when she stirred, then pushed herself off me. She got to her feet and gathered the throw around her like a robe again.
“Darcy,” I started.
She had already begun to head for the door, but she stopped then and looked back over her shoulder. Her black hair spilled down her back in abandon, the way I liked it. But her melting brown eyes were filled with loss.
“You deserve love, Sebastian, no matter what you think,” she told me, her voice hushed. “No matter what you’ve convinced yourself all these years. You deserve it. But so do I.”
“Don’t do this.”
It was as close as I’d ever come to begging. And her gaze only grew sadder.
“I don’t need you to love me,” she said. “I wish you would, but I’ve lived without it all these years. I’ll be fine.”
I knew that I was never going to be the same. I wasn’t even sure I’d make it to fine.
But I couldn’t seem to say a thing. Much less the thing that would stop this. The thing that might keep her.
“I’m going to love me for a change, Sebastian,” Darcy said. “Not the ballet. Not a man who’s happy to pay for me but refuses to love me. Me. And I don’t care if anyone likes it.”
And then, again and for good, I watched my little dancer walk out of my life.
Sebastian
FIRST I LOST my temper, having already lost my woman.
I let the kick of it propel me across oceans and continents alike. How dare she issue ultimatums? How dare she leave me—again? When it was obvious how good things were between us. When she was the one who had changed the game, not me.
But the trouble with temper was that it faded. And sooner or later, there was no more hiding from myself. No matter how I tried.
I found myself in Surrey some ten days after my last night with Darcy, in the foyer of that same cold house where I’d grown up. The New Year had rolled in. The world had been ripe with resolutions and vows, many already broken. Yet here in this house, everything was the same as it had always been.
Upstairs, I could hear my mother hurling things around, and the sound of shattered glass. It was my own personal symphony.
I climbed the stairs slowly. It took me longer than it should have to make my way down that same old familiar hallway. I knew this was my duty, but it sat heavier on me today. In the bright glare of this new year.
And when I stood in the door to her private drawing room, this interaction with my mother didn’t feel like penance anymore. It didn’t feel like a hair shirt.
It felt sick.
“Finally!” she shrieked at me when she saw me. “You dare to show your face here, after abandoning me the way you did? What kind of son are you?”
Normally, I would sit down. I would endeavor to be calm. Soothing. Something.
Today I stayed where I was.
“Things have to change,” I told her, in a voice I’d never used before. Not with her.
“You need to change, Sebastian,” she fired back at me, unsteady on her feet. “But I know you won’t. You’re too much like your father. It’s how you’re made. So cold straight through it’s like frostbite when you enter a room.”
I had accepted that as truth my whole life. And why? Because a drunk woman told me so?
“You’re a grown woman.” And the funny part was that after all the rage and fury that had held me in its grip since I’d last seen Darcy, today I felt quiet straight down into my bones. “I’m not going to tell you what you can and cannot do, Mother. But I will tell you this. I’m finished standing by while you indulge in yet another drunken tantrum. If you want to get drunk and throw a tantrum, go right ahead. But if you want to see me, you cannot be drunk. If you can’t do that, you can’t see me.”
I didn’t wait for her to respond. I turned and headed for the stairs.
And with every step I took, I felt lighter. Brighter. As if tethering myself to her downward spiral had made it mine, too.
How had I not seen that? I wasn’t paying penance. I’d been suffering through a prison sentence, maybe, but it had allowed me to lock myself away. It had kept me from feeling anything. It had made me distant and cold. My father by default.
And it was time I took responsibility for my own damned life. For what I had made it simply by standing by and letting these things go on.
My phone rang in my pocket as I stepped outside into the gloomy English January afternoon. I glanced at it, but it was never who I wanted it to be. This time it was my secretary.
“I don’t mean to bother you while you’re with your family,” he said, sounding harried. “But we’ve received another bid on the Delaney islands. Your brother has taken it upon himself to—”
“Enough,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Give him the islands,” I ordered my secretary. “He can have them. I don’t care. I’m not fighting with him anymore.”
“As you wish,” my secretary said, and rang off to do as I asked.
I made a mental note to send him an extra bonus for not mentioning that I’d waffled back and forth about this deal for months.
I had extended these olive branches before, of course. I’d stepped away from negotiation tables and left deals to Ash. I’d waited for him to recognize those gestures for what they were. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and heard something crash inside, but I didn’t look back.
None of this was mine. It never had been. It was my mother’s to hold or put down, as she chose.
I folded myself into my sports car and fired up the engine, but I didn’t drive away. I sat there for a moment. Considering olive branches and grand gestures.
I had made myself into a martyr. Ash hated me, and I knew he had a right to those feelings, so I’d done nothing, directly. Periodically, when he’d fought me for business, I’d handed over the thing he appeared to want and then I’d sat about, waiting to see if he did something else.
I’d done exactly nothing on my own. I hadn’t followed up. I hadn’t reached out to him. I expected him to divine from the ether of a business deal that I regretted what had happened between us and wished it could change.
And when he didn’t respond, because of course he didn’t respond, I used that as further ammunition that I was precisely as wretched and unlovable as my parents had always made me feel.
I was thoroughly sick
