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Night has fallen and the sky is awash with stars, their sparkle an echo of the twinkling lights that illuminate the bower.
I tremble on the edge of the wishing well. Not from the cold or the damp. It’s the thought that he is coming and he’s mine. Always was. Never strayed. Not from the moment our fingers first brushed. He gave his heart to me in that second. Mine! Mine! Mine!
I want to run and scream and cheer, but I also don’t want the paparazzi to snap pics of me being a loon…under the moon…far too soon. Add violins for the full effect! My heart is skipping and dancing and spinning and I’m full of his music and touch and kisses. The frogs’ chorus ofribbitsonly add to the heady madness of the moment.
Mariano said he’d be right behind me, but it’s already been three minutes? Ten? Twenty? I left the mansion in a flurry of excitement and escape, but after everything that’s gone down—my accusations (ugh), the revelations (shit!), Juliette’s explanation (phew!)—I should have thought to do something besides simply inviting Mariano to this place. Like, for example, cobble together an explanation for the madness that wastotesdefensible. Kind of. -ish. I mean, to me at least. I doubted him forreasons.I don’t talk about them, and I’d rather not if I don’t have to, but… Shit, I’m going to have to.
How about we start with this place means more to me than he could ever know? Yeah, no. I’m going to have to give him more than that. Everything. I have to give him everything, just as he’s done for me.
A car approaches, my heart speeding with it—and then recedes. Not Mariano. The longer I go without the trailing sparks of his hands moving across my back, the heat of his body pressed to mine, the warmth of his breath in my ear, the harder it gets to keep my doubts at bay. What if he doesn’t come? What if I’ve blown it? What if me needing to talk to Juliette was the last straw? What if he sees my nutso need for honesty and is turned off by it?
I peer into the wishing well, squeeze my eyes shut and picture everything I want, every dream I’ve ever poured into this place—Let him be the man I think he is. Let him understand me. Let him see me. All of me. Let me be forgiven. Just this once.
There are footsteps.
Not from the direction of the car park and the lit path, but from the other direction, through the woods that surround us. My heart does things hearts are not supposed to do, skitters and stops, flops over, and then races. Just when I think I might die of a heart attack, a voice, low and urgent comes out of the trees.
“Lolly?Mi vida, mi cielita?”
The sound of Mariano’s voice, my name on his tongue, unknots the last of the cords that have been binding me, twisting tighter and tighter ever since those damn pictures surfaced.
“Here!” I slip from the edge of the well, wincing with every muscle twinge, but tuned in to the sound of his voice and— “You came!”
The very fact of him is a firework bursting from my core, my heart a glowing, sacred, golden thing in his presence. If someone else reported this, I’d think they were being overly dramatic, exaggerating even, but every cell within every fiber within the innermost part of me calls to him, reaches out for him—and has been, since the moment I first knocked on the door to his suite. I didn’t trust it before, because this is the kind of magnetism I believed existed in books and movies, but not real life—and certainly notmylife. Not for realsies. Not forever. But here he is!
I have to laugh— He is still in his black vampire cape, his hair mussed from his fingers being too much in it, but at the sight of me, every trace of the worry, the confusion, the anguish that have marred his face since I flew from his room all those days ago, a seeming eternity of hours, disappears.
And then we are crashing into each other—his warm hands on my cheeks, his lips on my brow, the tip of my nose, my lips, everywhere while my words spill in a torrent.
“I’m so sorry! I should have—I don’t know why I couldn’t—Juliette said you never, you couldn’t, because there was someone else. When she saw us at Gustavo’s wedding, she said it was ‘très obvious’who it was—me.There was me, and—”
Still, he kisses me—behind my ear, at my throat where my pulse throbs. “Shhhhhh,mija.”
But I can’t stopper the emotions anymore. I have been holding them back too long. Despite what he said on the dance floor, despite our tango, there is still more I must say, more he must understand. “No. I have to tell you. I have to say it now or I might never—”
He pulls back for a moment, his eyes glittering in the dimming light. Helooksat me. Heseesme. Like he has from the beginning.
When it comes, my voice is too small by half. “Can you kiss me again, please? Like you were? And not stop, no matter what I say?”
Wait, am I asking for precisely what I want? The wishing well really is a magical place!
“I want to never stop loving you.” His voice is rough. “Thesecinco diaspasado, Lolly—”
“Kiss me.” He does as I demand and I cling to him, drawing strength from him, from the emotions coursing through him, transferring to me with each of his kisses. I can do this. I can. He will be there on the other side. Be brave, Lolly. Fly your freak flag and let him love you for it!
“I love you. I do. But I need”—The only sign that he hears me is the slightest of pauses between the kisses he is leaving in a trail down my shoulder. “There’s this thing. It’s a must. Without it, I don’t, I can’t—I’ve never trusted anyone, except—” his mouth is suddenly at my throat, and he bites me.Bloody vampires!My gasp is involuntary. His teeth are firm against that softest, most vulnerable place on my neck, but then his tongue is so soft, so gentle it’s almost not there. The sensation is somuch,the jokey defense mechanism flies right out of me and my knees buckle.It’s only the strength of his arms that keep me upright. In a heartbeat, a pulse throbs all the way through me to my button-brain and back, a new thought crystallizing. Alicia isn’t the only one I trust anymore. Velveteen isn’t either. “I want to trustyou, Mariano. But—I’m sorry—” A sob comes from nowhere, chokes the words I’m trying to get out.
“What is this ‘but?’” Mariano’s voice is the easy, gentle, cajoling voice he might use with an anxious horse just this side of bolting. “What is it that makes it so you can’t? Tell me.”
Damn. He’s already there and I didn’t prepare and how can I explain the snarled knot that’s in my head? “I need the truth. All the time. Every time—”
“Sí. Siempre. I understand, Lolly. And I pledge my heart. Indeed, no, my soul. I will always be the truth for you.”
The tears come, because it’s bigger than big, wilder than wild, sadder than sad, because—
“I lied to you. A lie of omission, but—still a lie.” The hypocritical truth that has me in pieces rips out like a wail. “I didn’t tell you who I really am, that I come from—”
His eyes are on me again. “I see a woman who wants toowneverything she does, down to the words that come out of her mouth.”
