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“Okay. I trust you.” It was easy to say it, because I felt it to my bones. He had never lied to me before.
Well, except for during our one-night stand seven years before. But neither of us had been truthful that night.
We hung up our coats and went upstairs to the bedroom. In the master bath, I brushed my teeth and removed my makeup while Neil took out his contacts. He was unusually quiet, until he said, “I wasn’t sure, until the moment Runólf met us at the door, that I wanted to see my brothers today.”
“What?” It was all he’d been talking about for weeks. “I thought you were looking forward to seeing them.”
“I was.” He screwed on one lid of his lens case, and he didn’t look up at me. “Until I wasn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I waited until he was ready to go on.
He took a breath. “The truth is…I was quite hurt that neither Runólf nor Geir came to visit while I was ill.”
A knife of sudden understanding pierced my lungs, and my inhale was painful. “Oh, baby—”
“It’s all right, now,” he assured me. “For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about it. Thinking about how terrible it was that Runólf hadn’t come to visit me. We were quite close growing up. Geir was seven when I was born, Fiona was six. I realize that families grow and change and drift apart, but it hurt that they were willing to risk never seeing me again. That they were both…”
I reached over and put my hand on his on the countertop.
He looked up with a hesitant smile. “I understand now, seeing baby Annie. Death, just the idea of it… It feels contagious. When Emma was a baby, I obsessed over her safety. If I heard a story on the news about a child dying, I turned it off. I was so happy, it seemed like if I invited even the notion of death in, I would make it happen.
“Geir is getting older. His mortality is becoming more real to him. I can understand why he wouldn’t want to see his little brother suffering through cancer. And Runólf has a beautiful wife who had just given birth to that sweet baby when my condition deteriorated so badly. Of course he would want to protect them, even if the danger was imaginary.”
I shook my head. “I still think it’s awfully shitty. Not coming to see you, when it seemed pretty certain you weren’t going to make it.” I hated talking about that time. It made my throat close up.
“Sophie, believe me. It’s fine now. I made my peace over it.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Hurry up, you don’t want to miss the fireworks. We have a spectacular view.”
When I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in my fluffy bathrobe, Neil was sitting on the bed, already down to his black silk boxers. In his hands, he had a gift wrapped in elegant green paper. “I know we’d agreed to forego presents this year, but damn it, I couldn’t help myself. So, I bought you something.”
“As it so happens,” I began, heading to my suitcase. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist, so I got you something, too.”
It’s hard to shop for a billionaire. If he wanted something, he usually just bought it. So I’d had to get creative. I handed him my present and sat beside him to open mine.
He tore the paper off the box and lifted the lid. Inside, in an elegant silver frame, was an enlarged version of the photo we’d taken in bed together in Paris the year before, on New Year’s Eve.
Neil’s hands trembled as he lifted the heavy frame from the box. In a voice choked with emotion, he managed, “Oh, Sophie…”
“You said you wanted to always remember that trip,” I reminded him, smiling down at the photo of the two of us, damp from a post-sex shower and snuggled up in bed together. That night, he’d tortured me with a personal massager and poured champagne into my mouth full of his cum. It had been one of our most intense encounters, made more so by the knowledge that he’d start chemotherapy when the trip was over. We hadn’t known then what the future would hold. A year later, we had come through so much, and we were finally, finally becoming that couple in the picture again.
When he looked up, his eyes were a little misty. “Come here, you brilliant woman.”
Still clutching the frame, he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me tight; I’d expected him to like the present, but I hadn’t expected it to move him so much.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said with a surprised laugh that was cut off by my lack of breath as Neil squeezed the hell out of me.
With a soft chuckle of his own, he released me. “Like it? Sophie, I love it. That night was the perfect way to start my year. And this is the perfect way to end it. The middle was a bit dodgy, I’m afraid, but the book ends are lovely.”
With one finger against the glass in the frame, he traced the line of my jaw. I shivered as though he’d touched me.
“Okay,” I said brightly, or else I was going to start blubbering. “I get to open mine now.”
“It’s nowhere near as thoughtful,” he said ruefully. “I’m embarrassed now.”
Tearing the paper off a Christmas present just thrills my materialistic little heart. I grinned to myself at the half-circle of birds and flowers stamped on the plain box. It was Carine Gilson’s logo. Her lingerie was to die for. I c
ouldn’t wait to see what Neil had gotten for me.
I parted the tissue paper inside, and my fingers brushed a pool of the softest azure silk I had ever felt. Breathless, I lifted the nightgown by its slender straps and a reverent “oh!” crossed my lips as the ankle-length gown unfurled, revealing the designer’s signature lace embellishments.
