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‘This was never my home, Aurora.’
‘I don’t mean the house. I mean Silibri…’
‘I do too,’ Nico said.
He did not have family here. There was no guilt or duty to bring him back to the village. Just work.
And he would soon pass that on. He would get the hotel up and running and then sell it, he decided. Finally he would be done with Silibri.
He would not keep her hanging.
‘Aurora, the hotel will be up and running in no time. I will pass on the management of it and then…’
He shared his business decisions with no one, and yet Aurora did not fit into the category of ‘no one’, so he told her what his grieving mind had decided.
‘And then I shall sell it.’
It was too painful for him to be here now. He had done his best for the village, and now his father was gone.
‘There is no reason for me to return to Silibri,’ Nico said. ‘I have not one decent memory of this place.’
Aurora gasped.
Not one? What about that time on the sofa, Nico? Does the night you took my virginity not even rate?
Hawks had talons, and Aurora felt hers then.
She wanted to slap his face, to deliver to him some of the pain he had flung at her. But she was not a violent person. She had never understood how Geo could lay a hand on someone he loved, and she would not lower herself to do it now.
‘Not one decent memory?’ Aurora checked.
Nico closed his eyes and wished that she had slapped him, for it would have been so much easier to end this on a row. To throw up his arms and feel justified in walking away.
But instead her velvet brown eyes tried to meet his. ‘How many more ways can you hurt me, Nico?’
‘Aurora…’ He already regretted those words. He could both see and hear the hurt they had caused, for her voice was raw and her face was bleached white. ‘I should not have said—’
‘No,’ she interjected. ‘Don’t bother apologising, or rephrasing, or trying to find another way to say what you really mean. Ifinallyget the message, Nico. It’s the same one you have been giving me for eight years now. You. Don’t. Want. Me.’
If he refuted that, Nico knew that they would end up in bed.
Again.
Or rather they would have sex on the floor, because he could not stand the thought of sex in his father’s bed.
Or perhaps they would go to one of the empty suites at the hotel and he would bury himself in her there.
He thought all that even as he stood with her sad vocalisation of his feelings for her ringing in his ears.
And when he did not refute Aurora got her answer from his silence.
Aurora regretted so many things, but somehow—somehow—she must not live to regret the moment she left. She must not break down within his sight.
Instead, she was as brave as she could be. ‘Live well, Nico,’ she said, and kissed his cold, pale cheeks. ‘I wish you nothing but good things.’
And finally she let herself out of the house and let Nico out of her life.
