Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (42 page)

“I’ll look it up. I gotta run to the ladies’ room first.” She stood up and moved around the back of her chair.

He reached out a hand. “Leave your phone with me—I’ll look it up while you’re gone.”

She started to rummage through her bag for her phone, then stopped.

He didn’t understand at first. The way she hesitated, the apology forming in her eyes.

Then he got it.

She didn’t want to give him her phone. She didn’t trust him with it.

You’re an idiot
, his brain informed him.
You’re accused of embezzlement. She’s going to leave her phone with you and go to the bathroom?

—She said she believed you were innocent
.

There are a million miles between saying you believe someone’s innocent and letting them hold an electronic device that probably contains every password and bank-account number and contact she’s ever collected in her life
.

But his brain didn’t want to let it go.

—She said…

His agitation rose, and he clamped down on it. “Okay. That’s okay.” He said it as much to himself as to her. “We’ll look it up when you get back.” His voice was as steady as he could make it. No accusation. She didn’t deserve accusation or defensiveness. She had every right to fear him. To fear the life he could offer if they kept this up. Weekends here and there, oases in uncertainty. Long distance, hard work, money spent to bring them together, and for what? So he could drench her in his shame? So he could make her wait while he served jail time?

Red circles had risen on her cheeks. She pushed her phone across the table toward him, her gaze not quite meeting his, as if she were looking at his right cheek but not into his eyes.

He didn’t reach for it.

A chasm had opened under his feet, and he realized that it described the exact dimensions of whatever had, earlier in the meal, been locked up inside his chest. He’d known it was big but not exactly how big, how Grand Canyon, impossibly, soul-swallowingly large.

He still hadn’t taken the phone.

“I don’t like to leave my phone with anyone. Not even my mother.”

He’d never heard her sound so uncertain. Not even that first time she’d called him, when
her words had almost been a question: “This is … the woman you kissed at midnight at that New Year’s Eve party?”

“You don’t have to apologize. It’s okay.”

But it was not. It was so far from okay. Because the chasm beneath him was the distance between what she’d said earlier—that she was convinced of his innocence—and what he needed her to believe: That he was not the kind of man who could ever in a million years have done what he was accused of doing. That he would no more have taken that money than he would have murdered his mother in her sleep.

But, more to the point, it was the distance between what he craved—a life with her—and the reality of what he could have. Between what he wanted to give her—everything—and what he could give her—only disquiet and awkwardness.

His throat hurt. His chest. God damn it, his
ears
.

He saw her across the table as if across that whole vast distance, the wonder and brightness of her receding, out of his grasp.

* * *

She’d meant every word she’d said earlier. She believed him that he hadn’t stolen the money. She’d stand up for him if someone questioned his innocence. She was in this with both feet.

But, as she’d feared, Henry had planted distrust in her, deeper than she could weed out. The moment with her phone had caught her off guard, and because it had, it had told the truth. A test Miles hadn’t meant to construct, a test that neither of them had seen coming.

She’d been willing to move forward with him, to commit her weekends, to commit herself. In
theory
. But when push came to shove, she’d balked. She trusted him with her heart but not with her phone. She didn’t believe, not completely, that he was innocent.

Oh, Henry. What have you
done?

“I—” she tried.

“Nora, please. Just … let’s drop it.”

“I do trust you.” And then, when he glared at her to tell her she couldn’t bullshit him like that, she pushed the phone toward him another few inches, knowing it was futile. He turned away from it, as she’d known he would. Too little, too late.

He’d asked for something she wanted—needed—to be able to give him, and she couldn’t. Because Henry had taken it away.

Miles had said he’d come to Boston and see her. He’d been honest with her about his doubts; he’d overcome them to take the next step with her. And she’d failed him when he asked her to take the next step with him.

“I—Miles, I’m so sorry. It was a knee-jerk thing. I have trust issues. Henry …”

It sounded like an excuse. A paltry one.

“It doesn’t mean I don’t believe you’re innocent. It doesn’t mean anything. It was just—I’m weird about my phone.”

“You don’t have to apologize. You got dumped by a guy who cheated on you for nine months. You’ve known me a day.”

So kind. His voice so even and patient.

Of course, he had his own trust issues. A fiancée who hadn’t been willing to stick by his side, and now Nora wanted so desperately to take it all back. Her hesitation. Her attempts at excuses. Even her apology. But some things couldn’t be taken back. Some things, once they were out there in the world, were there.

She needed to say,
I know you didn’t; I know you’re innocent
, as she had earlier today, before the truth of her feelings had been tested. Before she’d had to lay her world in the palm of his hand and leave the room.

She opened her mouth, but the words she needed to say wouldn’t come out. She just stood there, looking at the hurt on his face. Looking at the
despair
on his face, which she’d put there.

He said again, “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. It was really
not
okay. She’d hurt him and she could see that he’d gone to some kind of weird dark place. “Miles,” she attempted. “I ninety-five percent believe you’re innocent.”

She watched as the pain on his face transmuted into something harder. Sometimes it was better to shut up. Sometimes you dug yourself into a hole and you needed to stay there and reflect on how dumb you’d been to get there instead of scrambling up the unstable walls and triggering a cave-in.

“It’s fine, Nora. I can’t ask more than that of you. Of course I can’t. I don’t want to be
unreasonable about it.”

“You’re not being unreasonable. It’s not unreasonable to want people to have some faith in you—”

He shook his head. A denial of that possibility.

The waitress brought his coffee and her dessert, and they sat across from each other, but the cake had no flavor. She watched as the edge of her fork released an ooze of chocolate, but when she put the first bite in her mouth, it might as well have been dirt. “I’m sorry,” she tried again.

“Please don’t beat yourself up about it, Nora.”

He wouldn’t look at her. She’d lost him. He’d shut down some part of himself, the part that she’d reached out to at the New Year’s Eve party, the part that she’d awakened and taken into herself.

She stopped talking, because she hated all the words that came out, but that didn’t mean the words in her head had stopped. Pleas:
Don’t shut me out, Miles
. Defenses:
But, Miles, you can’t expect—it’s not fair
. Even an unexpected wash of anger:
I’m doing my best, Miles
.

Between them, at the table, there was silence now.

He drove her back to his house, and it was painful being next to him in the car. He was in there somewhere, but she couldn’t
feel
him. It was as if he were wearing his skin as a force field and she didn’t have the tools to break it down. She’d been exiled from him. The way it had been all those months after the party, when she didn’t know how to find her way back to him. Miles Shepard could hide from the world and he could hide from her, and if he wanted to hide, she didn’t know how to find him.

She was afraid he would put her in the guest room, and she didn’t think she could stand that. She thought if he did that, she would cry herself to sleep. But what he did was worse. He let her climb into bed with him, and when she turned to him, he made love to her. Exactly the way she’d imagined it would be in the bed, the two of them, in the dark. The light deprivation awakening her senses, her skin lit with the feel of his smooth skin, his rough hair, the heat of his body. The scent of him filling her, overflowing her. The rough sounds of his breathing, his grunts, the held-back moans and whimpers of hers. His entry into her languid, exquisite, an easy, slow slide, spreading and stretching and making the tears she’d been holding back trickle out the corners of her eyes as he moved over her, braced up on his arms, his face nearly invisible over
hers. She wanted to hold herself back the way he could hold himself back, but she had no idea how to do that, and so her body melted and she lost all her boundaries, like quicksilver running across the floor to meld and merge into the larger puddle. And the sensation was like quicksilver, too, bright and metal-sharp and soft and round and definitionless, everywhere, and she recognized what this sex was, knew its identity as well as she’d known him when she’d first seen him across the room.

Goodbye
.

“What the fuck, Miles?”

It was Owen on the phone. Miles almost hadn’t answered it, but in Owen’s last voice mail he’d threatened to fly out and make sure Miles was still alive, and the last thing Miles wanted was another overnight visitor on his doorstep. The last one hadn’t turned out so well.

“Hello to you, too, O.”

“You didn’t return my calls.”

“I didn’t have anything to say.”

There had been five or six of them. Most had been, more or less,
Call me and tell me how it went with Nora
.

“You could have called Nora,” Miles said. “Now that you two are bosom buddies.”

“Don’t be pissed.”

“I’m not pissed.”

“No, and the pope is the most recent convert to Mormonism. You’re pissed.”

“I wish you’d minded your own goddamned business, that’s all.”

There was a silence on the other end of the phone that, if Miles and Owen had not gone back quite so far, might have been hurt. “Point taken. So you probably won’t be surprised to learn that after I failed to get ahold of you for almost two weeks, I
did
call Nora, just to make sure you hadn’t strangled her in a fit of misplaced rage and tucked her body under the bed somewhere and were now the subject of a murder investigation.”

“Oh, that’s classy. Crime jokes.”

“I don’t think anything would be funny to you right now, Miles. You used to have a sense of humor.”

“And then someone accused me of a felony.”

“Which is exactly the time when a sense of humor comes in handy.”

He’d had a sense of humor again, briefly, while Nora had been with him. Not a laugh-out-loud raucous one, but he’d been able to find the usual range of pleasurable things pleasurable, the usual range of funny ones funny. He’d felt normal. Good.

Better than good
, something whispered in the back of his brain.
So good you scared yourself
.

“Anyway, she refused to talk to me about it.”

Damn it, of course she did. Because she was a good person. Which of course only made everything worse.

“I figured I’d try you one more time before I flew out there. So how’d you manage to screw up the beautiful woman flying to Ohio to have sex with you?”

“She didn’t fly here to have sex with me.”

“Really? Could have fooled me.”

He wasn’t sure why he was arguing with Owen about any of this, but maybe it was because this was the first time in a week that he’d had a conversation with another human being, and, more than he wanted to admit, he was enjoying it.

Over the last ten days, he’d regressed to the point where he probably would have been a better fit for the company of wolves than the company of humans, showering only occasionally, venturing out only when he exhausted the delivery-friendly take-out options. Though he’d spent an obscene amount of time in bed, he’d slept poorly, with periods when he’d dreamed he was awake and periods he hadn’t been able to sleep at all. He’d sunk much lower this week than in the days after Deena’s desertion, and he could explain that only by saying that it was the cumulative effect of one blow after another.

Of course, he knew better. He knew because, in the days after Deena left, he’d never found himself whispering her name, but he’d whispered Nora’s. Just once, at a particularly low moment, when he’d thought maybe he could drown his sorrows in a good jerk, but he’d been unable to come. Then he’d murmured Nora’s name like a plea, as if she’d hear and relieve him. Bring him release. But no.

But nothing.

“What happened, Miles?”

Because it was Owen, and because he couldn’t stand his own rancid, pathetic company anymore, he told the story, exactly what had transpired between Nora and him, minus a few details that he kept to himself. The red lace, the front hall, the shower, the way he’d poured himself into her after the restaurant when he’d known their first date would also be their last. After he’d realized that he couldn’t drag her into his limbo and he couldn’t take the look of doubt
in her eyes.

He hadn’t expected it, the way it would feel, filling her in the dark. The way the experience of her would take him over. How much harder it had felt, afterward, to know he wouldn’t do it again, not for a long time, maybe not ever. He’d felt flayed.

“She told you she was ninety-five percent sure you were innocent?”

“That’s five percent sure I’m guilty.”

Owen made a noise of disgust. “No, you asshole. That’s five percent not really sure. And how the hell do you expect anyone to believe you’re innocent when you act like you’re guilty?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Skulking around, avoiding people. Not talking to anyone. Not even talking to your staff.”

“I’ve been put on leave of absence with no pay. I’m a suspect. No one wants to talk to me.”