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“I just want to say it. I need for you to know everything.”
So she gave in and sat on the sofa. “All right.”
He sat beside her carefully, as though unsure if she’d let him stay there. “I woke up. You were sound asleep—and I wanted a snack.”
She realized she’d been staring straight ahead. If he had to give her the details, she should at least look at him while he did it. She faced him. And her love for him welled up, so powerful it hurt. “You’re saying you had no agreement to meet with her secretly in the kitchen. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“That’s right. It never occurred to me that she would be down there. And she wasn’t, not at first. I made toast. And hot chocolate. She came down just as I was about to carry my plate and cup to the table. She said she couldn’t sleep. I suggested hot milk. And then, out of nowhere, she gave me this intense look. I knew then that there was trouble, that you’d been right when you said she...” He hesitated, his expression pained. “That she still had feelings for me. I tried to decide how to get out gracefully—and you don’t have to give me that look.”
“But I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. Listen, I get it, all right? It was my mistake not to take you seriously earlier. And tonight, it was my mistake again even to hesitate. Once she gave me that look, I should have gotten the hell out fast. She said my name. Just my name, and then she grabbed me. I was pushing her off when I heard you behind me.” He fell silent.
What to say now? “Is that it?”
“That’s everything, yes.”
“Then can we go to bed now?”
He only looked at her. Deeply. “You do blame me.”
“No.” And she didn’t, not really. “But I didn’t like seeing that woman all over you. I didn’t like it at all.”
Something blazed in his eyes. “I didn’t like having her all over me. I swear it. I meant what I said. I am, and always will be, true to you.”
“Good.” But she still felt put out with him for being so damn dense. And she kept thinking of Fiona, for some strange reason—of the odd parallels between Fiona’s drunken behavior weeks ago and what Melinda had done an hour before. The similarities seemed to be about more than just two women behaving badly in the middle of two different nights.
“There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?” he demanded.
It would have been so simple to say it was nothing, to soothe him—soothe them both—and take him to bed.
But she knew there were truths about the night Edward died that he refused to share with her. She knew that he lied to her by omission. And now, because he hadn’t taken her warning seriously, she would have to live the rest of her life with the image of Melinda spread all over the front of him, her hands in his hair as she sucked on his face. It all got her back up just enough that she went ahead and gave him exactly what he asked for.
“The night she got drunk and came here to our rooms, Fiona said a few very strange things.”
His big body went absolutely still. “Fiona? Why are we suddenly talking about Fiona?”
“I thought you wanted to know what I wasn’t telling you.”
“Gen.” He spoke so gently. “Maybe we should—”
She stopped him with an upraised hand. “That night, when she came here to find me, Fiona talked about the accident.”
“What does what she said matter? You said she was drunk half out of her mind.”
“She talked about how she’d suffered, about how she’d ‘had’ what I would never get. How she’d never expected ‘it’ to end, that ‘it’ couldn’t end. That ‘it’ wasn’t supposed to end...”
“What, for God’s sake, is ‘it’?”
“Well, I don’t know, Rafe. I thought maybe you would know.”
“I...?” He seemed to gather calm about himself. “What are you getting at, Gen? You’d better just say it.”
“All right. Have you ever had...?” Dear Lord, this was gruesome. “I mean, you and Fiona, have you ever been in love with her—or have you ever, you know, had sex with her?”
He gaped at her. “Fiona? Seriously?”
“Don’t mock me, Rafe.”
“I’m not. It’s only... You really don’t think that, do you? Fiona and me?”
“Answer the question, please.”
“All right.” He sounded hopelessly weary. “Then, no. Never. She’s so completely not the woman for me, not in any way. And after what happened tonight, I can’t blame you if you question my judgment—but I would swear on the graves of all my proud DeValery ancestors that Fiona has no more interest in being my lover than I have in being hers.”
