Page 129 of The Scandal You Started
“Mm-hmm.”
He picked it up and straightened. She watched the way his wide mouth lifted and softened the strong lines of his cleanly shaven face as he traced a gentle finger over the acrylic.
“You look beautiful in every picture,” he muttered.
“Thanks.”
He angled the frame towards her and tapped on a picture. “Is this your father?”
“Yeah, that’s Dad and his wife.” She pointed to the one below it. “Those are my two brothers.” Then she pointed to a picture in the other corner. “And that’s my mum.”
Dominic angled the frame right under his face. “She is very beautiful.”
“Yeah, she was,” Rayna agreed wistfully.
“You look just like her. Though you have your father’s hair and eyes.”
“I do.” Her smile grew with his. “What about you? Who do you look more like?”
“Most definitely my father, though I have my mother’s eyes.”
They held each other’s bright, content stares before Dominic’s lashes dipped again.
His expression mellowed into something soft and bittersweet. “Do you think perhaps your mother and my father have met somewhere amongst the stars?”
Rayna’s heart hiccupped in surprise, and she fell still in her chair.
She had no idea why exactly, but picturing their parents meeting suddenly pasted a glob of emotion right at the base of her throat.
“I…” she croaked. “I don’t know.”
“I would like to think,” he said, carefully setting the frame back on her desk, “that they are sitting together, watching us, hoping we will realise if the past and future can remain together up there, then perhaps it can down here too.”
Her heart released an agonising mewl, and the back of her eyes started stinging as he swallowed her up in his glassy stare. The clump blocking her windpipe turned into a solid rock, and she didn’t dare move or breathe, couldn’t speak, in fear it would come out as a sob.
Fuck…fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
You’re so stupid, Rayna. Did you really think you could do it?
Did you honestly think you could let him go?
How could she when this ridiculously precious man had filled her head and heart with hope?
But was it really possible for her to trust that hope?
Chapter 37
Rayna
Two days later, on the Friday of the Summer Harvest Holiday, a traditional Khaasan celebration of the state’s prosperous agriculture, Rayna and Dominic packed overnight bags to spend the long weekend event at Victor’s house—the place she’d called home from the ages of thirteen to twenty-three.
As they did every year, Victor and Declan fussed around a barbecue in the middle of the long, landscaped back garden.Winnie lounged in a chair under an umbrellaed table, cutting summer fruits into a bowl with Dominic as Boris slept at their feet. While in the kitchen, Rayna, Benedict, and George prepared salads, couscous, and coleslaw with the fresh produce they’d all bought from local farmers and markets in the prior days.
George and Benedict were yapping away about a rugby game in some league of some national tournament at Rayna’s back as she washed a bowl of cherry tomatoes in the sink. But her gaze remained stuck on Dominic’s animated face through the big paned window above the silver basin as he chatted with Winnie.
“He told me he loves me.”
She didn’t fully register what she’d said until she realised George and Benedict were no longer talking. All she could hear was the rush of the tap and Winnie’s muffled giggles.
