smiled with entirely too much satisfaction. “It was cute.”
“And yet somehow we produced a child,” she prompted him, a touch of acid in her voice, though her expression was impressively impassive. “Despite the fact I was, apparently, an eight-year-old wannabe nun with no greater ambition than to live in a fairy tale. A poetic fairy tale.”
“On your eighteenth birthday you asked me for a kiss,” he told her, sitting back farther in his chair and enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time in the past five years he’d enjoyed himself quite so much, in fact. “‘Please, Rafael,’ you begged. ‘I want to know what it is to be a woman.’”
“Oh, come on. No one says things like that. Not in real life.”
He shrugged. “And yet, you did. Or do you remember it differently?”
“I don’t remember it at all,” she murmured, and he saw that mutinous light in her eyes. His stubborn girl. “Though that sounds a little bit dramatic, if I’m being honest.”
“You were a very theatrical teenager, Lily. The despair of your mother and a trial to all your teachers, or so I was told at the time.”
She rubbed her hands over her face. “And yet somehow all this drama led to a secret relationship? That strains belief, doesn’t it?”
“That was your call,” he told her without a single qualm, watching her for a reaction to what might have been the biggest lie of all, but she only stared back at him. “You begged for a kiss, which, of course, I refused.”
“I can’t say I blame you. I’d question the man who looked at a gawky teenager in a makeshift bridal gown who’d seriously considered taking up the veil and thought, I want some of that.”
Rafael had no idea how he kept from laughing. “I told you that I couldn’t possibly kiss such an innocent. That you would have to prove yourself a woman if you wanted me to kiss you like one.”
“You felt this was the right approach to an obviously confused teenager?” Lily sniffed. “I wonder if a kind word or two might have been a little more helpful. Or the number of a good therapist.”
“I thought you would run screaming back into your sheltered little world.” He didn’t know when he’d slipped from his fantastical story into something a lot like the truth, but he knew he didn’t like it. Rafael stretched out his legs before him and eyed her across the accent rug, where she’d once slipped to her knees and taken him in her mouth while his father and her mother had talked loudly in the hallway on the other side of the door. He remembered the heat of her mouth, the sweep of her tongue, as if it had happened yesterday. So did the hardest part of him. “I thought you were all bark and no bite.”
“Let me guess,” she said softly. “I bit.”
“In a manner of speaking.” Rafael remembered that kiss on New Year’s Eve. He remembered the taste of her flooding him, and the weight of her thick, wild hair against his palms. He remembered the press of her breasts against his chest and the silky-smooth expanse of the sweet skin at the tops of her thighs, where he shouldn’t have reached in the first place. “You decided you needed to prove yourself a woman.”
“Was there a series of tests?” Lily asked in that same soft voice, yet with something far edgier beneath it. “A gauntlet of fire, one can only hope?”
“Do you really want the details?”
Her gaze was too hot when it met his. She looked away—but it took a moment. “No.”
“You insisted we keep it a secret. You demanded I date other women in public so no one would know. You were determined.”
“And you, of course, acquiesced.”
“Of course. I am nothing if not a gentleman.”
There was a long silence, then. There was only the sound of the fire. The far-off noises that all old houses made, the shift and creak of settling. The moody December weather on the other side of the old glass windows.
His own heart, beating a little too hard for a simple conversation like this one.
“Can I be honest with you?” she asked.
“Always.”
“I don’t think I believe you.”
Rafael couldn’t keep from smiling then, and stopped trying. “Do you remember another version of events, then?”
“Of course I don’t. You know I don’t.”
He watched her ball her hands into fists, and took that as a victory. “Then my version will have to stand, as told.”
“Let’s say that all of this is true.” She studied him. “Why would you fall in love with me? The person you describe is a disaster at best.”
“Love makes us all fools, Lily,” he said quietly.
“You as much as admitted you made all of that up,” she pointed out. “Or you wouldn’t ask me for a different version.”
“Tell me which part,” he dared her.
She sat up then, so abruptly it made him blink. She stamped her feet back into her boots, one after the next with a certain nearly leashed violence, and then stood up in a rush. Rafael wanted nothing more than to do the same—but stayed where he was, lounging there as if he’d never in his life been more at his ease.
“This is crazy,” she muttered, as much to herself as to him. But then her blue eyes slammed into his. “What kind of person are you, to play games like this?”
“Do you really want to know the truth?” he asked her, and he wasn’t at all languid any longer. He couldn’t even pretend. He sat up, never shifting his hard gaze from hers.
“I thought that was the point of you bringing me here. All the truth, all the time. Whether I like it or not.”
“Because you knew the truth once, Lily,” he said, with a harshness that surprised him even as he spoke. He couldn’t seem to contain it. “You lived it. And then you sent your car over the side of a cliff and walked away from it. You had a baby, changed your name and hid in a place no one you’d known before would ever think to look for you. Maybe you don’t want to know the truth.”
Lily shook her head, more as if she was shaking this off than negating what he’d said, and he viewed that as a victory, too.
“Or,” he said in the same tone, with that same edge, “you already know the truth and all of this is a game you’re playing for reasons of your own. What kind of person would that make you?”
She stiffened as if he’d slapped her.
“I think you’re not right in the head,” she threw at him as she started for the door. “Why would you tell me a bunch of lies? How could fake stories of a made-up past do anything but make things worse?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rafael replied, and even he could hear the danger in his voice. The menace. And it took everything he had to stay where he was. To let her go when that was
