Page 42 of His Bride

I’m a stranger in a stranger’s room in a stranger’s house. Maybe it’s because I’ve changed? It hasn’t been that long, yet it’s like I’m in some museum.

I put the bear down and rise, going over to the vanity, cream-painted wood, a beautiful antique I remember picking out with my mom.

Something simple, she told me, not too girly, not modern, but something that could move through life with me. She thought if I ever had a daughter, it’d be perfect to pass on, and if I didn’t, it could serve in a dressing room in a house of my own.

I try to picture it among Caelian’s things. I can’t. His strong personality doesn’t make room for such things. Or maybe mine doesn’t either. This is something Mira would love. I’m not sure it’s me.

Not anymore.

When I ran to New York, desperate to escape the life my father picked for me, one of marriage to a man who, even before I met him, felt like a monster, I was pretty much still a virgin. In my head. In experience? Well, once removed. And now… I’ve changed.

But the world I come from has stayed exactly where it was, making me estranged. Because I’m not the little girl or the teenager of this room. I’m not the woman who let a stranger fuck me in the middle of the woods to try to be something a man like Aurelio wouldn’t want.

I’m not the girl who ran from home to hide in New York. The girl who fled to find freedom, to let the spirit in me fly.

All I’d ever wanted was that freedom. To be me, to own who I was, and fill my life with my own decisions, ones that might be right or wrong, to make mistakes. To win or fail. Fairly. Without anyone else dictating or forcing or even guiding me.

Mother always lamented I was a free spirit, but I still don’t see what’s so wrong with that. Yet all those dreams, that girl, it’s all fragmented. The past me is a remnant of a dusty shelf or a frame.

Now…

Now, I’m a woman. I’m young, yes, but I’ve got a perspective. I realize everything can’t be about me, about what I want—especially not if it hurts someone I care about. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our wants for the needs of others.

In my efforts to cling to the soul inside, to let it bloom, I became someone with life experience, and I know what lust and passion and desire are. At a bone level. Heart pounding, body melting level.

I know they don’t exist alone; they tangle with heartache, frustrations, laughter and tears, and quiet moments. There are highs and lows, gentle hills, small valleys, and frightening cliff drops.

Those emotions come with words that lash like storms and leave havoc and devastation in their wake.

I go to my window and stare out at the grounds, once so familiar and now seemingly a cage, a place I’m too big for.

This house, this estate is nothing compared to the Del Rossa property. Everything about that family is larger than life. Their world seems to extend infinitely, opulence and grandeur following them wherever they go.

Their power is this living, breathing thing that swallows anyone who comes too close. It's intoxicating, captivating, the kind of influence that leaves everyone in their orbit spellbound. The Del Rossas don’t simply exist, they reign. They command.

They seduce.

I swallow hard.

Caelian.The world’s most annoying, frustrating, addictive man ever. If it were a free choice, I would never have chosen him. But we don’t only clash, we mesh. We’re like wind and rain. Together, we’re a hurricane—destructive, disastrous, catastrophic…but so damn powerful.

The urge to cry is overwhelming. For the first time in months, he’s not here, not around me. I’m the farthest from him I’ve been since it all started—physically and emotionally. And I hate it. Inside, it’s like I’m hungry, like there’s a hole I don’t know how to fill.

Is this what passion, desire, lust, and…lovedo to someone?

Makes you crazy and all over the place all at once. Makes you want the thing that doesn’t want you, the thing that’s bad and good and everything all at once.

I stop.

Love.

My breath shudders.

I love him. And today I told him that. It was a shitty day to confess something so profound, but odds are I’ll never get the chance to say those words to him again. Rather now than never, although I did think saying those words and meaning it for the very first time would be different. It’s supposed to be a happy moment. Instead, it was the opposite.

I stare down at my hand, at the wedding ring glinting. With a breath that catches in my throat, I slip it off, closing my fist around it a few moments before going to my vanity, dropping it in the drawer and closing it.

A door slams somewhere downstairs. Maybe Dad’s home.

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