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It was when they were out of bed that he found himself... Not quite unnerved. That was too strong a word. But he felt on edge. Because at first she had been so bright, but lately, he had begun to notice that she seemed dimmer. Quieter.
Though when he asked, she always smiled wide and told him she was fine. Then usually loved on him some more.
Why wasn’t he satisfied with that? Had he not dreamed of this?
“It is like this library of yours,” she was saying now, in that perfectly pleasant way she said everything. But he didn’t believe thepleasantness. Not when he had watched summer ease away, out of her blue eyes, as one week bled into the next. He felt as if he was losing her when she wasright here.It was maddening. “You take such pleasure in waving your lack of pedigree and education as a flag. This library tells a different tale.”
Joaquin hadn’t expected that. His heart, that useless, traitorous organ, began to clatter in his chest.
“I am merely aping my betters,” he said quietly. But not without an edge to his voice that he couldn’t seem to dispel. “Is that not the fantasy of the upper classes? That, given the opportunity, all of us peasants would try our best to fit in with them? If we could, that is.”
“I can’t speak to the psychology, Joaquin.”
He was certain he did not mistake that faintly chiding note in her voice. But no matter how he studied that beautiful face of hers, he could not seem to crack the code. Amalia was too serene. Too distant. She’d come back to him a ghost in every way but one.
His need for her never eased. But he wantedher. Not this version of her who gave him everything he’d said he wanted, but was not the Amalia he craved—raw and undone and always so luminous, in bed and out.
Not the Amalia he still—
But he cut that off. With prejudice. He’d loved her once, yes. But that had been a long time ago. He knew better now.
That edginess in him had teeth. He took another pull from his drink.
“Let me hasten to assure you that I have no desire to impress snobby blue bloods,” he told her. Perhaps more harshly than necessary.
“You’re the one who keeps talking of performing intellectual feats for others, as if they might be grading you,” she said, still soundingpleasant.She looked as if she were simply having the sort of conversation anyone might over a cocktail. And she looked engaged, too—not that serene armor she had used so well on the island. Why did it all leave him feeling as if she was that edginess within him, teeth too sharp? “But there are too many volumes in this room with cracked spines and well-worn pages for me to believe that you have not spent a significant amount of time educating yourself. Knowing you, I imagine it gives you pleasure to let these upper-class blue bloods you so disdain imagine that they are speaking of things you cannot understand. When, in fact, you do.”
“Snobby, upper-class blue bloods like yourself, you mean.”
She smiled, and that should have pleased him, surely. But it only made the disquiet in him worse. The way it did more and more these days. “But I am no such thing. I am made of hardy peasant stock and can trace my lineage all the way back to the potato famine in County Galway. So I am afraid, Joaquin, that you will have to take out these class preoccupations of yours on someone else.”
And she might have seemed more and more a ghost to him by the day. Because he felt as if she was slipping away even when she was right in front of him, though he could not point to anything she was doing to give him that impression. Just that the light she’d brought with her was fading—and how could he say such a preposterous thing?
He dealt in facts. Not feelings. Notlight.
Still, there was one way he could reach her. He wasted no time standing from his uncomfortable chair, then going to pull her up out of hers.
“Shall I demonstrate these preoccupations, Princess?” he asked, his voice rough.
But she melted into him the way she always did.
And so he did his best to bring them both alive, right there on his library floor.
The days rolled by. He flew to Hong Kong. To New York. To Perth and back. And whether he took her with him or left her behind, it did not seem to matter. Nothing could make her glow again the way she had.
Not even him.
Telling himself that this was the sweetness of victory and he ought to enjoy it didn’t help.
Nor did the notion he had, often, that she wastryingto find her sparkle in there somewhere. Trying and failing.
One evening he wrapped up his meetings, then returned to the hotel he owned in Singapore. He found her in the private pool attached to the presidential suite, a sleek shape as she cut through the dark water, swimming laps with the skyline looking on.
Joaquin did not alert her to his presence. He stayed where he was, watching her move back and forth. And his heart ached inside him, making it entirely too clear to him that he was missing something. When he prided himself on never missing a thing.
Back and forth she went, slicing her way through the water, her black hair streaming out behind her like ink.
She stopped at one end and stayed there a moment, then two, her gaze out on the city. And when she turned around again, she started when she saw him standing there. But Joaquin found himself focusing on the puffiness of her eyes.
