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“Away from you!” she yells back. “Just do this for me. Tell him something unexpected came up. Tell him that Ilarion needs me. Just…get rid of him.”
I watch, but to my surprise, at the very end of the path, she steps off into the grass instead of following the winding gravel. She kicks off her shoes, leaves them behind, and carries on without them. When she disappears down the stone staircase, I turn to the foyer—only to discover that Ashton is standing in the doorway, watching her leave, too.
“I’m guessing the meeting is over?” he asks with resignation written all over his face.
I walk toward him, imagining for a moment what they’d look like together.Fucking beautiful; that’s what they’d look like together.
I look him in the eye. They’re a deep, dark brown, flecked with pinpricks of brilliant hazel. “Are you in love with my sister?”
His face doesn’t so much as twitch. “If I were, would you tell anyone?”
“No.”
He nods. “Then yes, I’m in love with your sister.”
I run a hand through my hair. “Well, shit. That was…easier than I expected.”
Ashton laughs bitterly. “It was the farthest thing from it, in my opinion.”
I offer him a tender smile. I know a lot about forbidden love. “Does she know?”
“Yeah, she knows.”
“As in, she’s guessed?” I press. “Or you’ve told her?”
“I kissed her on a night a lot like tonight, almost two years ago.” He sighs as his gaze slides over to the garden staircase that she disappeared down. “I guess that was my big declaration.”
Good Lord, he marked it on his calendar and everything. “How did she react?”
“She slapped me, actually.”
I bite back a surprised laugh. So much. There issofuckingmuchshe hasn’t told me.
Not that I can afford to be pissed. There’s more that I’m not telling her. I have no right to be hurt by her secrecy.
“But she still works with you,” I remind him. “Which tells me that she has feelings for you.”
“Oh, I know she has feelings for me,” Ashton says confidently. It doesn’t come off as cocky or arrogant, though. More like…earnest. Hopeful. “She’s just bound by her commitments. So instead of being honest with herself, she’s choosing to lie to keep the status quo.”
My legs feel like they’ve turned to jelly. He sounds exactly like Ilarion when Ilarion is talking about me.
What have I done?
“What happened after you kissed her? After the slap, I mean.”
He rubs the side of his face wearily, like it’s been paining him ever since. “She walked out on me. I left, expecting never to see or hear from her again. But then, three days later, I got a call. She kept it professional, we stayed on topic, she never mentioned the kiss or the slap, and I didn’t, either. We just acted like it never happened.”
“And you accepted that?”
“I tried to bring it up a few times,” he admits. “She always changed the subject or deflected. Then, finally, she told me to stop. She said that if I continued to bring it up, she would have to stop working with me and she didn’t want to do that. It was the first inclination I got that maybe it wasn’t as hopeless as I thought.”
Well…fuck.
“She claims to love Ilarion,” Ashton says, his eyebrows pinching when he says Ilarion’s name. “She says she wants to be faithful to him. But I know her heart belongs to me. She’s just scared to admit it. She’s scared to blow up her life. And I think she’s scared of him.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, Taylor.” It’s a playful scold, but still a scold. I barely know this guy, but I feel like I deserve the judgment. “You must know what Ilarion is. Men like him don’t tolerate their women screwing around behind their backs. Doesn’t matter if they fuck a hundred different women; they expect theirs to be faithful.”
