“I mean every word.” His grip doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t waver. “You want to know what I realized tonight? While I was driving around trying to figure out where I went wrong?”
I can’t speak, so I just nod my head, urging him to continue.
He sits on the edge of the bed, draws me down next to him, and takes both my hands in his. His palms are warm, calloused, the skin split across his right knuckles.
“My world is ugly, Nora. It’s violence and blood money and moral compromises. It’s my mother’s cruelty and Declan’s coldness and business deals built on suffering.” He pauses. “But you—you’re the best thing that’s ever existed in it. The only clean, good thing I’ve ever had. I think I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you. I knew you’d changed my life.”
“I’m not good?—”
“You are. You’re kind when you have every reason not to be. You’re gentle when the world has been nothing but cruel to you.” His voice drops. “You love me even though I don’t deserve it.”
“You do deserve it,” I protest.
“I don’t. But I’m selfish enough to take it anyway.”
I stare at him. The honesty in his face undoes me.
“You think you’re not good enough for me,” he says. “But I’m not good enough for you. I never have been. You should have a man from a clean life. Someone who can give you normalcy and safety and a world that’s not tinged with blood. But I’m not noble enough to let you go.”
He pulls out his phone. “I want to show you something.” He taps through it and turns the screen toward me.
It takes me a moment to recognize what I’m seeing. It’s a photograph. From the charity gala we attended together.
Cillian is in a black tuxedo, and I’m in the midnight blue dress I almost talked myself out of wearing. I don’t remember anyone taking a picture of us.
But a photographer caught it.
I gasp aloud.
Cillian is looking at me. Not at the camera and not at anything else in that glittering, crowded ballroom. He’s looking at me.
But that’s not what makes me gasp. It’s thewayhe’s looking at me—like I’m the only thing in the room worth noticing.
And that’s not all.
We look like we belong together.
Not at all like a powerful man and his charity case, but like two people who’ve found something very special in one another.
I think about the photograph Aoife showed me. She was trying to make me feel jealous and insignificant, and it worked—because I let it. I remember how certain I was that they were what a couple was supposed to look like.
But now, looking at this pic on his phone, I see how very wrong I was.
Cillian and Aoife looked like friends or colleagues. Like old acquaintances who had learned to stand at the correct angle for photographs. There was nothing wrong with it. There was also nothing special or intimate about it.
This picture of us is very clearly a picture of a man who adores the woman beside him and a woman who loves her man.
“When did you get this?” My voice comes out quieter than I intend.
“Finn pulled it from the event photographer’s archive.” He takes the phone back, looks at it himself. “I had it printed. It’s in my office.”
“You had it printed?”
“You’re my wife. I want pictures of my wife.”
Something behind my sternum pulls tight and releases all at once.
He holds my gaze. “So here’s what I need to know. Do you love me?”
