Page 15 of Tempting as Sin
“Why?” Paige asked, with the quick glance at her twin that Lily could have predicted. “I could go the rest of my life without hearing about the vampire from Venice. I still say you should have let me beat him up, Lily. I could’ve taken him. Pussy.”
Lily tried to concentrate on what was coming next, but it was driving her crazy. She said, “Wait,” straightened Paige’s collar, tucked in the tag at the back of her shirt, and felt a tiny bit better.
Rafe scratched his perfect cheek. “He’s in the new film.”
“You’re joking,” Jace said.
“Nah. He’s new. That Scorpio fella.” Rafe waved one of those beautiful hands, which were attached to the rest of his beautiful self. Tools of the trade. “Moroccan. Playboy billionaire. Inventor of heretofore unimagined weaponry. Torn between good and evil. Antihero. Et cetera. Very big in the Urban Decay world just now, and this film’s an ensemble piece. Hence the Tunisian location, which is meant to be Morocco.”
“Ah,” Jace said. “I’m not up on my superheroes.” Lily knew why. Because it wasstupid.Also absolutely fake, from the bloodless deaths to the superhuman strength, not to mention the painful struggles of conscience followed by the triumph of nobility.
“Typecasting,” Paige said, which had been pretty much the word in Lily’s mind. “Spoiler: I know which side he ends up on.” She reached around Jace and started splashing boiling water into mugs.
Jace stepped back a prudent pace, but when she set the kettle down again, he said. “Put the bag in first. Haven’t I taught you anything, woman?” And dropped teabags carefully into the mugs, taking care that the paper tab didn’t fall in. Another thing Paige never bothered about.
“It doesn’t matter,” Paige said. “It’s ten seconds’ difference. How much does the water drop from boiling point in ten seconds?”
“It does matter,” Jace grumbled. “Destroys the bloom.”
In Lily’s marriage, she would have apologized at that point. Paige, of course, did nothing of the sort. “We’ll do a blind taste test sometime,” she said. “Twenty bucks says you can’t tell the difference.”
“I’d take you up on that,” Jace said, “except that it isn’t fair to rob you.”
“Ha,” Paige said, then opened the fridge, took out the milk, and made some faint “Bok-bok-bok”cackling noises, which made Jace laugh instead of infuriating him.
All of which was exactly why Lily’s visit wasn’t turning out so great, even without this latest…wrinkle. She told Rafe, “I’ll show you the loft,” then walked out of the kitchen without checking that he was following.
She believed that there were good men in the world. Just not the ones attracted to her.
When she’d pulled out sheets and towels from the linen cupboard, handed them to Rafe, and pointed him towards the ladder, though, he said, “Right. I made a mistake. Obviously, I didn’t know about you. I don’t remember meeting you at any, ah…anywhere.”
“Because I was the cold socialite leading her separate life,” she said, keeping her own voice as low as he had. “One of the ladies who lunch, dividing my time between the gym and the spa, pretending that my little hobby of a shop mattered. A gold-digger who couldn’t even be bothered to go to the Oscars on the night her husband won. Bathroom’s across the hall.” She had to look at him.No running away. Not anymore. Faceit, dammit.“What else?”
A faint twitch in his hard cheek, but all he said was, “I’ll take this up there, then.”
She folded her arms. “What else? You owe me the courtesy of telling me what’s out there. What did he say? I know he said something, if he was on location with you for weeks.”
“Why would you want to know?” When she just stared at him, he said, “What you already knew, more or less.”
She kept staring, and his eyes slid away. She swallowed down the pain and asked again. “What else? What don’t you want to tell me?”
One second. Two. Finally, he said, “You got him to marry you because you were pregnant, and his family wanted him to have kids. And then you had an abortion.”
Her mouth opened, then snapped shut. She managed to say, over the blockage in her throat, “All right, then. All right.” After that, she headed into her own bedroom, shut the door, stared into the mirror blindly, and started to put up her hair again with shaking hands.
She wasn’t any superhero, and Antonio had always had more weapons than she had. Her only defense was her little bit of armor, the kind hardened by pain. It was time to put it on.
It was as if, during the rest of that endless day and evening, the woman Rafe had met last night had climbed into a bombproof compartment, pulled the lid shut, and latched it down. On the surface, she asked questions, laughed, kept the conversation going, made chicken molé with all the trimmings that would have done credit to a Mexican restaurant, and smiled.
Always, she smiled. He wasn’t the only one who noticed, either. When she was curled up in a side chair after dinner, sipping herbal tea while Jace and Rafe got after the scotch and the three others talked in a desultory fashion about watching a movie, Paige said, “You know what I’ve realized, Jace?”
She and Jace were on the floor, Jace sitting against the wall, Paige lying sideways with her head on a cushion in his lap and a blanket over her.
“No,” he said. “What?”
“Another way Lily and I are less identical now,” she said. “I have Resting Bitch Face, and she has Resting Smiling Face. Rafe, you’re an actor. What do you think? You couldn’t mistake us, right?”
Lily looked at him. And—yes. Smiled, like she was enjoying this. But it didn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes still looked like that doe’s. Dark. Wary. Wounded.
