Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8. Кейт Хьюит

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on a street in a funny little corner of America. I have drawn conclusions about what must have happened between those two events while you were busy playing identity games, but no. I do not know what happened.” She saw his hand tighten around his glass. She felt it as if it had tightened around her, instead. “I certainly don’t know why.”

      Lily had spent five years trying to answer these questions to her own satisfaction—but it was something else to answer to him. To Rafael, who was the reason behind all of the terrible decisions she’d made in her life, one way or another. She swallowed, found her throat dry and tucked her arms beneath her chest as if that could bolster her against him. Or against this story she’d never wanted to tell.

      She still didn’t.

      “Maybe it’s better to let these things lie,” she suggested, shocked that her voice sounded so small. She cleared her throat, tried to stand taller. “Please remember that I didn’t want to be found.”

      “Believe me, I remember.” His voice was a lash. He swirled the liquid in his glass, his dark eyes on her, and she had the distinct impression he could see all the fine hairs on the back of her neck and along her arms stand up. “And you are stalling.”

      “What does it matter why?” She fought to sound calm, no matter what she might feel inside. “What can knowing why do except make things worse?”

      “You let me think you were dead,” he hurled at her, and she realized as he did how much he’d been holding back before, out there on the canal. He wasn’t restraining himself now, and it took everything she had to keep from flinching away from all that rough emotion. “You let the whole world think you were dead. What kind of person would visit her own death on the people who loved her?”

      “You didn’t love me,” she threw back at him before she had time to temper that. He stiffened, but it was said. There was no taking it back. And besides, it was true. This was about truth. “You were obsessed. You were addicted, maybe. To the secrecy. To the twistedness. To the sheer delight in all the sneaking around and the excitement of all that passion. I know. I was there. But love? No.”

      “You’ve done enough, I think, without lecturing me on how I felt.”

      “I know what you felt,” she retorted. “I felt what you felt.”

      “Evidently not,” he gritted out. “Or you would not have sent a car over the side of a cliff and walked away from the wreckage, leaving me to imagine your horrible, painful death forever. You did not feel what I felt, Lily. I rather doubt you feel anything at all.”

      That stung, but she stood tall and took it. She waited until her heart felt less painful in her chest as it beat. Until she could speak without that betraying thickness clogging up her throat.

      “I felt too much,” she told him. “Too much of everything. Too much to bear.”

      His lips pressed flat, and his gaze was a dark condemnation far worse than anything he could have said. “You’ll forgive me if I am unconvinced. Your actions speak their own truth, Lily.”

      “And what of yours?”

      “I loved you.” He didn’t shout that, either, not quite, and yet Lily thought it rattled the walls, made the whole palazzo shake on its uncertain foundation. “I have never been whole since.”

      “I think you’ve fallen in love with a ghost,” she told him, her voice shaking slightly. “In retrospect.” He made a rough noise, but she ignored it and kept going. “You had five years to make your lost Lily up in your head. Was she virtuous and pure? Did you love her so desperately no living woman can compare? Was her loss a blow from which you’ve never quite recovered?” She shrugged when he scowled at her. “She sounds like a paragon. But that’s not me, Rafael. And that was certainly not you.”

      “I loved you,” he gritted out again, and though he was quieter this time, she still felt it slam through her. “You can’t make that go away because it isn’t convenient for you.”

      “I remember exactly how you loved me, Rafael,” she told him in the same sort of voice, holding herself tightly in check, as if that might keep her safe from all these truths filling the room. “I remember all the women you slept with while you claimed we had to remain a secret. You said you had to maintain your cover. You laughed when it upset me. Tell me, did you love me this much while you were inside them?”

      And for a moment Lily didn’t know which was worse—the possibility that he wouldn’t answer her...or that he would.

      “If this is your version of an explanation, it’s terrible,” he snarled at her after a long beat, and then he tossed back the contents of his glass in a single smooth motion. He slapped the tumbler down on the cabinet behind him with a loud crack that made Lily jump. “I’m not the liar in this room.”

      “On the contrary,” she replied, hoping there was none of that jumpiness in her voice. “There are two liars in this room. You’re not the story you’ve been telling yourself, Rafael.”

      “Is this the real Lily talking now or this ghost I made up in my head?” he asked, his dark gaze glittering with fury. “I’m finding it difficult to keep track.”

      She shook her head at him. “Liars are all we’ve ever been, starting that first night when you took my virginity on a pile of coats in the guest room of your father’s château and then strolled back into the party to kiss your girlfriend at midnight as if it had never happened.” Lily laughed softly at his expression, not sure where the will to do so came from, when he looked so fierce. “I’m sorry, had you prettied that up in your imagination? Made it all wine and roses and no cheating or sneaking around? Well, that wasn’t us. And I’m as bad as you are, make no mistake, because I knew perfectly well you had a girlfriend and I didn’t try to stop it.”

      He stared at her, all outraged male and dark ruthlessness besides, and she watched as that sank in. As it moved through him. And she’d imagined this moment so many times. She’d envisioned bludgeoning him with the truth and that changing everything, somehow.

      But instead she felt worse. Incalculably worse.

      “We were terrible people,” she said then, with an urgency that made her voice shake slightly.

      “We must have been,” he said as he moved toward her, a kind of bleakness in his voice she’d never heard before. “Look at where we are.”

      “Maybe,” she told him, her voice low, “you should have let us both forget.”

      He shook his head, an expression she’d never seen before moving over his dark face.

      “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Neither one of us has forgotten a thing.”

      That felt like a dig. Lily stiffened. “That doesn’t mean we have to wallow in the past.”

      “Is that what you think this is?” Rafael asked. He shrugged, an edgy movement that did nothing to mask that thunderous, broken thing in his gaze. “Maybe so. But I’m not going to apologize for how I mourned you, Lily. How I coped with your loss. You walked away. You knew what you were doing. I didn’t have that choice.”

      “Your choices came before that,” she retorted, stung and hurt and furious at the both of them, that all of this could still hurt like this after so much time had passed. After so much СКАЧАТЬ