herself facedown in the dirt, completely disoriented, scraped and raw in only a few places while around her, the northern California night had been quiet. A little bit foggy around the edges. Pretty, even, especially with the sea foaming over the rocks down below.
It hadn’t been until the car had burst into flames some ways down the cliff that she’d realized what had happened. How close she’d come to death. How narrowly she’d escaped it, completely by accident.
Lily sat up too fast in her bed—again. This was, what? The fourth night in a row? Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might punch a hole in her chest. The same way it had felt that night five years ago, when she’d finally comprehended what had happened. She’d almost forgotten the terror, all these years later. The insane what ifs that had galloped through her head. The smell of brake fluid and burned rubber and that thick, choking smoke from the fire so real in her nose she took a few deep breaths before she understood it was a memory.
It had already happened. It wasn’t happening now.
“It’s only a dream,” she whispered. “It isn’t real.”
Though the shadow that detached itself from the darkness near her doorway then was. It moved, it made her jaw drop—and then it was Rafael.
“What are you doing?” she gasped when she could speak, though she’d huddled up in a tiny ball against the ornate headboard. “You scared me!”
“That is going around,” Rafael murmured.
He looked rumpled and irritable and something else she couldn’t identify when he came to a stop beside her bed. She stared at him, the sight of his gorgeous body in nothing but a very low-riding pair of athletic trousers as soothing, oddly, as it was thrilling in the usual way. And his bare feet against the old carpet struck her as some kind of benediction.
“Rafael?” she asked, before that fire in her took over and made her do or say something she knew she’d regret. “What’s the matter? What are you doing here?”
“You screamed,” he said gruffly.
She swallowed, and took the time to uncurl her hands so they were no longer balled into fists. She felt cold, even under all of her blankets. And because she couldn’t make sense of that—of his presence here. Had he come running?
“Oh,” she said.
“Lily.” There was none of that sharp politeness in his voice then. None of that mockery. And she couldn’t see so much as a trace of either one on his face when he moved to the bedside table and snapped on the light. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened that night?”
“That night?” she echoed, though she knew. Of course she knew. It was still reverberating in her head, still oozing around in the corners of the room. She frowned at him instead, because that was easier. “How did you hear me, anyway?”
“I have a gift,” Rafael said, sounding dry and grumpy at once, which Lily realized was comforting, somehow. Though that made no sense. “I can hear two things with perfect clarity anywhere I go. The screams of terrified women, and irritating evasiveness at three twenty-seven in the morning.”
He didn’t reach for her, as she’d half expected. He leaned against the side of the bed, crossed his arms while he fixed that dark gaze of his on her, and waited.
And this was the story Lily had never told another living soul.
Maybe, she thought now, because he was the only person on earth who might understand what had happened and what she’d done—and she wasn’t even sure about that. Not any longer.
“Are you sure you want me to tell you?” she asked him. “You’ve really been enjoying vilifying me. I’d hate to ruin that for you.”
His dark eyes grew sterner and his jaw tightened, but he didn’t say a word. He only waited—as if he could stand there all night, no matter what she threw at him.
Lily sighed and shoved her hair back from her face, moving to sit cross-legged there at the head of the bed. And then she’d run out of ways to stall. And he was so dark and so beautiful, and he was so wrapped up inside her that she felt him when she breathed in, and she’d never managed to get him out of her head or her heart. Not then. Certainly not now.
And she still didn’t know what that made her. What that meant.
But it was the middle of the night. And the only light in the world seemed to fall in that tiny little circle from the side of her bed. She told herself it was the only confessional she’d be likely to get. And she took it.
Maybe all of this—from the moment he’d seen her on the street in Charlottesville all the way across the world to that night in Venice—had been leading them straight here. Maybe this had been the destination all along.
“You remember that last fight we had.” She looked at him, then down at her hands, threading them together in her lap. It had been a long time ago, that fight. “In San Francisco that Thursday.”
His sensual mouth flattened into a stern line. “I remember.”
“It was the usual thing. I cried, you laughed. There was that other woman you’d been in all the papers with. You dared me to leave you. I told you that this time I really would.” Lily frowned at her fingers as she lifted one shoulder, then dropped it. “I didn’t believe a word I said. Neither did you. We must have had that exact same fight a thousand times by then.”
“More,” Rafael agreed in that same too-dark voice, and she thought that was self-loathing she heard in his voice then. She recognized it. She’d heard it enough times in her own voice during those years.
“That weekend I went up to the château. It was a pretty night, I was bored and I was mad at you, so I helped myself to one of the overly fast cars in that absurd garage of your father’s, and I took it for a drive.” She lifted her head and looked at him. “I drove back down into the city. I wanted to see you.”
She had the notion he was holding his breath. She pushed on.
“You weren’t answering your phone, but I had a key to your house in Pacific Heights. I let myself in.” She let out a sound that even she knew wasn’t a laugh, but there was no helping it. This story was like an avalanche. Once it started, it rolled on and on until it wrecked everything. No wonder she’d never told it before. “I think I knew what was happening long before I made it to your bedroom. I don’t remember hearing any sounds, but I must have—”
He swore. Deep and rich and inventively Italian.
“—because when I made it to your bedroom and looked inside, I wasn’t as surprised as I should have been. If I hadn’t had some warning, I mean. If I’d been surprised, I would have done something more than simply stand there, don’t you think? Made a noise. Cried. Screamed. Something.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t.”
“I don’t know if it makes it better or worse,” Rafael said after a moment, as if it hurt him. As if he was speaking with someone else’s voice, some stranger’s voice that hadn’t worked in years. “But I don’t even remember her name.”
Lily remembered far too much. She’d stared at the figures on the bed, willing them to not make sense, the way such things always failed to make sense in books.
