STORM: A Standalone Romance (6 page)

They walked slowly together up the remaining length of the driveway, and were admitted almost at once. Cara found herself whisked off to her room to change by Melinda. She managed a glance behind her as she disappeared up the stairs, and watched as Simon accepted the towel that Gerald offered him; in the next moment, she saw him put his hand up to refuse the drink that was poured and ready to be pressed into his palm.

As Melinda tutted, Cara turned back around and smiled to herself.

She could hardly wait for dinner to arrive that evening. By the time it struck seven o'clock, Cara was already halfway down the stairs to the dining room.

              She had cleaned up well, and after drying and curling her hair into soft golden ringlets, she had crossed to her suitcase and pulled it open. She had brought most of her nice things with her from school, considering she was spending the holidays with her family. The Langfords were definitely a clan that liked to dress up for pre-meal photos; now that most of the children were older, photos tended to dissolve fairy quickly into drinking games after that (Cara hadn't been excluded from these since she turned eighteen). She pulled out a blouse she had worn last Christmas at their family gathering and smiled fondly at the memories. She loved her family, and missed them fiercely while she was away at school.

She had been out of communication with them for a few days now. She had finished finals midweek and left campus earlier than she had originally planned, intending to surprise them with her arrival home. They had no reason to be worried about not hearing from her, but she wondered if she should use the mansion's landline to call them. Something told her this would be more trouble than it was worth. She would have to explain that she had broken down, that the weather was bad and she couldn't get a tow, that she was staying in a stranger's house. She would have to explain Simon. And Simon, she was coming to find, was a man who was often beyond explanation.

When she was let into the dining room that evening by a smiling servant, Cara had already decided that she wouldn't make the call home. She would arrive on time like they had originally planned, and if the circumstances surrounding her eventful drive home to New Haven came up, well…she didn't think she would lie. There were a lot of parts she would obviously omit, but she didn't see the harm in sharing her harrowing story of survival with her family.

She entered the dining room wearing a lightweight white dress with floral trim. She had bought it at Target, and she hoped the expensive decorations that surrounded her in the room wouldn't highlight the relative cheapness of her selection. She rarely wore it, even though it was her favorite dress. Tonight seemed as good an occasion as any to pull it out. This might be their last dinner together, after all, and Cara wanted to leave an impression that would last them both for a very long time to come.

The man sitting at the end of the long table rose when she entered. It took Cara a moment to realize who it was—it was Simon, having undergone yet another minor transformation. His hair was cropped much shorter than it had been that morning, and was combed to the side handsomely. Most astonishing of all, he was wearing a dinner jacket. He no longer looked like a high fashion model trying to remain unnoticed in a knitwear magazine. He looked exactly like the man he was supposed to be, and it was only now that Cara recognized him.

She breezed by the place that had been set for her at the opposite end and approached him, as if drawn by magnetism. Dark blue eyes took her in, and she knew that the retail origins of her white dress didn't factor at all into his final estimation of her. In fact, after a long moment of being looked over, Cara was starting to doubt whether Simon saw the dress at all. Perhaps he was admiring his own memory of the body underneath.

He lifted his hand to her, and Cara saw that he was holding a rose. "Where did you find that?" she gasped. She accepted it without a second thought, turning the beautiful blood-red flower over in her hands, before remembering that this sort of thing wasn't supposed to affect her, a modern American girl. She screwed up her expression to one of careful neutrality as she examined the rose. She could see Simon's amused smile lighting up his clean, handsome face, and knew that her efforts at impartiality to his gift came too late. "I mean, I would think it's been raining too hard to grow them yourself," she continued, as Simon signaled for a servant behind her to redress the table closer to him. "And I doubt that they drove it out from town to you in this weather."

"I have my ways," Simon said mysteriously as they sat down. It really wasn't as effective when he was deliberately trying to be mysterious. Cara raised her eyebrow, but decided she wouldn't inquire further into the rose's origins. All that mattered was that it was with her now, and that Simon was the one who had given it to her.

"I've been thinking…" Cara said, as pairs of hands appeared and disappeared around them, leaving behind plates of salad and steaming meat and sparkling water. "About my family mostly. They really are the best people to spend the holidays with."

"Tell me more about them," Simon invited as he took her dinner plate and served her himself. He sounded genuinely interested in her home life. "For instance, are your mother and father still together?"

"Yes. And I have three brothers." She could feel herself becoming derailed, even though her family had been her intended topic of conversation. She needed to pull the trigger on her ultimate question before he distracted her any more.

"What are their names?" Simon asked curiously. "Ages?"

"Don't worry about those goons," Cara said with a brief flare of temper. Her idiot brothers were the last thing on her mind at the moment. "Simon, I'm trying to ask you if you would like to come and spend the holidays with my family."

The hands above her plate stilled, and Cara took it away before the man could distract himself any more with it. His startled eyes locked with hers, and her expression softened at the genuine surprise she saw registered there.

"We don't have to tell them who you are, or…what you come from." Cara gestured to the expansive hall of the dining room and all that it encompassed: the chandeliers, the crystals and fine china, the paintings on the walls, which she was pretty sure weren't reproductions. "We can make up a backstory. Really, I don't mind lying to my family. We do it all the time. They might not be the upper-crust types you're used to dealing with, but…"

"I'm not used to dealing with anyone recently," Simon said quietly. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's the point of this invitation."

Cara fell silent as Simon reached for his glass. He didn't seem angry with her—quite the contrary. He appeared to be struggling with an expression of deep gratitude, which was why he was distracting himself with the water—but he did seem to be closing himself off to her invitation. When Cara couldn't immediately grasp his reasons for doing so, she felt the reemergence of temper once more.

"Yes," she snapped. "Yes, Simon, that was the point of my invitation."
One of my points,
she corrected herself privately.
The point is that I don't want this to be the last time we see each other.
"The thought that I have a family to go back to, and that you, for whatever reason, have decided to exile yourself from society, is why I brought it up. Nobody deserves to be alone over the holidays…or any time of year, for that matter."

"There might be people in the world who deserve it," Simon countered, and Cara's blood froze. He said it offhandedly, almost dismissively, but the expression on his face… He really meant it. And he meant it almost as a personal statement, like it was a motto or mantra he had forced himself to adopt long ago.

"No!" Cara said rebelliously. "No, there aren't! And if there are, I refuse to believe you're one of them!" It was all she could do to keep herself from pounding the table to punctuate her point, but she had a feeling she had already lost this argument. She didn't want to let it go, but the more she pressed him, the more childish she was in danger of becoming—especially if the argument had already devolved to completely subjective opinions like "yes" and "no".

"Cara." She felt two hands grasp hers beneath the table, and found herself pulled to the edge of her seat. Simon was gazing at her once more in a way that made her heart quiver, like it had in the driveway. She hated how helpless she felt to help the owner of those kind blue eyes. "Thank you. You don't know how touched I am that you would say these things to me. And you don't know how tempted I am to accept your offer…but please understand that I cannot. I cannot spend the holidays with you or your family."

"But you'll spend them here," Cara said. "All alone in this enormous house. Because you'll let the staff go home, won't you? They all have families they have to get back to. You'll dismiss them, and then you'll be left alone." Cara gazed at their joined hands beneath the table and said nothing more. Simon shifted uncomfortably at her summation of events as she foresaw them, but he didn't deny that she was correct.

"What did you say it was you do for a living?" He echoed his own question from the day before. "Really, Cara, you could be a detective. The way your mind works these things out is extraordinary."

"Stop it," she said. "I know you're trying to comfort me, but just stop it. I can't bear the thought of you being here alone, and now you know it. If you can't respect me enough to just give me a straight answer, then don't say anything at all."

Simon withdrew his hands suddenly; the dishes rattled on the table, and for a moment Cara thought he had struck it. But he hadn't. He had risen so quickly that his knees had banged the underside of the dining table, but he didn't appear to notice.

"And you must respect
me
enough to realize when you are asking for the impossible. I can't tell you everything about myself, Cara. Don't you think I would have told it all to you already if I could?" Simon crossed to the window and stood, facing out toward the storm. Cara, who found that she had similarly lost her appetite, rose as well.

"What's stopping you?" she demanded. "Simon, I have to know. I thought I didn't need to know anything more about you, but it
does
matter to me whether or not you're happy…regardless of whether or not I'm here to see it for myself. I didn't ask to break down in front of your house, and I didn't ask to give a damn about you, but all those things happened anyway. So just help me out with this one last thing—help me understand you!"

"I can't," the man said quietly. Cara watched as the shadows from the rain sliding down the window were reflected in his face. "I respect the hell out of you, Cara, but I can't."

It wasn't how she had wanted the night to end. She hadn't wanted to argue at
all,
and had even steeled herself against anything aggravating he might say or do before she came down the stairs. Now, she had no one to be angry with but herself. It had been a stupid idea to even bring the topic up. She should feel embarrassed, but all Cara really felt in that moment was disappointed.

She set the rose down on the table and walked out. Simon didn't turn to watch her go; he said nothing as she departed, only kept his gaze on the window and the streaming world outside.

She had made the mistake of caring about the man who had taken her in. She could see that now. She had allowed their flirtation to sweep her off her feet, when at the end of the day they could be nothing more than strangers.

Cara climbed the stairs to her room alone and tried not to think about what a waste their last night together had been. At the very least it had been a waste of a pretty dress.

#

A shadow moved beneath her doorway.

              Cara lay awake in her room, pretending to read, when really she had been waiting all along to see if Simon would show up. She positioned herself upright on the bed. She was still wearing her dress from dinner, but most of her curls had fallen out as the night progressed. The hours ticked by, conveyed to her by the clock on the mantle, but she had noticed no one outside her room until this moment.

              The shadow from the hallway skated restlessly back and forth beneath her door. It
was
Simon, of that she felt certain, but the man was clearly deliberating on whether or not he should knock. He would have seen the light from her lamp beneath the doorway; he knew she was awake.

              Then, anticlimactically, the shadow departed, and every sorry feeling Cara had been entertaining for them both gave way to a white-hot flash of anger. She threw the covers off the bed and stomped for the door—if she moved a little more quickly than usual, it was definitely
not
with the intention of intercepting him while he was still on her floor.

That idiot! Was he really going to create, and then summarily give up, their last chance to bridge the gap that had formed between them during dinner?

Cara pulled the door open, but there was no one to be seen. Disappointed, she was just about to turn back around and put herself to bed for good this time, when something on the floor caught her attention. She squatted down, and lifted the rose that Simon had given to her at dinner back into her hands. This time there was a note attached to it:

Cara,

I went out yesterday morning to pick this for you. That is the secret.

That was the day I found you stuck in the mud, if you recall.

We hadn't even spoken yet, but I thought that you had met with so much dreariness and misfortune already that you deserved something beautiful to bring a smile back to your face.

Imagine that you are the rose gifted to me under similar circumstances, and you will understand something of the feelings that I cannot express to you.