The days passed in the loveliest haze. Time, status, reality had no meaning. There was no discussion about the future. No attempts at reasoning out what they had between them. They didn’t talk about the past. They didn’t talk about the future. They were in something like an eternal present, which was definitely different. And lovely in its way.
It also gave her even more of a chance to know him. Just as he was. Not just the difficult things in their past, the way that it related to her. Not the ways in which they had hurt each other and the why. But what he was interested in now. Though she found herself feeling curious about other things. She should let sleeping dogs lie. The sleeping dogs being his past physical relationships. But she felt raw about them. And this felt like a safe space. It wasn’t the estate, where so many memories, so many unkind words that had been exchanged between them hung in the air. It wasn’t his turf in London, or hers in New York. This was a liminal space where everything seemed just a little bit kinder. They were Adam and Eve here. Unburdened and unashamed.
She was lying out in the white sand, and he was walking out of the crystal clear water, naked. The water glistened on his body, his muscular chest, his thighs—thick and defined, and so sexy she was developing a new fetish. She wouldn’t have said that she was into men’s thighs. But now she was quite corrected.
“What kinds of relationships have you had?” she asked, staring at him from her lounging place in the sand.
He looked down at her and pushed dark hair off of his forehead, water droplets flowing down his forearm, through the valleys created by his muscles.
“I don’t live in your head, Heather. You are going to have to give me some context.”
“I was a virgin,” she said. “And yes, some of it was that every time I considered having sex with a man, I imagined you bursting through the door and pulling him off of me. But then at a certain point I just imagined you. It kept me from ever having a sexual relationship. I feel slightly wounded that I didn’t have the same impact on you.”
He made a dismissive noise, and she bristled.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I have no desire to fight with you. By the time I noticed you as a woman, I was no virgin. I was seventeen. And so, I already had experience. Also, I determined that I was never going to touch you.”
“You did a bad job at that.”
“Yes, thank you. I am aware of that.”
“What were your relationships like? Have you ever been in love? It’s easy for you to know my history. But I don’t know yours. That seems stunningly unfair.”
“I’m sorry that it seems unjust to you.” He was silent for a moment. And then he sat down beside her in the sand, his proximity taking away some of her irritation. Some of her anger. It was funny how it used to be the opposite. But now that she could touch him when she wanted to, she didn’t feel quite so much negative energy around him. She felt close to him. Which was unexpected.
“I knew that I was never going to fall in love,” he said. “And I was always very up-front with my lovers about that. I can have any woman I wanted. Except for you. And I think that might’ve tempered some of my activity. I might’ve been a monster otherwise. But there was always tension. The knowledge that there was a woman out there that I wanted more than the one that I was with.”
Her stomach went tight. “But you knew you would never fall in love?”
“No. I know that I can’t.”
“Why not?” Her mouth was dry, her heart sore. Because she loved him. She did. She had. And he was telling her that he couldn’t. This man who had captured so much of her for so many years was telling her he had always known he couldn’t love. He wanted her. But just a bit more than all those other women. And she supposed that she should be thankful for that? That she should be flattered? But that wasn’t the word. No.
Flatteredwas not the word. “Because I know how it looked on my mother. And I know… It has the capacity to be such a toxic thing. It simply isn’t something I would ever willingly subject myself to. Or anyone else. I made a decision a long time ago that I was never going to put anyone through that.”
“So they were meaningless to you.”
He nodded. “Yes. They were.” He looked at her directly. “You don’t need to be jealous of women that I’ve already forgotten.”
“How would you feel if I had a long list of ex-lovers?”
He practically bared his teeth. “I would want to hunt them down and kill them because they had seen you naked.”
“Then don’t begrudge me my own feelings of being feral over the women that have seen you.”
“But no one has shared a bed with me all night. And no one has stayed on a private island with me. And certainly no one else has ever had my baby.”
“I’m your wife,” she said. Because she couldn’t say that she loved him. She just knew she couldn’t. Not after this. But she could remind him that she was his wife. That she mattered to him. That what they had was special. Unique. Not like what he had shared with anyone else.
“You are my wife. And it is not enough for us to satisfy each other for an evening. We have to make this work for a lifetime.”
Yes. Forever. She didn’t need to worry about it. She didn’t need to push him. They had forever. He was right. And one thing that she knew about herself and Romeo was that they could hang onto something for more years than most. They had already had this obsession for years. Surely they could continue defeat it. Cultivate it. School it into something better, nicer. “Yes,” she said. “We have forever.”
They had already made it this far. There was no telling how much further they would be able to make it.
But only if she gave him the time that he needed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
