Page 156 of Seduction Under the Southern Stars

I bury my face in his T-shirt. “I’ve been such an idiot,” I whisper.

“No you haven’t.” He hugs me. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“You don’t know that,” I whisper.

“I’ve got a pretty good feeling about it all,” he says, and kisses the top of my head.

But I’m not so sure, and while I wait for the two of them to come back, my stomach is like a washing machine, the emotions tumbling around until I’m just one big messy bundle.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Linc

“Gorgeous day,” Atticus says.

I nod, looking up at the bright-blue sky. Elora’s eyes are a shade darker than this, but pretty much the same color. The sun is incredibly bright, but I don’t put my sunglasses on. I want Atticus to see my eyes and to know that what we’re about to discuss is real and that I’m being honest.

“Where would you like to go?” he asks.

“The forest,” I reply, wanting to see if it still has the magic I remember from my youth.

“Sure.”

We head for the gate at the end of the path, go through, and then just a few minutes later, we approach the trees and enter the cool quiet of the forest.

We walk in silence for a while, listening to the trees whispering over our heads. It’s not un-Atticus like. When I was young, he took me walking with him a lot, sometimes with other students or his boys and Elora, sometimes just me and him. In the beginning, I was angry and resentful at being made to do exercise when I didn’t feel like it, and afraid that he’d make me talk about stuff like feelings or my life at home, and I refused to talk to him. But he never pushed me. “Quiet people have the loudest minds,” he told me on our first walk together.

“That some Bible quote?” I replied rudely.

“No. Stephen Hawking said it. You know who he was?”

“Some dude in a wheelchair?”

He just looked at me then, and I blushed and said, “He was a scientist.”

“He was a theoretical physicist and a cosmologist who suffered from motor neurone disease. A very brave and determined man who deserves nothing but admiration.”

He always managed to make me feel an inch high with his non-scolding. But I learned that he was kind and generous, and always willing to listen, until the end, anyway. I don’t want to think about that now, though. I’m an adult, and although I respect him, I’m going to stand my ground.

I take a deep breath. “I’d like to talk to you about something.”

To my surprise, though, he holds up a hand and says, “Can I go first?”

“Er… sure.” I’m a little irritated. If he lectures me or starts bringing up what I did wrong, it’s going to make it much harder for me to have my conversation.

“Elora rang me last week,” he says. “She told me she’d seen you. And she said you’d told her that I was the one who sent you away.”

I don’t say anything. It’s true. What can I say?

“I implied to everyone that you were the one who walked out,” Atticus says. “And I want to apologize for that.”

I’m so taken aback that I stop walking. I stare at him, shocked. I never, ever thought I’d hear him admit he was wrong.

He stops too, and we stand there in the middle of the forest, a few feet apart, facing one another.

I swallow hard, overcome with emotion. “It was just a kiss,” I say, my voice husky.

He looks at his feet for a moment, then returns his gaze to me. “Elora told me the same. She said that what you felt for each other wasn’t crude and vulgar and sordid, because she’d experienced that firsthand.” He gives me a direct look. “You know what happened to her, right?”

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