Page 101 of The Kiss of Deception

Uncharacteristically impulsive, I’d called him, unsure what I would say. As I was about to hang up, he’d picked up.

I’d paused.

The answer to my quiet “Hi” was a question.

“Who is this?”

Then, small pieces of shattered glass everywhere as I’d disconnected the call, slamming the phone against the wall.

I’d never found out if he’d realized it was his daughter, calling so late on the day he never remembered.

Minutes later, Miles’s incessant knock on the door found me frozen on the same spot. How dare he look so happy when I wanted to crumble into dust on the floor? His blinding smile only highlighted the darkness I’d felt. So, I’d ripped it right off his face with blatant rudeness.

Later, with a clear head, I saw the error of my ways. Hidden behind a bouquet of beautiful lilies, I was on his doorstep, ready to make amends, only to be met with a mirror of myself. I never got a word out.

In the face of reciprocation directly fueled by my own attitude, I never gave him the benefit of the doubt. From then forward, I declared Miles the bad guy, shaping the story to the benefit of my beliefs, taking innocent actions, and injecting them with hidden intentions and self-serving interests.

People hide themselves. I was raised to notice the difference between a public persona versus the truth. So, it made perfect sense that that’s who he was. Another rich, hot guy hiding his ugliness behind a blinding smile.

With all those foregone conclusions and assumptions, I’d been the one to set in stone the tone of our relationship, a complete bitch who knew how to hold a grudge with nothing but stubbornness and two slender arms. I clung to it like a lifeline, when in reality it was only ever a boulder that dragged me down.

It sounds so petty and childish now that I want to dig a hole under my bed and never come out.

Camila interrupts my trip down the memory lane, as though she isn’t the only person in the world who knows everything.

“So, how did you change her mind?”

Miles’s searching eyes flit between mine, offering only truth once more. “Most days, I’m not entirely sure she has.”

Over my shoulder, I see the closed curtains that conceal my secret—the birthday gift that winked in my head the first time I visited this house. I walked in and before I saw the room as it was, I saw it as it could be—as it would be.

After weeks of work in a careful schedule that assured Miles was far away from the house, it’s finished—just in time for his birthday. All the things I haven’t voiced, things I can’t make sense of, wrapped in a present without a bow.

I’m just as eager to kick everyone out and drag the curtains open as I am to keep them in place forever.

“Oh, she has,” Rodrigo says all-knowing. All provoking. “If you took your smoldering eyes off her ass for a second, you’d see it.”

An unexpected boom startles me. Fortunately, my drink is long on its way to my blood, so there’s no waste of expensive alcohol. I fumble for balance, grasping only air that doesn’t support me. I tumble into Miles’s lap, knocking our heads in the process.

“Ow!” I complain as Miles grunts. It’s my scar his finger smooths with care, like it’s my pain he must erase.

“Foda-se, Camila!” Rodrigo’s heartfelt curse, followed by his sister’s maniacal cackling, enlightens the picture I can’t see. Because my gaze is stuck on my boyfriend’s hands that clutch my waist as he adjusts me on his stone-legs.

“He’s afraid of balloons,” I explain to those alarmingly attractive hands. Can hands even be that attractive? They shouldn’t.

Somewhere in my periphery, Julia clucks her tongue as an introduction to her speech. It sounds remarkably like Portuguese, but not quite in the way the siblings speak. Her lips curl around the vowels in a slower manner that strips them naked and presents them with adoration.

My eyes snap to her, hands on her waist as she distributes admonishments.

The indentations between my brows are questions that Miles promptly erases with unrestrained pride. “My mother is Brazilian.”

My jaw drops with the weight of all the implications of this little revelation. “You speak Portuguese.”

The divots in his cheeks deepen, delighted at being caught. “Don’t worry, love. They mostly talk about your devilish eyes. It’s me that inspires their creative insults.”

“So all this time you’ve been eavesdropping on their conversations. As they talked about you. Without their knowledge. That’s… devious.” And unexpectedly hot. Very fucking hot.

I don’t realize I’m clutching his wrist until the calloused pads of his fingers send shivers up my arm from their trail on my whitened knuckles.

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