Billionaire Romance Boxed Set (9 Book Bundle) (44 page)

I woke
early in my room, guilt churning my stomach. The thin sun coming in through the
windowpane reflected off of the motes of dust hanging in the air. They twinkled
like snowflakes as soft invisible currents of air tumbled them. They turned
randomly in my vision, but I was filled with a sense of purpose even as guilty
thoughts invaded my mind. Today was special, not just another day.

Today was the day I would go to
visit my mother
’s grave.

Watching the sunlight twirl
circles in the room, I felt detached from yesterday and all that had happened.
I hadn’t meant to do whatever I had done that led to Mark’s kiss. Every step
taken up until that point had been so normal that when he kissed me I did not
know what I could have done to take it back, were I to do it over again. It had
felt strange—his lips pressed against mine in the joy of discovery,
nervous and desiring. Not anything like Eliot’s possessive and confident
embraces And then he had looked at me expectantly.

I recoiled at the memory.
Pleading sleepiness, I’d escaped from Mark’s company at last, but not before he
had tried to get me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything just
then—I had seen the look on Eliot’s face, and it had hit me like a punch
to the stomach. That I could wound someone in that way was unthinkable, but his
expression made it clear that my ill-timed embrace with Mark had not gone
unnoticed. And Mark’s insistent glances only made me sicker to my stomach that
I would have to hurt him too. I loved Mark as an intellectual equal and a
friend, but no romantic feelings had ever turned my heart toward him, not even
now after we had shared a kiss. Indeed, even remembering it made me feel
uncomfortable and itchy under my skin.

How could I explain to Mark that
I didn’t share his feelings? I had known unrequited love, but it had always
been from the other side. Cute boys I crushed on would dismiss me without a
second thought, or worse, insult me with pity. Knowing how terrible rejection
felt, I didn’t want to hurt Mark, but I most definitely didn’t want to lead him
on either.

All of that would have to wait,
though, because I was not about to let some romantic attachments get in the way
of the main reason I had wanted to come to Hungary in the first place. I pushed
back the covers and slid out of bed quickly, pulling on my clothes in the quiet
dim room. The other girls slept on. The first day of sleeping in came at the
end of a long week, and everyone except for me was taking advantage of it. Some
beds emitted the faint sounds of snores and sleepy murmurs, and others were
silent as tombs.

An emotional pang shot through
me as I walked out to the stairway where I had first found Lucky. I hoped that
Eliot would be taking good care of him. Of course he would. Still, I missed the
small, boisterous kitten.

Not wanting to be caught by
Mark, I eased the doors open and then closed them behind me, tiptoeing down the
steps and then walking briskly down the sidewalk. By the time I turned the
corner, my thoughts had already turned away from Eliot and Mark and towards my
family. My mother. In my pocket my fingers slipped over the scrap of paper
where I had written directions to the cemetery where she was buried. I only
hoped that I could find her when I got there.

The sky seemed bright as I
walked quickly on, and I whistled the notes of the Satie that had been playing
in my head all morning.

I’m on my way, mom
,
I thought, and smiled.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

As I walked to the cemetery snow
began to fall softly around me. Arriving, I couldn
’t believe my
eyes—the place was huge, three long city blocks at least at the front of
it, surrounded by iron fences taller than me. My Nagy had told me that my mom
was buried in the back of the cemetery, to the right. I had imagined a small
plot of graves, but now that I looked across the street at the cemetery, I
thought I might be there for hours searching for the right grave. Maybe there
would be a caretaker I could ask.

A street vendor outside of the
cemetery waved me over, and I stopped to look at her flowers. Not a single
other person was on the sidewalk, and the old woman was eager to see me. She
spoke in Hungarian first before realizing that I was American.

“For the one you visit,” she
said. “The one you love.” She held out bouquets for me to choose from.

The flowers had been wrapped in
brown paper to shield them from the cold, and I picked out a small bunch of
white roses. The woman accepted my money gratefully and smiled, showing a
crooked grin.

“Bless you, child,” she said, and
turned away, humming. I inhaled the delicate scent of the roses and walked on
toward the entrance to the cemetery. Cypress trees lined the edges of the
graveyard behind wrought iron fence that kept souls inside and vandals out. The
metal bracing of the entryway arched over my head as I entered.

Passing through the gates, I
heard nothing but the soft whistling of the wind through the cypress trees. I
walked forward quietly, and snowflakes fell all around but never seemed to land
on me. Rows of stone slabs marked the buried. Carved angels and wreaths stood
eroded at their edges, proving true the saying that nothing lives forever,
despite the hopes of those who commissioned the monuments that stood above
their tombs. Many of the gravestones had lost their lettering already to time
and weather, some slabs cracked from being frozen and thawed over however many
number of years they had been there.

Ahead of the entrance, a number
of private family plots clustered together, the tombs topped with huge statues.
Famous people, I thought, or rich. I skirted the edge of the plots but as I
walked by, my coat snagged on a low iron gate into one of the plots. I stooped
down to free the fabric, and the name on the grave made my breath stop for just
an instant.

Herceg
.

Was this where Eliot’s wife was
buried? I looked up at the plot, my coat now freed from its snag. Several
graves organized themselves into rows, the stones above them carved ornately
with scrollwork. The iron gate creaked at my knees as I pushed it open and walked
in. I looked around guiltily, as though I was an invader.

I didn’t belong here. It felt
wrong to be here without Eliot, to stand in this sacred spot. I stepped away
but my eye caught on a small statue of an angel, its arms thrown up in the air
as though dancing. I paused to look and saw the name carved into the top of the
stone.
Clare Herceg
. I brushed the snow off of the rest of the stone. A
few lines of Hungarian were written underneath, a prayer or a poem. The date of
death was ten years ago.

It must be her. I looked around
again, feeling like somebody was watching me from afar, but there was nobody
else in the cemetery that I could see. I turned to leave, but then turned back.
My fingers trembled as I pulled at the ribbon on the bouquet of white roses. I
tugged the bouquet in half and laid the flowers down at the front of the grave.
Whoever Clare was, Eliot had loved her and she had loved him. I felt a
connection with her, standing there in the drifting snowflakes and looking down
on her grave.

Then I left the plot, not
looking back over my shoulder. My breath already was coming faster as I moved
toward the part of the cemetery where my mother would be buried. It didn’t look
like any caretakers were around, so I would have to find her grave myself. I
walked on, my toes beginning to freeze as my feet marked a trail towards the
places where snow had drifted into piles on the paths through the cemetery.

My hand hung at my side, white
fingers clutching the remaining bouquet of roses. Row on row and still nowhere
near the end. The trails here ran crooked at the edges, overrun by brown and
deadened weeds no hands had torn out in the springtime. My mother had been laid
there, among the paupers and the unknown, the homeless and the kinless. I ached
with guilt for not having come earlier, but the anger at my father inside me
had altogether disappeared. Emptiness took its place, a quiet space in my mind
amid the grief threatening to flood my senses.

The last row. I turned to the
right and saw the slab, knowing it was hers before I read the inscription. The
stone was whiter, newer, and the front glowed brighter in the daylight than any
other around it. Dark patches of lichen crept up the uneven, pockmarked sides
of the white slab, spiders crawling over stone. I knelt down and brushed the
frost off of the front inscription.

Katalin Tomlin

1961-1992

Just her name and those dates.
Nothing that mentioned she had been a loving wife and mother. Nothing about
her, not a “Rest in Peace” or a “Forever in Our Hearts.” All of my vague
memories, all of her life, reduced down to a name and number. Why hadn’t my
grandmother’s family done something for her? It felt wrong.

“Mom,” I whispered.

When I touched the cold marble,
it was as though the barricade that I had built up over the years, the dam that
I had made, cracked and crumbled, swept away in a fast-moving river that was
fed by some secret underground source. I broke down and wept: my face grew
warm, then hot, then burning. The wind picked up and whistled among the cypress
trees at the perimeter, the cold murmurings of a faraway tribunal.

“I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m
sorry, I’m so sorry, mom. I’m sorry.”

I did not know what I was
apologizing for. For the years lost and taken for granted. For every mischief I
got into. For waiting so long to grieve.

It had been too long. I didn’t
even remember the sound of her voice. Slowly, but surely, the pieces of memory,
so fragile and precious, had cracked and melted and ebbed away on the tides of
time like so much glass being fractured, crystal by crystal, into sand. Her
voice that had sung to me when I was young.

The tears ran and wet my collar
as I pressed my handkerchief to my face and soon it soaked through, and still I
cried and cried, the wet and dripping handkerchief clutched between my fingers
in a paralysis of sorrow, nothing mattered. Not even my nose dripping so much,
my tears wrinkling my face, so hot and wet and constant. My mom’s body was
here, under me, and for the first time in a long time I let myself care. I let
my emotions rise up inside me and take over, and in the roar of hurt and pain I
found myself again.

I sat there for a long time,
until I was steady enough to stop sobbing.

“I love you, mom.” I pressed a
hand on the stone. It was cold and hard and dead, so unlike the tree in my
grandmother’s yard. I thought that I would want to stay and talk, but now that
I had seen where she lay buried, I didn’t want to. I didn’t know why. It struck
me that I had been expecting more to come of my visit, for the world to stop,
to change direction.

I stood up and touched my
collar. It felt frosted, and that was when I realized that my hot tears had
turned to ice in the air here. I pulled the coat collar out and brushed the
frost away. There would be more tears later, but for now the world felt
peaceful. Not numb, not suppressed. Just peaceful.

Walking
out of the cemetery, my thoughts were a jumbled mess. I didn
’t
even notice when a car pulled up next to me, and I started when the car stopped
at the curb in front of me and the driver got out. It was Eliot. He looked at
me over the hood of the car, and I just looked back. I didn’t care how horribly
puffy and red my eyes must be. He didn’t care for me anyway, so why should I
care what he thought? Eliot walked around the front of the car to me.

“I’m glad I found you, Brynn! I
talked with Mark already, but he said you had been gone since the morning. I
thought you might be here.” Eliot stopped in front of me, just then noticing my
bleary face.

“Brynn? Are you alright?” He dug
in his pocket and brought out a fresh handkerchief. I took it gratefully and
blew my nose. The sun had broken through the afternoon clouds and its rays
warmed the top of my head.

“I’m fine. Just went to go visit
my mother.” I said nothing about seeing his family’s plot, about his wife.

“Your mother? I—I had no
idea. I thought you were visiting your ancestors… Of course. I’m so sorry.
Brynn. Forgive me.”

Before I could stop him, he
pulled me into his arms and hugged me tightly. My heart pounded against his,
and we stood together for half a minute that seemed like a lifetime. His chest
rose and fell and pushed mine to breathe with it, and for those moments we were
breathing as one person. A surge of desire ran through my nerves as his hands
touched my back, ran along my shoulders possessively. Then I remembered
everything, remembered that he had pushed me away, and anger rose up to take
its place. I needed to be alone, to think about my mom. I did not want to have
Eliot edge his way back into my thoughts.

“Why are you here?” I asked,
keeping my frustrations bottled. “Did you come here to…” I waved towards the
cemetery, not wanting to say his wife’s name.

“No, no,” he said. “Nothing like
that. I came to take you to the academy, if you’ll let me. Your, ah, friend
Mark is on his way there already.”

“What’s the hurry?” The last
thing on my mind right now was Mark
or
Eliot, and I resented having my
day interrupted by two people I had diligently been trying to avoid.

“The problem.” He opened the
passenger side door for me, and I reluctantly got in. “You two found a nice
little opening into the answer. I checked it out earlier this morning.”

“Oh?” I crossed my arms. “Not
last night?”

Eliot recoiled with the snide
remark, as though I had slapped him across the face.

“I’m sorry I interrupted you
last night. I was so intrigued, and this is such a new avenue to explore, I
couldn’t help but come. But I am very sorry to have disturbed the two of you.”

I flushed. “You didn’t disturb
anything. Really.”

“Really? He seems enamored of
you.” Eliot’s smile was pained, but his emotions towards me were mere
trivialities.

“What do you care?”

“Again, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
to pry. It’s none of my business.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to
become involved with any of the other students,” I said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It would be a
mistake
.”
I nearly spat out the word. “And I wouldn’t want any more of those.”

Eliot said nothing, just stared
ahead through the windshield where slush spattered the glass.I fumed out of the
window, and we rode the rest of the way in silence. When we arrived at the
academy, I slammed the car door shut behind me.

“Brynn?”

I spun around to see Eliot
standing, his hands open in innocence.

“I’m sorry for how you feel
right now. If it’s my fault—”

“Of course it’s not! Of course
it’s not your fault!” Adrenaline tensed my muscles, and another wash of grief
tore its unyielding way through my body. I shuddered.

“What is it, then?”

“I thought it would change
things,” I said, blurting out the thought that had been at the forefront of my
mind since I left her graveside. “I thought it would change things to see her
grave. But nothing changed.” I looked up at him, wetness burning in the corners
of my eyes. “Nothing.”

Eliot paused in thought. A
snowflake fell on my eyelash, and I blinked it away, a tear falling from my
eye.

“Go again. Go again tomorrow.”

I looked up at him. The distance
between us felt huge, empty.

“Why? What will have changed
tomorrow?”

“You will have changed.”

I held my chin up. If he thought
I was only a child, he was wrong. I would not be manipulated again, not by any
of his high speeches. Not when he didn’t have the courage to put into action
the advice he gave to others. When I spoke again, my words turned his face
white.

“And what about you?” I said. My
voice was cold, dead. “When will you go visit your wife?”