The Fifth Favor (36 page)

“No!”

His lips curled. “Not even a little bit?”

His contempt sliced through her like razor wire. “Christopher—what could I possibly gain from hurting you this way?”

“I think we just covered that.” He turned the disc in contemplative and caressing fingers, then abruptly snapped it in half and dropped both pieces in the trashcan beside the desk. “You should go.”

Anguish and indignation jockeyed for position in the sunken place where her heart had crumbled. “I’m not finished! If you think this was intentional, then you really have no idea who I am at all. How could you possibly love me and in the same space, think me capable of such spite? You don’t love me. You don’t love anyone. All the…the things you said when we were in bed…they’re just…”

Tears sprang to her eyes and she shook her head, coming apart despite her effort to contain her emotions. “It’s a scary thing to be vulnerable like this, isn’t it? To be out in the real world where people have real feelings, and real love is just as available to you as the sick emotional games you’ve become so comfortable at playing?” She stepped 197

Shelby Reed

toward him and jabbed a hard finger in the center of his bare chest, beyond humiliation, beyond pride. “I want to know why you bothered to leave Avalon,
Adrian
, when it’s so obviously where you belong?”

He stilled, and with him, the world. “I fell in love,” he said softly.

The unarguable hopelessness of their relationship crashed through Billie, and suddenly she couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She started to turn away, but he caught her elbow and jerked her back to face him. They were both panting, Billie’s breath leaving her in short, furious sobs.

Myriad shadowed emotions played across his features as he stared into her face, fingers tight on her arm. Even amid the dark anguish of the moment, wayward passion simmered between them, hot and sparking to ignite.

“No more,” he said wearily. “Let’s put this to rest. Go home…and let me pick up the pieces of the mess I’ve made. I don’t know what I’m going to say to my family, to Luke’s. I don’t know how…” He stopped and looked away, his throat working. When his eyes drifted back to her, they were filled with despair. “But I’ll leave you with this.

Think what you want about me, Billie. You’re the only part of my life that hasn’t been a lie.”

Grief choked any response she might have made, and she closed her eyes, hot tears pooling and trickling down her cheeks.

He moved past her to the bedroom and left Billie standing alone in the midst of their shattered beginning, the slight stirring of air currents between them his parting caress.

* * * * *

Christopher found Rosalie in the backyard, raking leaves that floated to the ground as quickly as she could scrape them into piles.

She was humming “It Was a Very Good Year,” sweetly off-tune and with the passion of one unaware of being observed.

Wordlessly, he grabbed a plastic bag and began filling it, clearing three large, sweet-smelling mounds near the flagstone patio before she glanced back toward the house and noticed his presence.

“Oh my God!” She clutched her heart as the rake fell from her hand. “Christopher!

You scared me to death! Where have you been?”

She approached him, her stodgy legs strong and determined in faded jeans as she strode across the grass to glare up at him. “I don’t know whether to hug you or slap you silly.”

He gazed into her frustrated, velvet-brown eyes. Despite his roiling anguish, humor tugged at his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

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If at all possible, her frown deepened. “So no explanation for your sister? You always have excuses, Zio. What is it this time? Why the disappearing act?”

Glancing around the yard, he folded his arms across his heavy, thudding heart.

“When do the kids get home?”

“Not until three-thirty. Why?”

“Do you have time for a cup of coffee?”

“Of course.” She paused to shuck off her man-sized gardening gloves and nodded toward the house. “Come in, then. And I expect a full explanation as to why you fell off the face of the earth.”

* * * * *

For the second time that day, Christopher called upon finely honed emotional control. The first time was to distance himself from Billie. Now it would help him lay out the truth—
Adrian’s
truth—for his sister. He spoke in measured tones as his fingers turned the coffee cup around and around in its saucer, voice soft and even, heartbeat and nerves firing like a slow-measured metronome under Adrian’s intense will. The only thing he failed to do was look into Rosalie’s eyes. If he had, if he’d seen the big, liquid tears he knew had gathered on her dark lashes, it would have broken him.

It took forty-five minutes to condense eight years of impropriety into a single, sordid tale. Through all of it, Rosalie sat across from him in silence, unmoving, her coffee gone cold in its pretty porcelain cup.

When he was done, silence filled the space between them, thick with consternation and anger and grief—whether his or hers, he didn’t know.

“And Billie knew all the while?” Rosalie’s words shattered the brittle quiet, uncharacteristically subdued and diffident with shock. “She knew what you were all this time? What you did at that place?”

“Yes.” And had loved him in spite of it.
Christ.

“Was she your customer?” She stumbled on the question, her voice hushed, as though the idea was too heinous to verbalize.

“No.” He met her gaze and flinched at the pain he saw in her chubby face. The same pain that had been in Billie’s features right before she’d walked out of his life.

His initial anger and sense of betrayal over the article seemed inconsequential now to the hole Billie’s absence created in his world. In his deepest heart he knew she hadn’t meant to hurt him; he’d been far more deliberate in the way he retaliated. He’d caused her far more pain, and worse, he’d done it on purpose.

Because he was afraid. Because his soul was wide open to any damage, deliberate or accidental, she might inflict. Because… “God help me.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I love her.”

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“Yeah? You’ve got a funny way of showing it.” Rosie shoved aside her cup, her fingers playing with the edge of the paper napkins she’d set between them. “As for her—she must be some kind of saint, or nutcase, that she could love a-a—”

“Please.” He bowed his head, rubbing the space between his brows with trembling fingers.

Rosalie shoved back from the table and stood, her shoulders stiff as she set her cup in the sink and ran the water. “You have to tell the DeChambeaus.”

“I’ve written them a letter. They would never agree to see me.”

“They’ll never speak to you again. They’ll want to forget you ever existed in Luke’s life.”

“I know, Rosie.” He swallowed and stared at her back.

“The kids will be home soon,” she said without turning around.

Christopher’s cue to leave. This subdued, hollow response from his volatile sister was far more punitive than any screeching explosion she could have subjected him to.

Woodenly, he got to his feet, pushed in his chair and moved to set his cup and saucer on the counter by her elbow.

“I’ll be at my apartment tonight,” he said. “I’ll answer the phone.”

“What makes you think I’d want to talk to you?” She turned off the spigot and looked at him, plump tears pooling on her eyelids. “I feel so betrayed, Chris. On behalf of our family, I feel shamed and confused and wounded. I don’t understand where we went wrong with you that your path would go so far away from God and love and integrity. We loved you too much, maybe. Made it too easy for you, that you could bruise your own soul like this. Is that it? Tell me, where did we go wrong?”

“I’m the only one who went wrong, Rosie. It’s not your fault, or Mama and Papa’s.

Just mine. And then my refusal to see my life for what it had become—the road to hell.”

He started to reach for her, then thought better and clenched his hands at his sides.

“But then Billie came along and halted me in my tracks, first with her relentless questions, then with her love, and—hell, she’s exposed me to the world with this damn article. My life is ruined. My worst fears realized, and…I love her for it.
I love her
.”

Hearing himself say the words filled him with a misplaced peace that burned in his chest, a fragile fire. “I don’t deserve her.”

“No, you don’t.” Rosalie wiped her hands and leaned a forearm on the counter, her frown easing just slightly. “You want this woman? This reporter?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

“Then you’d better get your act together, Christopher. Make it so you do deserve her. Make it right so you deserve love all the way around, from Billie, from your family and from yourself.
Get honest
.”

Christopher didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He reached out and closed his hand around hers, and she didn’t recoil as he’d feared.

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A fat tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it on her shoulder as though it were an inconsequential mote of dust. “This information doesn’t go out of this room, you hear me? Mama and Papa—it would kill them. I’m the only one who needs to know.

Dio
—it reads like a soap opera, and a shabby one at that.”

After casting him one last searing, derisive glance, she stood on tiptoe, grabbed his jaw with both hands and pulled him down to kiss each cheek. Then she stepped back, and with an expression fierce with pain and passion, smacked him clean across the face, so hard his head snapped to the side.

Christopher heard bells.

“That’s for keeping secrets from the people who love you, you foolish man. And for selling your soul in the gutter. You’d do well to make your confession to Padre Rosetti.

And not through some private screen in a dark booth. Face to face. Or have you given up the Church, too?”

Jaw stinging, he managed a smile and leaned to press his lips against her furrowed forehead. “
Ti amo, mia sorella
.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She wiped the heels of her hands against her eyes. “The kids are almost home, and if they see you here without Rudy they’ll disown you.”

“I’m going.” He paused at the kitchen door and looked back at her, eyes moist with welling gratitude and regret. “Please forgive me, Rosie.”

A single sob shook her shoulders, then it was gone and she waved him off. “Forgive yourself,
idiota
. And come on Sunday for dinner. Bring Billie, if you haven’t already run her off.”

Ah, Billie
, he thought, prayer and lament both.
If only I could turn back time.

* * * * *

Illicit’s
October issue was the best selling edition in the magazine’s history. A hollow victory for Billie, who sat in the weekly staff meeting with her head in her hands, hardly able to meet Nora’s gaze across the conference table.

She hadn’t heard from Christopher since that awful day over a week ago, nor had she tried to call him. If he’d had a miraculous change of heart and attempted to reach her, she wouldn’t know. Her answering machine remained in disrepair, and when the phone did ring, she jumped, but she didn’t answer it. Her single wild rebellion against the world.

Part of her didn’t want to hear his voice if he still cared enough to call.

Part of her wanted to throw herself at him and beg him to come back, like a child in the throes of a violent tantrum.

Think whatever you want about me, Billie. You were the only part of my life that wasn’t a
lie
.

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Yes, he’d said it, sent her into a tailspin of confusion and grief and another incongruent emotion that felt steady like…joy. Because she’d seen the conflict beneath his anger in the instant before she fled his home, his painful uncertainty.

She was the certain one now. Certain that if she didn’t get away, she’d beg him to keep her. Then he’d have her pride along with her heart, and for God’s sake, she needed to keep something.

Christopher didn’t show up at her apartment, either, and after ten days of holding her breath and ten nights of lying awake with her dry gaze fixed on the ceiling, she made a decision.

The next day, she canceled her apartment lease. Then she typed a two weeks’ notice of resignation, and with tears streaming down her cheeks, set it on Nora’s desk.

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The Fifth Favor

Nora reacted with typical indignation, as though Billie’s resignation were a personal affront. “You’re doing this on purpose. To get back at me for publishing that article on Adrian without your permission. My God, Billie, it was shitty of me in a personal sense, I’ll admit it. But the magazine has to come first. I wasn’t thinking about your romance with this guy. I didn’t know it would affect
you
, that it would ruin—”

“This has nothing to do with Adrian,” Billie said, defeated.

“Then what is it? Do you need a steadier assignment? Your own column? Anything you want, I’ll arrange it. Just—”

“I need to start over, Nora.” Her eyes welled up. Damn it. She never used to cry.

“There’s nothing here for me anymore. I’m moving to Atlanta. Or farther south. Some place far, far away from D.C.”

“You’re running away,” Nora pointed out. “Throwing away an incredibly promising career for nothing. You’re acting like a lovesick fool who’s letting her broken heart call all the shots.”

Billie glared at her. “Fine. I
am
a lovesick fool. And yes, my heart’s calling the shots on this one. It’s taking me away from here, where I can forget about Adrian, and
Illicit
, and everything that smacks of the last few weeks, and my dull, depressing life before them.”

“It was only dull because you don’t know how to relax and live, Billie. You should be more like me,” Nora said, despicably self-righteous as always. “I let the body call the shots. I see a man I want, and I grab him. Pure sex, no heart involvement.”

“Yeah?” Billie’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s what it was with Adrian. Pure sex, no heart involvement. Until I fell for him like a block of concrete out a fifty-story window.