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“She was.” It was hard to think, to formulate words with his eyes on her. She turned back to the gallery wall. “I tried to get her to let me show them when she was still… before shedied.”
“She wouldn’t have it?” heasked.
Nina shook her head. “She said they were a gift to the women of the city. That’s why she’d leave them around the park — so everyone could see them. I was as surprised as anyone when I got the letter from her attorney telling me she’d left them tome.”
She could feel the heat of his gaze. “I take it they came withinstructions?”
“They did: sell them and keep it cheap so everyday women can affordthem.”
He laughed softly next to her. “She sounds like quite adame.”
The word sounded surprisingly fitting coming from Liam, and she glanced over at him with a smile. “She was exactlythat.”
They both turned back to the wall, the weight of their history settling between them, of everything that had happened and everything that hadn’t, of all the words spoken and all the ones leftunsaid.
“You were in Africa,” she finallysaid.
“Were you stalking meonline?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No. Maybe. Kind of. It wasn’t exactly a secret.” She thought about the blond in the picture with Liam. “How wasit?”
“Why don’t I tell you over dinner sometimesoon?”
He said it so casually it took a minute to register, to work its way through the armor she’d been fighting to keep between them. There was only a moment of silence, but in that moment she saw everything: the way he’d looked that first day at Roast, the sparkle in his eyes when he’d teased her about running into him again at Karen’s book event, the way he’d called her out on her fixation with the difference in their ages and the seriousness in his eyes when he’d asked her to set it aside, to give them achance.
Then she saw the end — the hurt on his face when he’d learned she’d been seeing Jack, when she told him she’d moved too fast, that she needed to break off their relationship so she could focus onherself.
They hadn’t discussed being monogamous, but Nina had known deep down that he’d be hurt, that what was between them was special. Being in the grip of her obsession with Jack’s bedroom games was no excuse for not coming cleansooner.
She smiled up at him. “I don’t think that’s a goodidea.”
“You have something against dinner?” he asked. “I mean, I do agree that breakfast occupies a special place in the day’s meal schedule, and lunch does have a certain charm, but what do you have againstdinner?”
“I’m just not ready for… anything, withanyone.”
He searched her face as if he’d find an answer to his unspoken questions there. It had been over a year since their relationship ended. He couldn’t know about Jack. Or if he did, he couldn’t know the depth of her obsession with him, the way she’d lost control of her life as she pushed against the increasingly movable boundaries of their sex life. He couldn’t know she’d stopped eating and sleeping, that she’d screwed up a catering order at the gallery, that she’d let Jack fuck her in the dirty bathroom of a seedy bar while a strangerwatched.
He lifted a hand like he was going to touch her face, then let his arm drop to his side. “Okay,Nina.”
“I’msorry.”
“Don’t be.” He smiled and started walking backwards the way he used to when he didn’t want to leave her. “Unless you plan to give up the meal completely, you have to be ready for dinnereventually.”
She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling and turned back to the wall. But as her eyes scanned the wall of Judith’s photographs, all she saw washim.
