“No.”
“But you were.”
“Yes.” She didn’t, at that time, know how that single word admission wounded him.
“What happened?” He brought his mouth to her breast and ran his tongue around the sensitive peach aureole. She bucked against him, and desire began to stir anew in her body.
Even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t have focussed on the words that needed to come out. They were murky in her mind, concealed beneath layers of thick swamp mud. Desire was fogging her. Need was disabling her. She shook her head and pushed up on her elbows, so that she could claim his mouth with hers. “Not now, Cris. Not now.”
He understood, as he always had. And though the questions simmered in his gut, he stored them away for that moment. He knew what she needed. It was the same for him.
Their passion could obviate the pain of the past. At least, for a few moments it could.
3
It evaporated as quickly as it had settled. That crazy fog of desire was an illusion. Now satiated, Ava couldn’t believe she’d been such an idiot. Her breathing was still ragged in her body, but sense was returning like a sledgehammer to ice. She pushed her hands against his firm chest and rolled out from beneath him.
Her mind was a painful well of recriminations.
“Ava.” His voice was like honey on her spine. She dipped her head forward and tried to focus on something – anything – that would serve as a talisman of reality.
Her clothes were in the small lounge area. She stalked from the bedroom and scooped them up, then made for the bathroom. But even it was flooded with the accusing images she would never be able to forget.
He caught her by the door. “You are not rushing away from me.”
Her eyes were loaded with a pain he couldn’t understand. “I have to go back to the house.” Her words were a plea; her face was pale. He saw the way she was swallowing and he understood that she was overloaded with emotions. But he didn’t give a flying care. How could he when his own sense of comprehension was at an all time low?
“You were so sure about everything,” he said with a dull throb in his voice.
“What?” Bleakness. Confusion.
He was closing himself off from her. He watched as she pulled her clothes on, but he was filling with a sense of dispassion. It was the opposite to how he’d felt only moments earlier. Now, he was numbed through. He studied her body through the eyes of a stranger. She was as beautiful as ever. Altered a little. Breasts that were fuller. A stomach that was flatter. She was softer. She had a fine mark on her abdomen that he remembered kissing now.
“You were so certain that you wanted to marry him. Angus Edwards. Yet it didn’t work out. Why not?”
Ava licked her lower lip.
What could she say to that? It would be a lie to insist that it was none of Cristiano’s business. He had been front and centre of her marriage breakup. “I …”
She closed her eyes. She felt nausea. The gulf of knowledge that existed between them would shock him, if he felt it. For how much had happened to Ava since that one last day, when he’d left as if life was a simple question of right and wrong, black and white. He’d gone and she’d been left to pick up the pieces.
To try to make sense of the world she’d once known.
“It was complicated,” she finished lamely.
He expelled a breath through his nose, and his nostrils flared wide. He was staring at her as though certain she would speak. As though she was about to lay bare all of her feelings.
But to what end? He would never forgive her if he knew about Milly. That she’d had their baby and raised it on her own, without including him. A man like Cristiano would feel the betrayal to his core.
And if he knew how she’d struggled? How her delivery had left her permanently scarred and forever unable to have further children? If he knew how she’d suffered with her grief and depression after the devastating operation that removed both Milly and any hope of future babies from her at the same time? If he knew how she’d cried for him in the middle of the night, and wished he had been there to comfort her?
He would hate himself.
She blinked away the sudden urge to give in to the tears.
“Complicated? You’re saying it was complicated? Jesus, Ava, you were so damned sure.”
“I know.” She nodded jerkily.
“So what? What happened?”
“Come on, Cris. Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” he growled. “I loved you, Ava. I loved you.”
She arched a brow, but her heart was thudding painfully in her chest. Both his declaration and the way he’d couched it in the past tense flooded her raw emotions with acid. “Not enough,” she said with a small grimace. “You loved me, but only so long as I fell in with your plans.”
His face drained of colour. “No,” he denied, but she cut him off.
“Yes, Cristiano. You assumed I loved you so much that I’d pack up and leave my home. The only home I’ve ever known. You loved me, but your love was fickle. You loved me only until I told you no, and then you walked away. At the first obstacle, you ceased to love me.”
“Bullshit!” His curse was loud and she lifted a finger to his lips.
“Keep your voice down, Cris. I’d prefer to keep this private, if you don’t mind.”
His expression was a tempestuous storm. When he was angry his accent was thicker. “That’s you in a nutshell. You give too great a shit about what other people think. You cared about what your sisters thought. You cared about what Angus and his family would think. You cared about everything and everyone more than you did about you and me. And for that you deserved to be unhappy, Ava. You made the wrong choice. You made the wrong choice.”
His words were like bullets in her armour. She felt her soul weakening as it was punctured again and again and again.
“You wouldn’t have been the right choice,” she said firmly. She had held that certainty to her chest as a sort of balm for a long time. It had comforted her when she’d woken up in the middle of the night, with visions of Cris so strong and real that she almost felt she could reach out and grab him. “It wouldn’t have worked for us either.”
“How can you say that with any degree of certainty?”
She gaped her mouth. “I’ve never been more certain of anything,” she muttered. She ran a hand over her skirt and then turned to the mirror. Her face was so obviously passion ravaged that she winced. She ran her fingers through her damp hair, and pinched her cheeks.
“That is most curious,” he murmured. He approached her from behind, and met her eyes in the reflection. “Because I have long felt the exact opposite.”
Her heart turned over in her chest. “You’re wrong.” She shrugged, forcing herself to remain strong. “You loved me, but only so long as I fitted in perfectly with what you wanted.” Dark colour slashed his face. “And I loved you, but only so long as you fitted in with what I wanted.” She turned around, and it brought their bodies back together. “We both needed more from one another than we were willing to give. You needed me to be someone different. Someone who would pack up and travel, and live without the security and permanence I crave.”
He didn’t speak. She was right, only he hadn’t realised it would be such a burden to her. For Cristiano, who lived to explore, it had never occurred to him that anyone could view the notion with anything other than pleasure.
“And I wanted you to stay.” She swallowed and again that delicate throat of hers knotted visibly. “I wanted you to forget the world. No.” She shook her head sadly. “I wanted to be your world.” Her eyes were darkened by memory. “I wanted to be enough for you. I wanted to be the continents you explored and the excitement you craved. I wanted to be the adventure you needed. But I never would have been.” She lifted a hand and curled it around his cheeks.
Her statements were launching questions in his brain that he alone needed to answer. He would attend to them later, in the solace and privacy
of the middle of the night. “And so you married Edwards.”
She gripped the vanity behind her for strength. “Yes.”
“When you loved me.”
Her expression was pale. “Yes.”
“You think you have any right to lecture me about what we each deserved, when you acted in such a manner? You behaved like a selfish bitch, Ava. To marry him when you loved me. To marry him, when you should have been with me. And now to stand there as though I wounded you …” He welcomed rage in the face of anything else he could have felt. Regret. Self-recrimination. Pain. Despair. Anger was the best of all those emotions. He gripped it and fanned it. He embraced it to the extent that he didn’t feel anything else. He didn’t notice the way she recoiled in pain. He focussed only on his own indignation. “You were a child. Only twenty one years old, and you married him as though your life depended on it. I offered you the world. I wanted to explore the world, yes, but with you.”
“And yet when I said no, you went anyway,” she interjected with silent stoicism.
“You didn’t say no to travelling with me, Ava. You said no to me. You told me you had a life here. That you wanted to marry Angus.”
She blinked. Had she said that? The argument had been awful. She had been on the edge of a wobbling precipice, and the fall had scared her into speaking without thinking. She had spoken from a haze of sentiment, and she could never accurately recall what she’d thrown at him in those miserable moments. Though his words were emblazoned on her soul.
“I was scared,” she said quietly. “I knew that even if you did stay, it would mean breaking your heart as well as Angus’s.”
“You cheated on him,” he ground out angrily. “You cheated on him with me. You let me fall in love with you before I even knew you had promised yourself to another man. You let me take your virginity, Ava, and then you married him.”
She spun away from him, the crude recollection of the bare facts stripping away so much of the background emotion that justified her actions. But her reflection confronted her in the mirror; she couldn’t escape the blame.
“It all happened so fast,” she said quietly. She braced her palms on the cool counter, trying to take comfort from its smooth top. “I loved Angus. I have loved him forever.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “You know that.” She got no pleasure from his obvious reaction of betrayal. “But I didn’t realise, until I met you, that it was a different kind of love. Nothing had prepared me for how you’d make me feel.” She lifted a hand and toyed with the ends of her hair nervously. “I should never have let it happen. Apart from anything, I had agreed to marry him. He deserved the courtesy of my faithfulness.”
“The courtesy of your … Jesus, Ava, you speak as though life is some kind of … Victorian romance novel. You live life like it’s a sterile equation.” She jerked at his harsh indictment. “With me, you feel passion, and it scares you. I understand that now, and I understood it then. I make you feel that life is terrifying and unpredictable, which it is. I never offered you something so bland as marriage. I never said we would love one another forever. Nor that I wanted to be with you forever. Only that what we shared deserved more. More time. More togetherness.”
“I know,” she pushed aside the familiar pain. For his lack of assurances hurt now as much as ever. “You can’t understand what it’s like to have lived with that kind of romantic insecurity all your life. You and I are different people, Cris. Too different.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “Yes. You’re damned right we are.”
“It never would have worked.”
“Perhaps not.”
He was fuming! Though he spoke with a measured sense of patience, she understood the dark emotions that were his undercurrent. “We should just forget about this.” She gestured to the shower and felt her skin warm as the memories slammed into her.
“We are not finished.”
Ava blinked up at him, and clarity was a much-needed boost of assurance. “We are.” Her smile was lukewarm. “We’re so finished, Cris.” She stepped away from him but he clamped a hand around her wrist.
“Fuck, Ava. Tell me what happened.”
Her eyes were enormous in her pale face. “What do you mean?”
“Your marriage. I came here expecting you to be married to him. I braced myself for that.” In the back of her mind, she heard his confession. He had inadvertently revealed a need to brace for seeing her again. Even now, years after what they’d shared, he was as affected by it as she. “I deserve to know what happened.”
She was pulling away from him in every way. She yanked her hand free and rubbed her wrist. “You didn’t like that I cheated on him with you. You didn’t like that I had an affair?” Her eyes clashed with his. “Neither did Angus.”
A swarm of emotion, a lot like relief, flooded his system. “He knew about me. About us.”
Ava was cool now. She was remembering herself. And her life. She was remembering what she owed not only to herself but to Milly. She was remembering how this man had disappointed her. And she was remembering that she’d sworn she would put herself first forever more. Herself, and Milly. “Yes. You might think the worst of me, but even I couldn’t have married Angus knowing what I’d done. Knowing how I felt about you.”
Cris leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “You told your husband you loved me.”
She studied him with a sinking feeling in her gut. The mess was so much worse than he appreciated. Milly. Dear, sweet Milly, with eyes just like her father’s. “Yes.”
“When?”
“After you left.”
“But you did marry him.”
She swallowed. Angus had been noble and kind. And she had loved him. In a way that she had hoped would be enough. “Yes.”
“What kind of man allows himself such a betrayal? How could he welcome you as his wife? To his bed? After we …” He rubbed a hand across his eyes, as if to clear the disturbing imagery. “I knew about your marriage. Tom told me,” he said, referring to the friend he’d travelled halfway across the world to be groomsman to.
He hadn’t come to see Ava. He’d come for Thomas. “You didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me yourself.”
The accusation stung. It was unjust and completely unfair. “I came to Brazil. I came to see you,” she said with a sob she couldn’t suppress.
The sound brought his eyes flashing open. “Yes, I know.”
“You were the one who turned me away. You wouldn’t even meet with me.”
“How could I, Ava? You were married. You chose Angus over me. You broke my heart, and then you were what? Coming to glory in your life? Or worse, coming to seduce me?”
“To seduce you?” She spluttered, her pulse firing. “You must be kidding. You seduced me. I had no idea what we were feeling. I was completely bowled over by you and what you offered.”
“Believe me, it was mutual,” he grunted. “You were married, and you dared come to me in Rio? What did you want? To see if it was too late? Or to see if I’d give you one last roll in the hay?”
“Don’t be disgusting,” she snapped, lifting a hand to her neck. She stroked the fine skin on the side of her throat as though it might help her to breathe more easily.
“Well? What did you want?”
To tell you we made a baby, she wanted to throw in his face! How easy it would have been to give in to the churlish desire to wound him. But even then, ripped apart by hurt and doubt, she could never use Milly as a weapon. For Milly was all that was good and right in the world. She deserved better than that.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said with truth. “It was a lifetime ago.”
“Were you still married to him then?” His face was stricken. “Ava, I need to know. Were you still married to him?” What if he’d been wrong? What if she’d come to him a free woman? What if she’d come to him because she’d erred? What if she’d come to him because she wanted nothing more than to resume their relationship?
The ide
a had never occurred to him! He’d known enough of her stubborn streak to believe her capable of resolutely remaining married regardless of how she felt.
“Ava,” he groaned, crossing the space between them and cupping her cheeks with his hands. “Did you come to me because you wanted me after all?”
Tears sparkled on her lashes. She blinked furiously but still one fell. “No … I was married.”
And it broke the last thread of hope he had cherished in his gut. He stepped away from her, and stalked out of the bathroom. He didn’t want her to see his face. She would easily detect the emotions there, and he didn’t want her understanding him so well.
“So?” He said, pleased that his voice sounded firm rather than bitter. “What did you want, then?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “You wouldn’t see me.” Her voice cracked. “You didn’t want to see me, and I had to respect that.”
“How could I have? Jesus, Ava, you make it sound so simple. But you were married!”
Her smile was without humour. If he’d seen her, he would have seen more than just Ava. Six months pregnant, her stomach had been pleasantly rounded and full. The life of Milly had been kicking and swimming constantly.
“I knew then that we were over. Once and for all. I accepted that,” she promised thickly. “But I could hardly stay married to Angus. He deserved better than marriage to a woman like me.”
Her assessment hurt. Though he’d thrown horrible words at her only moments earlier – had he really called her a bitch? Shame coloured his face – he hated hearing her describe herself in such a way. “I doubt he felt the same.”
“No.” Her lips twisted sadly. “He was very understanding. He didn’t want the divorce. He begged me to reconsider. But I hurt him again.” She closed her eyes on that horrible memory. “It’s all I seem capable of doing.”
He wanted to comfort her, and that realisation tipped him into a point of fury. She deserved no such compassion. She was right, after all. She’d hurt him. And she’d hurt Angus. And she’d obviously wounded herself too.