockey, so discovering that the captain of the Colorado Dragons woke up looking as though he'd been dragged backward through a hedge felt like information I should probably preserve for future use.

I reached up and pushed one piece even farther out of place.

Max's eyes narrowed. “Are you deliberately making it worse?”

“I was checking something.”

“By attacking my hair?”

The genuine suspicion in his voice made me smile. “I wanted to know whether it was possible for you to look ridiculous, but I'm afraid the results are still inconclusive.”

His hand tightened at my waist as amusement replaced suspicion. “Perhaps your experiment requires a larger sample.”