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“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,”he said. She wasn’t sure what it meant but it made her knees weak to hear it, and her thighs weren’t holding up all that well, either.
“Um...my Latin’s a little rusty,” she said, meeting his eyes, the wild color of storm clouds.
He put his hand to his mouth as if to tell her a secret.
“Beware Greeks bearing gifts,” he said. His breath tickled the sensitive skin of her shoulder.
Lia raised a finger and wagged it at his face.
“You’re trouble.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said.
“I’m going now. Thank you for the gift. Flirting over.”
Lia couldn’t believe she’d cried in front of the man. It had been years since she’d shed a single tear over anyone or anything. She’d forgotten how much she hated being vulnerable in front of someone. Thanks to August Bowman, she remembered.
Wanting to put distance between them quickly, Lia strode across the hallway, stepped into the music room and stopped dead in her tracks.
Across the room, at the fireplace, stood her mother with a man Lia had not seen in four years and had hoped to never, ever see again. The second he saw her, he smiled and raised his glass of red wine to her in a mocking toast.
David.
Here it was. This. The thing she’d been dreading. The knot in her stomach. The hand wrapped around her heart. She’d been right. Something monumentally bad had happened tonight, was happening right that second.
David Bell was here, in her home.
Her mother spotted Lia at the same instant and waved her over.
“Lia? Are you all right?” August suddenly stood at her side.
She was too scared to lie. “No.” Her breathing was so fast she thought she might faint. “Help me. Please?”
As if answering her “please,” the house reverberated with a clap of thunder. The windows turned white as lightning split apart the sky.
The power went out and they were all plunged into darkness.
“I wish I could take the credit,” August said. “But that wasn’t me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Lia felt a strong arm around her waist. She let August pull her from the room and down the hall. He took out his phone, turned on its torchlight and led her away.
“Your room’s upstairs?” he asked.
Lia nodded. They took the stairs quickly, despite the dark and the chaos in the house as the hundred guests laughed nervously and fumbled around for phones and candles and torches.
“Left,” Lia said as they reached the top of the staircase. He half pulled, half carried her down the long hallway. “Here.”
They’d reached her suite. Lia was still shaking when August opened the door and led her inside. He put her on the love seat in her sitting room.
“We need wine and candles,” he said. “What would you like first?”
“Candles in the box on the mantel,” she said, hoping that was true. Her suite included a sitting room with a large stone fireplace, only decorative these days, and her bedroom with a smaller working fireplace. She’d prefer to keep August out of her bedroom. August went to the sitting room fireplace and, by the light of his phone, found the candles, candlesticks and matches.
“Are you going to tell me who that man was downstairs?” Quickly he lit four candles and set them around the room—two on the stone mantel, one on her side table by the love seat, one on her sewing table by her weaving loom.
“Just an ex,” she said.
