“Shhhh!” someone hissed at them. Gabriel, looking guilty, lay back down and stopped talking.
The silence stretched, the pipes played on in the distance, and a burning log fell with a crack, sending up a shower of sparks.
“Pierre?” he finally said very softly.
“Yes,” she whispered back.
“I wanted you to know that I looked for you. Three years ago.”
Her breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t just what he said, but his voice as he spoke. She waited, knowing he was going to say more.
“I thought a lot about you, and had the timing been different…Who knows what might have happened?” He blew out a long breath. “But…the thing is I’m…Nicole and I got engaged two months ago.” Again, he paused. “It was just after Christmas. When it all looked like the move to America was happening… Anyway…” He paused again and finally said, “Pierre, I’m not the kind of man who cheats.”
“Of course not.” She made herself smile. “And congratulations on your engagement,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice light and cheerful. “When is the wedding?”
She didn’t want to know. She really, really didn’t want to know.
“I don’t know. Sometime when we’re in LA. It’s bit of an upheaval, this move, so neither of us has had time to plan anything yet.”
“You should look through a silk filter and see if you can count the moons.” She tried to laugh but it didn’t come out right. She lifted the silk square up to give her a reason to look away from him.
It may have been the silk getting more transparent, or her eyes blurring with tears, but there were two faint crescent moons in the sky. She blinked repeatedly but it didn’t change.
Fourteen
Fool, fool, fool.
What had she been thinking? He’d made no secret of his relationship. All right, perhaps he never actually said he loved the woman, but it was clear in the way he had defended her, blaming her temper on stress, how quick he’d been to smooth ruffled feathers at the post office. As if it were his responsibility to make sure people didn’t think badly of his woman. Lucky of Nicole to have such a loyal boyfriend.
Every thought hurt like a stab to her diaphragm.
In her arrogance, she had pitied Doris her innocent crush, called it the impossible dream, when all the time it was she who’d been trying to catch the impossible.
Was she really the kind of woman to go after someone else’s man? Even if that someone else was Nicole?
If only she could stop shivering.
For the second time that day, she stripped off her clothes and stepped into a hot bath. Who took a bath at 2am? Answer: the sad, the wounded, and the lonely.
The lonely.
Was that why it hurt so much? Why she’d allowed herself to forget? To sleep-walk into an infatuation?
Suddenly she couldn’t lie still. She pushed herself up and out of the bath. Walking naked, soap bubbles clinging to her skin, she padded to the bedroom and grabbed a large towel and wrapped herself in it. Then she stood before the mirror. Green hair hung in limp ropes over her shoulders and down her back.
She was a solid gold fool. Mistaken a man’s friendliness for something more. Thinking herself special, imagining she was the only recipient of his easy-going charm when the evidence was right in front of her. Everyone who met him liked him, even Cook, heaping his plate high with food. Did Cook think he had special feelings for her? No. Only Pierre had been so…so...what?
Lonely.
But she wasn’t lonely. She had friends here, lots of good friends. She wasn’t lonely.
The word refused to go away.
Truth is like an inflated beachball, no matter how hard you push it under the water, it always bobs back up to the surface.
Pierre used the edge of the towel to dry her ears.
Truth is the whisper you cannot stop yourself hearing.
