“LYON . . . YOU HAVE TO understand . . . I never dreamed you would leave,” she said brokenly. “I didn’t mean for you to leave. You shouldn’t have gone. You shouldn’t have gone. You shouldn’t have actually gone.”
Her voice spiraled in anguish, the anguish she’d never shown anyone, let alone herself, lest it rip her to shreds.
She dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands.
She drew in a hot, ragged breath. And then another.
And the sob that clawed its way out might as well have been a shard of her own heart.
One ugly, wracking sob followed another.
Old tears. Too long held back.
She had never, never wept for him since he left.
After a moment she could feel him drop to his knees next to her.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. My girl. My sweet girl. For heaven’s sake. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
He said it so softly, almost panicky. He was flailing.
It was almost funny.
No one else called her that. No else had ever thought she was sweet.
No one knew how tender she really was.
No one else had ever been able to really hurt her.
No one else could save her from herself.
And all of this made her throw herself backward on the sand, fling one arm across her eyes, and weep with abandon.
He said nothing.
Perhaps she’d appalled him speechless.
She lay there on the sand, and she didn’t care that her hair would be full of it, or the back of her dress would likely be ruined, or that her dignity was in shreds, and she wept as though it were the end of the world. As though she’d just lost him all over again.
At some point gentle hands tenderly scooped up her head.
She submitted as he thrust a folded coat beneath her as a pillow.
The coat smelled just like him. And just like everything about him, it comforted and stirred.
She heaved a great ragged sigh and sank back into it.
The sobs seemed to be done with her.
She finally peeled her arm away from her eyes.
And blinked, surprised.
It was full dark. Somehow the entire night seemed cleansed. The stars had an almost stinging brilliance.
She felt peaceful and empty and borderless. She might as well have been sand or sky.
Which was how she knew heartbreak had comprised nearly the whole of her for so long.
Now that she’d released it, she didn’t know who she might be.
She lay still in the emptiness.
She let her head loll to the side. There Lyon was, mostly in shadow now, his arms wrapped loosely around his knees, staring out at the water, his profile etched in shadow.
No other soul on the planet would have skewered her so completely. There was a peace in being so known and understood, even if that meant being excoriated.
“You were right,” she whispered. “About all of it. I was—am—a coward.”
He turned to her swiftly. And then he gave a short, humorless laugh.
“Before you do any more self-flagellation, Olivia—not all of which is unjustified—the truth of the matter was that I had to leave Pennyroyal Green. With or without you. And I only realized that recently. Perhaps in the end . . . perhaps in the end it was all for the best.”
His voice was quiet, too, and almost drifting. That’s when it occurred to her that he’d said what he wanted to say to her, and perhaps he, too, was feeling empty and cleansed.
But who were they now?
And were they finally—as he’d said—finished?
How could anything that took them away from each other be all for the best?
But she knew, too, that once Lyon had spoken to his father about her, Isaiah Redmond would have made good on his threat to ruthlessly clip Lyon’s wings: stripping him of his allowance, bullying him into a marriage Isaiah considered appropriate, threatening him with the loss of everything he loved unless Lyon did precisely what Isaiah wanted him to do.
It would have been intolerable for Lyon and intolerable to witness.
“Yes. I see what you mean, Lyon. I do believe you are right about that, too. You had no choice.”
To her surprise, he laughed, a genuine laugh. It tapered into a pleased sigh.
“Oh, Liv. I could almost hear your brain rifling about to arrive at that conclusion. I never did have to explain anything to you. It was always such a luxury . . . You have no idea. Being with you . . . it was like . . . like slipping out of tight shoes. Only infinitely more thrilling, of course.”
She smiled. God, she knew what he meant. Before him and since he’d gone away, she’d either contracted or ever-so-subtly contorted her very being to accommodate nearly everybody else.
She was only ever wholly herself with him.
It was a bittersweet realization.
“And you weren’t completely wrong about me being . . . my father’s creation,” he added. His voice was thicker now.
“I’m seldom completely wrong,” she murmured. “And your father managed to create a few magnificent things. You, for instance.”
Somehow she could feel he was smiling. Just something about a change in the air. As if his mood was her personal weather.
He sighed companionably, and then unfolded his long body and languorously stretched out beside her, his hands clasped behind his head to pillow it.
He did all of this slowly, as if to emphasize how very tall, how very strong, how very dangerously male he was.
That few inches of space between them almost pulsed. And yet it might as well have been the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Lyon?” Sobbing had scraped her voice raw.
“Mmm?”
“I’m so, so very sorry I hurt you.”
Words she had longed to say for so long.
He said nothing.
She held her breath.
For so long the peace they’d created began to gather into tension again, began to ring in her ears.
Forgive me, she silently begged. I need your absolution.
“I thought you despised me.” He’d been gathering his thoughts, clearly.
“I never—”
“And you know . . . I always thought I would die before I hurt you. I would certainly want to kill anyone else who’d dared to hurt you. And yet at the same time I wanted to hurt you. I wanted you to care that I was gone.”
He stopped talking.
His breath seemed held.
“Oh God. Lyon. I cared.”
Cracked, whispered words. Yet they managed to contain the desolation of the years without him, and her whole heart.
He sighed, and tipped over on his side, propped his head on his hand, and stared down at her. His face was all shadows and moonlight.
“I’m sorry, too,” he whispered.
And that was done, then.
They let his words hover softly in the air for a while.
“I would have found a way for us, Olivia.”
“I know. I don’t think I ever truly doubted you. It’s just . . . you were older than I was. More experienced. Always a little quicker. Sometimes . . . it was too much. Sometimes I felt . . . caught up in something, a little pushed. I just wasn’t ready to make that kind of decision that night.”
He took this in with a long breath.
And he sighed. “I was so certain of the rightness of it, I suppose. Of my own rightness. I was so very arrogant. Young and invincible and all that.”
She smiled. “What did we know about love?”
And there it was. The word. Somehow it was easier to say now that they were utterly empty of pretense or defense. She’d lost her fear of it because it was simply truth, something that just was, like the sand below them and the sky above them.
“Love is like a loaded musket,” he mused. “And yet it’s available to everyone. It’s always . . .” He mimed thrusting out a gun. “‘Here you are! Try not to kill yourself or others with it.’ They oughtn’t allow young people near it.”
But they were still speaking of love as if it were separate from them, as if it were part of the scenery, a reminiscence, not a thing that belonged to them now.
She laughed. “Ah, but the species would never perpetuate if the young weren’t idiots.”
He parted his mouth as if he meant to say something. And then stopped, and gave his head a little shake. “The things you say, Olivia. I just . . .” He gave his head another little shake.
Too filled with the pleasure of her to say anything.
She smiled at him.
She listened to him breathing for a moment, and the lick and sigh of waves rushing up to the beach and slipping back out to sea. That was all and that seemed enough forever. It seemed all she’d ever needed.
She’d never said “I love you” to him aloud then. She’d always regretted it.
She was so weary of disliking herself. She was engaged to marry a fine man, who said he loved her, and she’d begun to envision a life with him, a life grand, consistent, respectable, soothing, and safe, surrounded by family, friends, eventually children. A life, and a man, any woman would be proud and privileged to claim.
A man she could imagine one day loving.
She didn’t want to hurt Landsdowne, or anyone ever again, herself included. She was so tired of pain. Perhaps she was simply tired of feeling so very much.
But she couldn’t not touch Lyon now any more than she could keep her heart from beating.
Her fingertips landed softly on his cheek. Uncertain of their welcome.
She felt rather than heard his breathing arrest.
The soft peace of the previous moment was gone, just like that.
And all was portent and anticipation and wariness.
She couldn’t see the expression in his eyes any more than she could see the expression in hers.
She dragged her fingers softly along the line of his jaw. She knew it as well as her own. It had seemed the most magical thing in the world to watch his desire for her kindle on his face, simply because she touched him.
Back then, they could only have that much and no more from each other.
Perhaps this would always be true.
Still. Her fingers trailed down his throat. And his pulse thumped swift and hard.
And just like that, she could feel the serrated edges of desire settling around her.
And then his face lowered. His lips touched hers.
Hesitantly.
So softly.
And perhaps, like her, wary of fresh pain.
But their bodies contained the memory of each other in their very cells. And when their lips met, hunger and celebration rushed in and swept out sense and caution.
They knew how to do this. He’d taught her, after all, and she’d inspired him.
Her mouth parted beneath his, and then . . .
Oh God, the incomparable, heady sweetness of his mouth, the heat and satin. The remembered pleasure. Surely no drug could be more decadent.
Desire roared along her nerve endings and her fingers laced through his hair and she was lost.
“Liv.” Half sigh, half groan, all surrender.
He lowered himself alongside her and they eased into each other’s arms. The fit of his body against hers was so right, so familiar. But there was a new ferocity in him that was both dangerous and seductive. The wall-like chest against her was a reminder that this was not the Lyon of yesterday. That perhaps she didn’t know all she needed to know about him now.
But she did know that she wanted him.
His hand slid down to cup her hip and he pressed her against his now-hard cock. Pleasure cleaved her, and he rose over her to take the kiss more deeply, and they clung, the kiss devouring, nearly punishing.
And then suddenly he pulled his mouth away from her.
Pushed himself up on his arms, drawing in a long, shuddering breath.
He rolled away, lying flat. Away from her. Arms at his sides rigidly, as if to discipline them for wrapping her in them at all.
And they both lay, dazed and once again separate, which seemed wrong, suddenly. She felt unmoored, between worlds.
Even logic and gravity succumbed to Lyon.
Every bit of her body was thrumming as if she were a struck gong.
He finally broke the silence.
“I’m not a boy anymore, Olivia. I don’t intend to spill in my trousers ever again.”
It was coarse but quite honest.
“Understood.”
He turned his head to look at her, in something like amazement. And then gave a short laugh.
They lay in utter silence, each of them tense as pulled-back bowstrings, until at last she became aware of other things besides Lyon, such as the fact that it was growing cooler.
She gave a start when he sprang to his feet.
He looked down at her for a moment, as if he was admiring a kill, and then thrust out his hand.
She seized it and he pulled her to her feet, with a mock effortful grunt.
“Excellent! You’re already a little heavier, Liv, from the delicious shipboard food.”
“Beast,” she said, without rancor.
When she was upright, she discovered the world was still spinning a little.
There was no intoxicant in the world like Lyon Redmond.
He dropped her hand abruptly and bolted off, his heels kicking up little sprays of sand.
“Where are you—what are you—”
He pivoted and ran backward a few steps, eyes on the sky, and then stopped abruptly.
“Stay right where you are!” he commanded.
He stretched out his arm like a triumphant acrobat landing, and ceremoniously turned up his hand.
“Now look up, Liv. Look at my hand.”
She did.
And lo and behold, the bright orb of the moon was right there, nestled in his palm.
“Ohhh,” she breathed.
It was beautiful and perfect and magical.
And an illusion.
And then he wound his arm and pretended to bowl the moon to her, a la cricket.
She ducked, flinging her arms over her head.
He shook his head and sighed, gustily and funereally. “We’re going to have to work on your catching, Eversea, if you’re ever going to be a decent wicket keeper.”
He dropped his arm, leaving the moon in the sky, and strode forward.
She laughed and scrambled to catch up to him, her bare feet sinking into the silken sand, and she found herself savoring every step, because every step brought her closer to him.
He remembered to stop to wait for her.
AH, CEILING, MY old friend, Lyon thought mordantly. We meet again.
He wondered if ceilings would always remind him of Olivia.
They’d silently gone their separate ways into separate chambers once in the house.
And he’d stripped out of his clothing and climbed into bed, and waited in vain for sleep, and it was just like old times.
He was a little older, perhaps a little wiser, infinitely more jaded. He’d been stabbed at and shot at, and he’d done a fair amount of stabbing and shooting. He’d amassed a fortune through a piquant blend of ruthless opportunism, lawlessness, and idealism, and he’d earned his sense of near invincibility, not to mention the calluses on his hands and on his heart.
And yet here he was, lying perfectly rigid, like a man attempting not to jar a grave wound. As uncertain and burning, burning, burning with untenable lust as if he was a boy again who had just touched his first breast.
And all it had taken was a few moments in her arms.
He was darkly amused at himself, and at everything, really.
In some ways this suffering was truly operatic, the stuff of legends. Tragic, consuming, all the doomed and star-crossed lovers nonsense, etcetera. She was his Achilles’ heel, his Chiron wound that would never heal.
On the other hand, surely nothing could be more mundane. For there would be no myths, no operas, no plays, no flash ballads, if men and women before the two of them hadn’t performed this particular fruitless pas de deux over and over since the beginning of time.
He’d thought that he’d wanted to show her his house in Cadiz to prove to her how wrong she’d been. To show her what she could have had.
Now he knew it was because he simply wanted her to know that he was worthy of her. Which is all he’d ever wanted.
And she was right. He hadn’t quite seen it before, but he had pushed her. He knew how precious her family was to her, especially since she could have lost her brothers in the war. She’d had enough uncertainty in her life. And yet he had demanded of her that they go forward into uncertainty, together.
He had simply thought love was enough.
He shifted restlessly in his bed.
He could have taken her tonight.
Her perhaps ought to have taken her tonight.
He could still take her tonight. She was lying only a few rooms away.
He knew how to use Olivia’s own passion and sensuality to get what he wanted.
But what then?
He had enough honor and breeding to not relish cuckolding a man like Landsdowne. Or to deflower a woman who was engaged to another man.
But when he peered beneath the veneer of that rationale he knew the truth:
He might have survived being shot and stabbed.
But Olivia Eversea was still the razor who could slice his callused heart to ribbons.
She always had been.
He wondered if she always would be.
And God help him, he wasn’t certain he was brave enough to live through that again.
So when he finally slept, he slept alone.