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Was it worse to imagine what he was doing or watch him do it? All these years later, and she still did not know. She twisted around to look at him, not surprised to find him watching her with that same intense regard.
“Before,” she amended.
He looked at her for a moment, then out toward the opposite bank of the lake where leafy green persimmon trees rustled in the slight breeze.
“This was never a happy place,” he said finally. “It did not seem appropriate to bring a new bride to a place made from one man’s ego and a woman’s tears.”
Bethany swallowed. “And now?”
Why did she ask? What did she want from him?
But she knew what she wanted. She had always known: everything. That was why the little she’d received had hurt so very badly. That was why she had haunted that house in Toronto for so long, hoping in the dark of night that he might return even as she hated herself for that weakness in the light of day.
She was merely feeling the echoes of all of that now, she told herself desperately. Just the echoes, nothing more.
“What answer do you wish me to give?” he asked softly, turning that brooding yet fierce gaze back upon her. “What must I tell you to make you touch me as you want to do, Bethany? As we both want you to do? Tell me what you want and I will say it. Just tell me.”
It was as if there was a sudden earthquake beneath her—as if the earth tumbled and rolled, cracked and heaved all while she sat there, not moving, not touching him, not even fighting with him—which was, she acknowledged in some far-off part of her brain, far easier than whatever this was.
This …aching regret. This longing. This undeniable need and this deep, wrenching fear that if she did not reach over and place her hands on him he would truly disappear as if he had never been.
Because he never should have been. He never should have noticed her in the first place. He had never been meant for her—he had always been on loan, and some part of her had recognized that from the start.
Was that why she had thrown tantrums, indulged her inner lunatic, done everything possible to push him away? Had she done it all to hasten along the inevitable day when he looked at her and saw nothing but his worst mistake? Why not rush to that end, when she’d known they were always destined to get there one way or another?
“You look at me as if I have become a ghost,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Before your very eyes.”
“Sometimes I think that’s all you ever were,” she heard herself say as if she had no control over herself any longer—as if all the things she had only ever admitted to herself in the dark of the night were suddenly free to tumble from her lips. As if this secluded, unnatural spot, so pretty and so calculated at the same time, was somehow the safe haven she had searched for all these years.
“That is all you allowed me to be,” he said quietly. “It is all you would give me—your body, your protestations of love. But the real woman? The flesh and blood? That was never on offer.”
Any other day she might have thrown something back at him, tried to hurt him in return. But today was too different. Too out of time, as if their usual rules did not apply. Or perhaps it was this odd place, this peaceful lake hidden away on a hilltop, yet never meant for happiness—just like us, she thought.
She could not bring herself to do anything but reply honestly.
“Whose flesh and blood did you want?” she asked, her voice as soft as his. “You wanted something I could never be. You wanted the woman you should have married. The woman you would have married, had you not met me instead.”
She did not know what she expected from him. Protestations? Denials? Some part of her yearned for him to storm at her that she was mistaken, to demand that she tell him who had put such thoughts in her head. But he did neither.
Instead, his dark gaze seemed electric on hers, searing and hard, and his face darkened. A moment passed, and then another, and he did not speak.
“You were meant for someone noble, well-educated, refined and elegant,” she continued, reciting from memory the words his cousin had hurled at her, trapped in Leo’s gaze but unable to look away. “Every day I was none of those things, and every day you resented me more for it.”
“No,” he said, his eyes clear on hers even though his voice was gruff. “I did not. I did not resent you for that.” He paused, then continued, his voice low and harsh. “If anything, I resented myself for trying to make you into something you were not.”
She opened her mouth then, but nothing came out. She looked at him and it was as if she shook, or the earth shook, but nothing made sense. It was all a jumble of regret and misunderstanding; her own fears and his cousins’ poison; his retreat into his title and her inability to reach out to him; resentment and anger, the wounds inflicted across the years, and her inability to dismiss him as she should. And she knew she should.
