“You were under for a while.”
“You were keeping time?”
“Longer thanmost people can hold their breath-minutes long.” She grinned. “What kind of normal problems should we talk about?”
“How you would’ve convinced me to marry you at your father’s property—before you left for Paris.”
“Never far,” she murmured. She swam to the glass, staring out. “Before we play this game, I need to know. Did I have a chance? At convincing you?”
“I told you before, I almost gave in,” I reminded her.
“You told me that after we were married. But you didn’t. Didn’t stop me from leaving, I mean.”
I swam to her, standing behind her this time, wrapping my arms around her waist. She settled into me, floating again.
Putting my mouth close to her ear, I whispered, “Ah, my beautiful Eve, it was never a far fall from grace for your misguided Adam. No act, even by God, could save you from me. Still.”
“There you go again, with the easy words,” she whispered, holding tighter to my arms. “Besides, I never want to be saved. I love my position in life. Next to you.”
“Rilassare,” I murmured in her ear. “Let me carry you.”
She loosened her grip, resting her head against my chest, relaxing again. Her talented feet rose above the water, all of her bones outlined by her skin, toes wiggling. Violet had painted them stark white, which made her skin glow. It was easy to believe that I could see all her veins beneath the surface, rushing to her heart. Her skin was so delicate.
“This is like heaven,” she barely got out. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed completely at ease. “I could do this with you every night.”
Every night—when she couldn’t sleep.
There was something going on with her. Something she wasn’t telling me.
It had started the night after Luca showed up. She’d wake up in the middle of the night, clinging to me like I might disappear. She was having nightmares but refused to tell me what they were about. She passed them off as being caused from the cold or from hormones.
She was acting more peculiar than normal too—baking enough bread to feed a small village, for starters—which told me she felt something she didn’t want to feel. She was attempting to figure it out on her own.
“What if I had told you that I was pregnant?” she said out of the blue.
“You already did,” I said. “Twice.”
She smiled, her teeth bright white in the moody darkness. “No, I mean before I left for Paris. Would you have married me then?”
She must have still been thinking about our conversation—how she would have gotten me to marry her.
“After my heart stopped? Yeah, I would have. Lickety fucking split.”
She smiled even wider, but after a moment, it faded.
“I hoped…I wanted to be,” she said softly. “I was so jealous that Violet was. Not of her circumstances, but that she was getting married, having a baby, staying home. The life I wanted with you. I thought about it. God, did I. All of the ways to convince you to stay, to marry me.”
I followed the design of the pool, taking a page from her book and just floating us around it. Smooth and steady to keep her relaxed and talking.
“You didn’t lie to me to get me to change my mind,” I said.
“I had enough sense to realize that a lie wasn’t the right way to keep you. If you wanted me, I wanted you to just wantme. I didn’t want to get married because you felt it was the right thing to do, or out of responsibility.”
She set her hands behind my head, and water droplets ran down my neck in soft, warm streams. Her breasts were pressed above the water, her nipples hard, highlighted by the moonlight.
“Other than that—I tried to come up with something, anything to make you see the truth, but none fit or worked. You couldn’t see the truth then, so I left. What other option did I have?”
I buried my face in her neck. She held onto my arm as I caressed her breast, down her side, until my hand found the apex of her thighs. Her mouth parted. “Two words would have worked on me, Scarlett.Never again.That’s all you would’ve had to say to me.I’ll never be yours again.”
