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It didn’t matter who was to blame, she told herself, pushing past the anguish. It only underscored what she had always known: she could not stay here. She should never have come here. She had known better, and yet she had done it anyway.
And she even knew why.
It was like a sickness, she thought, a great wave of despair crashing over her, so hard it nearly took her to her knees. She moved over to the great four-poster bed and leaned against it, her hands loath to touch the linens where she had lain with him, over him, where he had brought her to such great heights with his hands, his mouth, that all-seeing gaze and boundless need.
And all of it part of this lie, she thought, miserable. The lie she should have known he would tell, because this was who he was. Why did it hurt so much to have her worst suspicions confirmed?
But she knew. She loved him. Despite everything, she was in love with him.
She rubbed her hands over her face, but the uncomfortable and ugly truth did not dissipate. The love, fierce and tough and uncompromising, remained. It was why she had stayed in that house in Toronto, rattling around like a wraith. It was why she had let him talk her into coming here. It was why. It was that silken, unbreakable thread of hope that could not let him go. She did not want to love him, but she did. She still did. She always had.
She had loved him since she’d first laid eyes on him, wet and glistening in the Hawaiian sun, and nothing had ever altered that love. Nothing had changed it or diminished it. She had adored him, hated him, feared him, blamed him—and still she loved him.
These past days had been a fantasy of all they could have been; he had been, at last, the man she remembered from Hawaii so long ago. The man she had thrown away all she’d known to follow heedlessly across the globe. But even knowing now what she had not wanted to suspect—even now, she loved him.
There was no one else for her. She faced the truth of that, and managed not to flinch. There would be no ‘moving on’, no ‘getting over it.’ There was only Leo. He had broken her heart so many times she had stopped expecting anything else. Yet still she could feel the way she loved him swell in her, dance through her veins and slide deep into her bones. Even now, when she wondered how she would ever survive this moment. Even now, when she was not even sure she wanted to survive it.
She loved him, but he was still playing his games. He was still playing lord of the manor, the presumptuous prince. He was still manipulative and deceiving, patronizing and cruel. She had stopped questioning why she should love a man like that, who seemed sometimes to be so different, so good, so noble.
But there was no use in questioning it. She loved him, but that did not mean she had to live with him and let him move her around like one more pawn on his chess board. She knew she could bear almost anything, but not that.
Something rolled through her then, something hot and arid—her love, her history and her heart so broken it could never be repaired. She straightened from the bed and marched over to the dressing room door. Wrenching it open, she stalked inside, yanked her roller-bag out and tossed it on the bench that ran along the wall. It would not take long to pack—after all, she had come with so little and she would leave as she’d always sworn she would: with nothing he had given her. With only what was hers.
You will be perfectly fine, she told herself, repeating the phrase again and again, though she knew better than to believe it. But she would survive. The worst had already happened three years ago—she had already lived without him, had already had to accept that he did not and could not love her in the way she loved him.
She could do it again. She would do it again. And, if it hurt her worse this time somehow—because she had expected she would keep herself safe and armed with all she knew—well, she had years and years ahead of her to explore that particular shame.
“What the hell are you doing?”
His voice came from the door, low and fierce. She did not look up. She did not trust either one of them.
“I think you know,” she said in a quiet, controlled voice that cost her bits of her soul.
She tossed her jeans into the bag and then zipped it shut. Who cared what she left behind? She wanted to leave. She needed to leave, immediately. Before he could tell her more lies she would want so desperately to believe. Before she could betray herself further.
“You are leaving,” he said, as if he could not believe it, as if his eyes must be deceiving him. As if—as usual—she was the villain in this piece. “You are packing up and running off again?”
She turned on him then and was slightly taken back when she saw an unexpected wildness in his dark eyes, a kind of raw fury she had never seen before. She had no idea what it meant, and so plunged ahead.
