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“I hit Chase,” she said again, and it tore at him, how she said that so matter-of-factly, as if, inside her head, she’d conducted whole trials and found herself guilty again and again. “And he teased me, and I hit him again. They told me to stop and I didn’t. I was too mad. And then I hit the driver and everything...flipped. And then we were on the side of the road and Mama—” She shook her head instead of finishing that sentence. “It was my fault, Nicodemus. I hit the driver and made him lose control of the car. He died, too.”
“Mattie,” he said softly. “It was an accident.”
“Nothing was the same afterward,” she whispered. “No one could look at me. Chase, my father. We all pretended, but I knew. They even made us lie about what had really happened.” Her eyes welled up then. “And every time I told someone that Chase and I weren’t in the car, that it had happened to her while she was on her own, it made it worse. I did this horrible thing. I ruined my family and killed an innocent man. And yet I was protected.”
He couldn’t hold himself back then and he stopped trying. He crossed to her, pulling her into his arms and holding her the way he’d always wanted to hold her—the way she’d only let him the night he’d found her sobbing and in the grip of her internal terrors.
She shook against him, and he held her so he could look down at her, at those pretty eyes slicked with tears again, at all that guilt and misery he understood, now, had been behind all of this from the start.
“And you wanted me so badly,” she whispered. “But I knew you wouldn’t, if you knew.”
He shifted so he could cup her face in his hands.
“There is nothing you could do to make me want you any less,” he said gruffly. “Much less this revelation that when you were a child, you acted like one. There was a terrible accident. You survived.”
“What kind of person kills their own mother, Nicodemus?” she asked harshly.
“Me,” he said after a moment. “I’m as guilty of it as you are.”
Her face flushed. “It’s not the same.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is. If I was a child who couldn’t be held responsible for what followed my recklessness, so were you. Maybe it’s time we both forgave ourselves.”
Her eyes searched his. She took a deep breath that he could feel move through him, too.
“I’ll try if you will,” she whispered.
And then, at last, he kissed her.
* * *
It wasn’t until the second kiss, that sweet fire, that easy press of his mouth to hers, that Mattie realized she hadn’t truly believed he would ever kiss her again.
When she felt him smile against her mouth, her neck, she realized she’d said that out loud.
“I should have kissed you at that ball a hundred years ago and spared us both all this wasted time,” he muttered. “And all this unnecessary guilt.”
Mattie lifted her head then and opened her eyes, and couldn’t quite fathom what she saw on that hard, fierce face of his. Shining openly from those dark eyes. It lodged in her chest. It melted all that hard, cold glass inside her as if it had never been.
“You gave up on me,” she said, very seriously. “On us. Don’t do it again.”
His smile deepened. “My version of giving up involved signing a major merger with your family’s company and returning to the city where you live.” His fingers moved near her temple, playing with a strand of her hair, and the look in his dark eyes made her want to cry again. “I don’t think you have to worry.”
“I never sleep through the night, Nicodemus,” she said. “Never. But I did that night in Greece. And when I woke up, you were gone.”
“I don’t want any more of these games we play,” he told her, and the words were like a song inside her, buoyant and melodic, sweet and perfect. “I only want you.”
“You can have me,” she promised him, and these, she understood then, were her real vows. These pierced straight through her, leaving tangled roots in their wake. Binding her to him forever. No witnesses. No pictures for the hungry tabloids. Only the two of them. And the truth. “But I want the same in return.”
“I’m yours, Mattie,” he told her, and he pulled her close again, lifting her up as if she weighed nothing and holding her there, like she was a miracle. Like this was, this thing between them that finally made sense. That meant everything. “All you had to do was ask.”
“I love you,” she said softly, threading her arms around his neck and smiling down at him as if he was the whole world. Because he was. He was hers. “But to tell you the honest truth, Nicodemus, I think I always have.”
