“I thought if I came in person I might be able to argue my case.”
“What if I still decide to stay?” Cassie said.
Alex glanced out at the plain. “Then I’ll develop a taste for South Dakota.”
Cassie shook her head. There was no point arguing over something that had already been done; something she knew, deep down, she had wanted. Besides, she was hardly the person to complain about a breach of trust, when Connor was just on the other side of the door.
“So,” Alex said, smiling. “What do we do now?”
Cassie smiled back, relieved, more than willing to put off the time for explanations. “I don’t know. You’re the one who reads all the good scripts. What happens in the movies?”
Alex scuffed his boot against the step and looked down, but he didn’t stop rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand, as if to remind himself that Cassie was indeed flesh and blood. “Usually the hero and the heroine ride off into the sunset.”
Cassie bit her lower lip, as if she were considering this. “Then we still have a good seven hours to sit here on the porch,” she said.
Alex’s eyes grew dark, lazy. “We could goinside,” he suggested.
Cassie knew exactly what he was thinking, and laughed out loud at the thought of Alex walking into the living room, expecting to make love, only to find Cyrus, Dorothea, Will, and Connor staring him down.
“I don’t think you want to do that,” she said. “It’s a little crowded.”
Alex frowned, thinking of the goddamn tabloids that had ripped Cassie apart after she left, linking her with every man from the Shah of Iran toJFKJr. He told himself she was not living with another guy.
She wouldn’t have been so relaxed. She wouldn’t have kissed him like that. She couldn’t have. “You don’t live here alone?” he said carefully, keeping the emotion out of his voice. Cassie shook her head.
“It was a nightmare,” he said. “A reservation’s a big place. I didn’t think I was ever going to find you. When I got here yesterday, no one would tell me where you were. They all looked at me and pretended they didn’t speak English, or else they told me it was none of my business. What iswiththese people, anyway?”
Cassie just shook her head. Pine Ridge was probably the only place in the world where her own group of supporters was stronger than Alex Rivers’s fan club.
“So I finally bribed some teenager by giving him a fifth of vodka, and he gave me directions here.” Alex looked around at the landscape.
“Wherever ‘here’ is, exactly.”
“It’s the Flying Horses’s house,” Cassie said, but that was all she was willing to offer. She slapped her palms on her thighs and affected a bright smile. “So,” she said, walking away from Alex. “What have you been doing since the Academy Awards?”
She turned around for his answer and stumbled against Alex, who was standing several inches too close. “I don’t want to talk about me,”
he said softly, gripping her shoulders. “I know exactly what I’ve been doing for the last six months—I was trying very hard to kill myself, the slow, poisonous way: letting my career go to hell and drinking myself into a stupor because I didn’t have you around.” His hands dropped to his sides and his voice fell so quiet Cassie had to lean forward. “I don’t know what exactly it was that made you go that day,”
Alex said, “but I have a good idea. And I want you to know that I’ll do anything you want—I’ll even sleep in a different bedroom. But God, Cassie, please say you’ll come home.” He looked at her, his lashes dark with tears. “You’re too much a part of me,” he said. “If you cut yourself free,pichouette, then I bleed to death.”
Cassie stared at Alex, feeling the balance of the world shift under her feet. She’d spent three years afraid of the ways Alex reacted to her;
now he was afraid of how she would react to him. She had bent over backward to make him happy; now he was offering the same bargain to her: therapy, counseling, even celibacy, because that was what he thought would please her. Figuratively, he was on his knees before her—just as she had literally been countless times in the past.
A beautiful nugget of optimism burst inside her, flowing through her system until it heated the ends of her fingers. She placed her hand against Alex’s cheek, thinking of all the times she had pictured this moment: when Alex would begin to keep his promises; when he willingly would start to change their lives; when he would never risk her again.
Cassie brushed away Alex’s tears, humbled by the fact that this man, who never cried, was doing so for her. Itwasdifferent, this time. He had seen that she had the power to leave, and because of that, she was now an equal. He had admitted there was something wrong between them. He was depending on her for help again, except this time her involvement would not be as a sacrifice, but as a savior.
She smiled at Alex. “I want to show you what I’ve been doing since I left,” she said. Turning on her heel, she pushed open the door of the little house, ignoring the questioning glances from Dorothea and Cyrus.
She looked at Will, but only because he was holding the baby. His eyes were dark and hooded, his lips drawn into a tight line.
Cassie took a deep breath and scooped Connor from Will’s shoulder.
She stepped outside and closed the door behind her, bouncing the baby to keep him happy. Then she held Connor out in her arms, an offering.
“This is Connor,” she said. “Your son.”
