Knight and Stay (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

Sophie sat on the sofa cradling the good measure of whisky Lucien had just handed her, even though it was turned two in the morning. She hadn't asked for it, and he hadn't poured himself one. She didn't even know where he'd unearthed the bottle from. It was left over from some distant Christmas, she presumed, not really her sort of drink, but she sipped it anyway, letting the warmth of the liquid fill her throat, giving her something to concentrate on besides Lucien's impending departure. He was dressed again, and she was wrapped in her bathrobe, her hair almost dry after the most memorable hair wash of her life.

She sensed that Lucien didn't know how to leave, and she wasn't ready to make it easy for him. She loved this man beyond all rhyme and reason. Let the neighbours talk, let them hang her out to dry as the scarlet woman. Love didn't respect timescales, and it wouldn't wait around until she'd spent a respectable year or two cast as the spurned wife first. It was here, and it was now, and there wasn't a damn thing either of them could do about it.

"Mine," she said, raising her chin and looking him in the eye. "That's what you called me earlier. Mine."

Sophie saw the way he swallowed hard as he looked away and scrubbed his hand uneasily down the side of his face. "I don't remember."

"Don't do that, Lucien," she chastised him softly. "You don't lie."

He perched on the arm of the chair with a heavy sigh. "Sophie please... don't look for what isn't there."

"But it is there, isn't it? It is for me, and I think it is for you too."

"You're wrong," he said.  "I don't do break ups, and I don't do broken hearts. You
know
this. I
told
you this. Didn't I?"

Sophie half nodded. Yes, he'd told her very clearly that he didn't want a relationship, but that was back in the beginning. They were different people now. They'd changed each other.

"I don't want to feel this Sophie. Like I've led you on, or like I can't be with anyone else."

"Lucien, you said yourself that you don't want to
be
with anyone else!"

"Yes, and you have no idea how much that fucks me off. Don't you get it, Sophie? I don't want these feelings, or these cravings." He splayed his hand on his chest. "It's not who I am."

Sophie stared at his bent head. He meant what he said, and it frustrated the hell out of her. Being that emotionally screwed up must be exhausting.

"Let me get this straight, Lucien. You're walking away, and you're pushing
me
away, because you want me too much? Because you have feelings that you didn't expect?"

She shook her head and knocked back the whisky, letting the alcohol warm her body and loosen her tongue.

"Well guess what? I didn't expect them either. I didn't plan this, but Lucien I'm going to say it..."

He lifted his head, his eyes brooding with danger. "Don't, Sophie."

"I love you." It wasn't how she'd planned to say it, but she was way too far down the line to stop now. She slid the glass onto the table and stood up. "I love you, Lucien Knight."

"No you don't." His voice was as bleak as the shuttered expression in his eyes. "I don't love you, and you don't love me either. You might think you do, but you said it yourself in Paris - I'm your rebound guy."

She half laughed, unexpectedly giddy with the relief of letting all of her pent up emotions out. "I did say that. I did, and I really thought that, but I was wrong. Trust me, the last thing I planned on was loving you. But I do." She was close enough to touch him now, but she didn't. She didn't want to let their physical connection take over when there were still things she needed to say. "You can walk away, and you can deny it, but I think you love me back."

Lucien tipped his head up and lifted his gaze to the ceiling, the slow shake of his head and hard set of his jaw telling Sophie how much he was struggling. It was painful to watch him in his Herculean effort to hold onto his beliefs.

"It's lust Sophie," he said eventually. "And maybe it's infatuation, but it isn't love."

A rush of anger roared through her at his denial of something so intrinsically, obviously, straightforwardly good.

"You know what, Lucien Knight, you're a
coward
," she blazed, feeling all the power that he'd imbued in her over the past months rise to the surface now that she needed it most of all. She had his full attention for one last time, and she was going to give it everything she had. "You hide behind your flash cars and designer houses... you deny love exists, and all for what? So you can hang onto your oh-so-glamorous lifestyle and screw anyone you want to? Listen to yourself - you don't
want
to screw anyone else. You want
me
. And I'm here, now, saying I want you too, saying I love you, and I don't know where the hell it'll end up, but I'm brave enough to say that right now you're my everything. You've opened my eyes, and my body, and my heart to so much more than I knew existed, and you make me feel beautiful, and protected, and adored, and I don't think you could do all of those things if you didn't love me back. Everything about you scares me... your lifestyle, your secrets, and the damn stubborn way you cling to your lines as if you've rehearsed them so often that they're written in stone. But you can change them. It's
okay
to love someone, Lucien. It's
okay
to let someone in. Let
me
in."

They stared at each other in silence, both shell-shocked by her words.

"That's just it, Sophie. It's not okay... It's not okay." He spoke jerkily, painfully. "I will hurt you, and I will leave you, and I will cheat on you."

Wow
. Tears scorched her throat. Tears of pity and frustration for herself, and for this beautiful, fucked up man. "You're already hurting me, and it would seem that you're intent on leaving me. How can you know that you'll cheat?"

"It's in my genes. It's who I am, and I warned you... I warned you not to do this."

There was a desperation in his voice.

"That’s just crap. Infidelity isn't in anyone's genes, it's a choice. Christ, Lucien! Even Dan never tried to blame genetic failure for his affair." She knew her words hit home from the way he closed his eyes to shut her out. She didn't want him to shut her out, but she couldn't find the way to stop the door closing, even as she scrabbled for a fingerhold, to keep it open even just a chink.

"When you touch me... when you touch me, Lucien, it's not just sex. When you came to me, right here in my bed, I knew." She was crying now. "You made love to me then, and you made love to me again tonight. You can walk away from me, but it won't change the truth. I know you love me."

"Sophie, you love a stranger, some hero you've dreamed up to get over your husband. That man isn't me.  How can you be so trusting, so open, knowing full well how much you're going to be hurt?"

"It's not a choice, Lucien. It's who I am, and it's pretty god damn normal. That’s how people are. They love, and they get hurt. But sometimes, just
sometimes
, they don't get hurt. They don't cheat, or leave... they stay and they love you forever." Her voice broke. "I want to love you forever."

"Be someone else then, Sophie, because being you is too risky."

"I'd rather be me than you. I'd rather risk getting hurt than deny myself the chance to ever love anyone."

"I'm not in denial," he stated flatly.

"Let me in, God damn you." Sophie clutched his face. "Let me in."

Lucien placed his hands over hers and closed his eyes as he drew in a deep, unsteady breath. When he opened them again, he removed her hands gently and placed them at her sides. "There is no
in
, Sophie. This is it. This is who I am, who I've always been, and who I'll always be."

He left her then, feeling more heartsick and lonely than she'd ever dreamed it was possible to be.

Chapter Thirty-Three

December blew in cold and fittingly bleak, and the idea of celebrating the impending festive period felt incomprehensible to Sophie. She had fuzzy recollections of Christmas's gone by, when Dan had always dragged an impractically large tree into the house and they'd decorated it together over the best part of a bottle of Baileys. But those memories were tainted now, because in amongst all of the picture book romance Dan had been secretly sleeping with his mistress.
Had he helped dress her Christmas tree over the years too?
It was mentally exhausting trying to rearrange all of her memories to fit the new reality they now existed in, one that included Maria in the background. 

News had reached her a few days before that Maria was pregnant. She'd absorbed the information in an abstract way, and in truth, it didn't hurt as much as it might have done. Her marriage to Dan felt like a lifetime ago, yesterday’s chip paper already. He crossed Sophie's mind far less than he would probably have liked to think, but the fact was that she'd been letting go of him little by little for a long time because he'd been subtly detaching himself for years. She could see that clearly now, but it had taken the arrival of Lucien Knight in her life to make her take off her rose tinted glasses.

Lucien's arrival had made Sophie realise many things.

He'd made her see that she'd been living on the edges of life, existing rather than embracing its bountiful richness in technicolour. He'd plunged her head first into a storm of sensations and emotions; a mental shedding of an old, dull skin; a seductive invitation. 'Hello, come with me, let me shown you somewhere bigger, more dazzling, more truly alive.'

Sophie glanced from the jingling TV ad to her unadorned living room. It couldn't
be
less dazzling or alive. Two weeks had passed since Lucien had left her home, and she'd barely left it herself since either.

They'd had no contact.

Two weeks felt like forever without him.

She'd laid her heart on the line, and he'd walked away. She shouldn't have been surprised, but she was. Surprised, and hurt, and desolate. She veered between wanting to run to him and wanting to run far, far away, but when she imagined running the only place she imaged running to was Norway, and to Lucien. All of her thought processes seemed to short circuit back to him, to blissful memories he'd created.

Yes. She'd well and truly closed the door on her feelings for Dan. She couldn't fathom how she'd ever been deeply happy with him now that she knew how much more her heart was capable of feeling. And how carelessly he'd treated her. How little she must have known him. As love went, she'd been swimming in the shallow end all those years and she hadn't even known it. Loving Lucien had thrown her out into deep, bottomless oceans where she was constantly swimming against the tide.

Don't love me. I love you. Don't love me. I love you.

It was utterly draining and her body and heart ached with the effort.

She didn't know what she'd actually expected him to say. He wasn't a man she could ever imagine settling down, yet she'd thrown her heart at him anyway. Lucien wasn't an everyday sort of man with an everyday sort of life. Even Sophie could see that the life he'd built for himself didn't include space for a wife.

What did she want him to do?
Invest in a pipe and slippers, come home to her in the evenings and grumble about his day at work whilst idly surfing through the TV channels? The idea was hideous, and utterly implausible.

But what was the alternative?
Live Lucien's lifestyle at breakneck speed, twenty-four seven?
She'd tried it for just a week and come home shattered in mind and body. It was entirely alien to everything she knew as normal, and impossible to imagine sustaining. So where did that leave them? He didn't fit in her world, and she didn't fit in his.
Maybe he was right after all.
They
were
too incompatible, in experience as well as outlook. It could never have worked.

And so it was time to make some choices.

She was on the right side of thirty, she was separated, and she was alone.

Sophie was down, certainly, but somewhere deep inside her, she wasn't ready to be counted out. So much had happened over the preceding months. Huge, life-changing events that couldn't help but change people caught up in them too. Sophie's life had always been defined by the people in it. She was a daughter; she was a wife. She'd passed from her family home to her marital one without pause, her life shaped around those she loved.

This time was different. She couldn't shape her life around the person she loved, because he'd promised not to love her back.

But Lucien had taught her other things too. He'd taught her self-respect. He'd given her confidence she didn't know she possessed, and he'd taught her that she didn't have to take anyone else's crap. And finally,
finally,
Sophie realised that by sitting here alone in her bleak living room, that that was exactly what she was doing. She was taking
his
crap.

Little by little, she could feel herself rising. She'd hit the bottom, it was time to kick her feet hard and push herself back up to the surface.

Lucien Knight was a walking, talking hang up, a beautiful mass of contradictions. He'd been single-minded in his mission to free her from her marriage and it was time to return the favour. There was something fundamentally wrong with his way of thinking, and one way or another she was going to find out why, and then she was going to put that man straight once and for all.

A few hours later, Sophie walked purposefully through the glass atrium of Knight Inc., her heels clacking on the marble floor and her ponytail swishing with efficiency. No one stopped her. She was a familiar enough face not to raise any eyebrows, and the confidence of her stride implied that she belonged there.

Butterflies filled her stomach as she rode the elevator to the top floor; she was going to see Lucien again. It was only as she approached his resolutely closed door that her nerve wavered for the briefest of seconds, but she thrust the feeling away ruthlessly and tapped her knuckles lightly against the smooth beech wood.