Desire when you got close in the right way. When you lingered against him, nothing sudden: light touches on the left side, if at all, more freedom on the right.
Hope when you slowed your steps along the Seine, when the sky was Paris-purple, lights turning on and the city transforming into something else: not a wandering place now, but a destination place—a specific spot, a reservation, a fresh red lip, a set of people you were going to meet.
And then, when you tried to say—clumsily, okay, you’ve never tried to say somethingquitelike this before—what destinationyoumight have in mind, before time ran out on the best day you can remember having, maybe ever…
Disappointment. Sadness. Loss.
And now, in trying to belessclumsy, Layla had startled him—herit’s not tomorrow yetmaking him blink and stare in disbelief, in whiplashed surprise.
She took a breath, shifting on her feet, and thought of lastnight, tucked into that stone archway, into the privacy Griffin had stolen for them. She could try something like that, something stark and stripped down, whatever tonight’s version ofIt made me think of youmight be.
I wanted to invite you back to my hotel room, orI think I might die if you don’t kiss me again.
But no. It was more complicated than that now.
And she was desperate to tell him why.
“When I came here before,” she said finally, and there—from startled to something else, the frustration again, anytime she got close to something about Jamie, or the MacKenzies.
She liked it. It was complicated.
“When I came here before,” she repeated, “I was trying so hard to become something. Someone, I guess. Someone who belonged here. Someone’s wife. A MacKenzie.”
He made a noise, deep in his throat—a rumble that made theI think I might diefeeling come back, a pulse between her legs that had her wanting to take a step toward him. But even with the rumble, his eyes on hers were still cautious, holding something of himself back.
“I wanted to know Paris like they do,” she continued. “I wanted to love it like they do. To make their memories of it mine. Their favorite places would be mine, too. It was another way to be part of their family.”
He came closer, his eyes softer. He knew the contours, at least, of this wound now—knew what it meant to her, to feel like she was part of a family, when her own had been so incomplete and fractured and distant. He knew that the Paris of her honeymoon—the Louvre with someone who’d seen itso manytimes, the best restaurants from the MacKenzie family lore, the tempting, clichédsouvenirs she felt too embarrassed to buy—could be full of terrible pressure.
Too much to see, too beautiful, too sophisticated, too delicious.
“But today, I just loved it. I love it likeIdo.”
They both blinked when she said those last two words: the vow they’d come all this way to witness, and the one she’d once made with someone else. No covenant now, no becoming something other than what she was.
He came even closer. Like this, she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze; she had to lift her eyes to see everything there. To see how heunderstoodher.
“Layla Bailey,” he said quietly, his breath drifting across her lips like a sealing kiss, as good as any pronouncement.
She nodded.
Desire, hope: She could see it in him again, or maybe now that he was closer she couldfeelit, warming her straight through. She wanted to say the hotel thing, theI might diething, but there was still the trepidation in him, keeping him slightly apart.
“Tomorrow,” she said again, hoping to go back to that moment where he’d turned himself off, to explain better this time. To get rid of that trepidation. “I know I’ll need to be Emily’s sister again. But for tonight, I was wondering if—”
“I’m afraid,” he said, cutting her off. Airplane-aisle sharp. A white-hot blade through the warm night air.
But now she knew that, too, was complicated. The first time she heard him speak, his cuttingBe quiet. TheDon’t tell Michael you saw memoment in the elevator; theLet’s talk about somethingin a candlelit restaurant.
All of it, a version of this. All of it to carve around this truth.
I’m afraid.
Slowly, she extended her left hand—not much distancebetween them, not much at all to reach him. She set the tip of her index finger against the knob of bone in his right wrist, the easiest place to touch with his hands still in his pockets. She let it linger there, watched his eyelids lower, his nostrils flare gently. This could not be like last night: This could not start with his angry, desperate impulses, could not end with her careless, grabbing hands.
This had to be different.
She moved. The pad of her finger sliding down that knob, to the outside of his hand. She felt that touch all the way up her arm, a delicious, warm tingling that was entirely unrecognizable to her from such a subtle movement.
