“The blonde?” I ventured.
I looked up and he looked down, beads of water running from his forehead, sliding down the sharp slope of his nose, dangling before another pushed it away. His thick jet lashes were fringed with tiny crystal bubbles. He shrugged. “A girl I met there.” He put the sponge underneath the spray, soaking it again, before he started running it up the length of my belly, a tickling caress. “Elliott wanted that place because he took Lisette on that trip. He told me he wanted to marry her after we got back.”
“My parents gave it to him, but I’m not sure now…” The thought of Charlotte having it after all she had put him through made my blood turn hot. The place in Fiji was all he had wanted, and she fought to have it, even though she hated sand.
“You never told your parents about Charlotte and Nick. In the pantry.”
My breath caught when he began to wash my breasts. “Mmm.”
“Scarlett.”
I didn’t respond, too lost to the feeling. A second later, he dipped his head and took my nipple in his mouth, biting hard enough to make a tightness coil deeper in my stomach.
“Ah!”
“Answer me.”
“Because…because I didn’t want to be like her. Just like you refused to call Stone about Janet.” I waved a hand. “Jane.”
His tongue ran up the expanse of my skin, and he took advantage of the part of my mouth. His lips met mine, his tongue teasing. Chocolate. I tasted chocolate. He stepped away, our lips parting with a tender noise.
“You called him,” he said, putting the sponge up.
“Turn around.” I blinked myself back into focus. “Let me do you.”
He laughed at that, a low noise in his throat. He assumed his earlier position, two hands against the pane, back muscles taught and skin glistening with steam. He was the most beautifully built man that I had ever seen. Every part of him was defined.
“I did,” I said. “And I’d do it again. She’s a wicked bitch. Her and Charlotte would be grand friends.”
I had a score to settle with Jane Jones. It was one thing for my sister to be cruel to me, but another thing entirely for another woman to lie on my husband.
“They were, in high school,” he said.
I squirted more of his shampoo in my hands than intended. Male scents dominated the feminine ones, though the undercurrent still lingered. I slid my fingers in the strip of his hair, using my nails to scrub his scalp.
“What do you think about Eva?” I said, changing the subject.
Rarely did Brando comment on people we met. I could usually tell if he liked them or not by the way he acted in their company. It was hard to read him this time.
A prolonged moment later he answered, but when he did, he sounded like he was immersed in a pleasant dream. “She’s…peculiar.” His head dipped forward, like he was about to fall asleep. “She reminds me of you, in a way.”
“You think I’m peculiar?”
“Always did, baby.”
I concentrated on his hair, using my fingers to massage his scalp, just as he had done mine, all the way to the stiff muscles in his neck.
Brando was hesitant about me being…what had Eva called it?Touched.The night that I saw my grandmother’s lover—who turned out to be my grandfather—outside of the castle in Slovenia, where we spent our wedding night, the revelation had bothered him. The man was a ghost.
That, along with my star gazing, the humming in my blood that seemed to connect the fabric our lives, and the habit I had of feeling things before they actually happened, made him uneasy.
Iwaspeculiar,I realized with a shock.
“Why do you think I came sniffing around?” he said, and I could see from his reflection that he was grinning in a drunken sort of way. “The thrill of discovering something no one else had, or ever will. All of you.”
“I could never belong to anyone else, not in the way that I belong to you,” I whispered.
A sound rose up in his throat that made my womb tighten like a fist. The deep, drumming pulse, a steady tattoo, picked up rhythm. I became hyperaware of every molecule and cell. One touch and I might combust.
