Page 49 of Tempting as Sin
She did not want to talk about this. She especially didn’t want to know what Antonio was saying about her. She didn’t need that in her life anymore. Also, she needed to get dressed and ready for the shop, since thatwashow she paid her bills. Instead, she said, “I should get us some more coffee.”
“Or,” he said, “you could stay here and tell me the truth. Why are you in Montana? What happened?”
“Why tell you?” she asked. “Seriously, why? There’s no point anymore. It’s the past.”
“Because there’s this thing,” he said, his expression much too intense, “between you and everybody else, hanging there like a curtain. It’s everything Carrera’s said about you, everything you think might somehow be true. You can’t push it away, and you’ve given up trying. You’re still there behind that curtain, though. I can almost see you.”
She tried to catch her breath. It wasn’t easy. “You'd know about that, I guess, considering what’s been happening to you.”
He moved a hand impatiently. “Maybe a bit, and no. Nothing like as bad. It’s not about me. Who I am, for better or worse, is out there to see for anybody who cares to look past the tabloids. Who you are, though—that’s something else. You’ve hidden it away.”
She twirled her coffee mug between her hands and didn’t look at him. She didn’t have to tell him anything. Maybe she wanted to, though. All those months of hearing the whispers and not being able to contradict them, and the friends who hadn’t been friends at all. How ashamed and broken she’d been, her life torn out by the roots. She said, “Maybe I believed I got to take a shortcut, though. Maybe I believed I deserved wonderful things just because I was pretty. Maybe that’s on me. Did you think of that?”
“If you did,” he said, “I reckon you’ve paid the price.”
Wow. That one was a gut punch. “Maybe I did. All right, then. Here you go. Why am I here? Because I got this land in the divorce. It was an ugly time, and I needed to get back to real things. A garden. Animals. I needed to make a little piece of the world more beautiful, at least that was how I felt. I traded a big chunk of the prenup money—which wasn’t that much, because there were no kids—” She had to stop a second, but then she went on. “I traded it for the land. Too much of it, in fact. Antonio was happy to tell me I’d been stupid, and that I’d had a bad lawyer, too, after the deal was signed. I needed the land more than money, though. More than security, even though I was terrified.”
“Security isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Rafe said. “Or maybe it is. There’s security in surviving, I reckon, and in knowing you can do it again.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said. “I keep not expecting this much…listening, and losing my balance. Or maybe it’s just that your eyes are the right color.”
“Pardon?”
“Oh. Why you seem even more focused than usual. You feel more real. I think it’s your eyes. And your accent.”
“I told you,” he said. “That’s only the outside.” It wasn’t. He was all the way here,and if he was faking this, he was good. She’d swear he wasn’t, though. Maybe it was the snake story, so much less heroic than he could have made it, and actually so—well, heroic.
She said, “Maybe so. Anyway, Antonio had bought this land with me early on, because we’d come through here once, and I’d loved it. It was sort of a present, like the piece of jewelry he’d give me after every film. I sold all of those. Those were mine. That still makes me happy, because I think, now, that they were supposed to make me feel like he’d been thinking of me, to make me ignore the tabloids, and to make it seem like he cared about—other things. Things that mattered to me, that were hard to take.”Whoa,she thought.Do not go there.She plowed ahead. “So—yes, he bought the land. Afterwards, he was sorry. A stupid town that was going nowhere, and a sign of how naïve I was, what a foolish romantic, to want to buy in such a backwater. Sinful wasn’t much then. I could say that I thought it was a good investment, that I saw the change coming, but really, I just loved it. It was the exact opposite of the life I’d had, and the opposite of the life I’d thought I wanted.” She looked into those silver-blue eyes and gave Rafe whathewanted. She gave him the truth, or at least one piece of it. “It’s what I said. I thought I’d be glamorous. I thought I was destined for some fancy life. I got it. It wasn’t that great.”
“No,” he said. “So often not.”
“I wanted quiet,” she said. “Peace. My own choices. I’d had a shop in New York, and Antonio had always…” She swallowed convulsively. “Laughed about it. I was…when I was with him, I was so small. I loved my shop, though. I wanted to try again, try it for real,riskit for real. It scared me so much, worse than Paige has ever been scared, I’m pretty sure. You’re right about that. And that was why I had to do it. I used more than half of the money on the house and still needed a mortgage, and I worked with the guys and learned how to do everything I possibly could to make that money go further. I sourced everything myself, and I kept the place tiny, so I could use remnants. My flooring is left over from a lake house down in Kalispell. My cabinets are from a house that somebody modernized. And on and on. We built the house, and then we built the shed and did the fencing, andIbuilt the chicken coop, and there you go. The fencing was a diamond necklace. That must have been some affair.”
Did she sound bitter? Probably. Too bad. Building that fence for her animals—Antonio hated animals, with their hair and their mess and their noise—with that necklace money? That had feltgood.
Rafe said, “And then you did the shop.”
“The shop…” She sighed. “Man, the shop was scary. I couldn’t get a loan. The shop took everything I had left, and more. It took my credit card, and it maxed it out. It had been a jewelry store, so fortunately the outside was already pretty. I bought most of the fixtures secondhand and put as much as I could in by myself, and then I gambled on buying high-end stock. Boy, did I ever gamble. For the first year, I couldn’t hire help. I worked all the time. I tried everything I could think of, and it wasn’t enough. I kept hearing these voices at night saying I was going to fail, telling me I wasn’t bright enough for this, I wasn’t tough enough for this. I almost did fail. You want to know why I have a garden and fruit trees and goats and chickens? It’s not just a hobby. It’s because I can very nearly feed myself with it. The second year, it got better. Now, I even have solar panels. I can feed myself and my animals, I can pay Hailey, and I canbreathe.But the difference is—this time, I earned it, and nobody can say anything else. Every one of those breaths I can take now, Iearned.”
She was being too dramatic, and she knew it. The words had just poured out. But he couldn’t know how it had felt to lie there at night, think about the bills, and sweat. To have put all her money and all her efforts on one turn of the roulette wheel. To watch the wheel spinning, spinning, spinning, dreading the moment when it would stop in the wrong slot and everything she had, everything she’d tried to become, would be raked away. To try to believe in herself when believing was so hard, and it was so easy to think that Antonio had been right all along.
Those early months, when too many women had walked by on the sidewalk, hesitated, and then walked on. The way the tears had risen, and the way she’d forced them back and tried something new. Tried something else. The way she’d told herself,Find another way. The way she’d clawed her way up and out of that looming credit-card debt, handhold by handhold. The way she’d stared bankruptcy down, and the way she’d won.
“Yes,” he said. “I see that.” That was all, but her breath came out in a rush. She must have been holding it.
“Now do we get to have more coffee?” she asked, trying to make it lighter. “That’s all the sharing I can handle for one day.”
He smiled. “Yeah. We do. And maybe you’ll tell me why you were thinking about that deal we made to make fools of ourselves, and not to care. The night you danced on stage with me and sang by yourself.”
“Really?” She got up and plucked his coffee cup off the table, but she had to smile a little, didn’t she? “That’s what you remember best about that night? It was great, but I thought we were being honest.”
“You’re right,” he said, standing up himself. No smile now. “What I remember best? That’s easy. I remember kissing you.”
Lily looked at him, and he tried to read her and failed. And then she headed into the house, and he picked up the tray and followed her. Chuck stopped policing the goats’ activity and came along, tail wagging, hoping for a run he was sadly not going to get.
That curtain wasn’t there anymore, and finally, he was seeing her. He saw the shame that lingered, the doubts that wouldn’t leave. Unfortunately, he also saw her walk away. She had that swing on her porch, the kind of thing you could sink into with a woman in your lap while you kissed her and touched her and made her feel so good. Except not.
He set the tray down inside, on the tiny breakfast bar, and she stood in the kitchen in her silky robe and her bare feet and said, “I need to get ready for work. But this was so not my plan.”
