Page 39 of The Honest Affair

Chapter Nine

Matthew

The sound of the door slamming behind her jerked me out of the trance I didn’t even know I was in. Two seconds ago I had been whispering Hail Marys just because I had never felt so equally blessed and damned at the same time. Now I was alone under the night sky, my dick all but hanging out in the freezing cold wind. And all from loving and wanting and fucking this woman.

And now, once again, she was running away.

“Not this fucking time,” I growled.

I yanked up my zipper and trotted toward the door, no longer caring that my vest was flapping open or that my shirt was only half tucked in and probably missing a few buttons. Those rich pricks downstairs could see my bare ass for all I cared. I wasn’t letting Nina de Vries get away.

I sprinted back to the main floor, but instead of a party full of New York’s elite, I found the catering staff busy cleaning up. Frankie was gone, along with Xavier and the other hundred or so people who had crowded themselves into the townhouse.

Jesus. How long had we been on the roof?

“A woman,” I said to a girl carrying a tray full of empty glasses. “Just came running down here. Tall, blonde, stunning, in a black and white dress. Did she leave?”

“Ummm…”

The waitress faltered, though through her confusion she still managed to eye my undone shirt and tie. Interest sparked. I huffed and rolled my eyes. Move it along, sweetheart. This ain’t for you.

“She’s downstairs with Eric and Jane,” Tony spoke up behind me. One brow rose as he took in my appearance.

I was too busy to notice. Finally, a break. “Thanks, man.”

He nodded as I dashed around him toward the stairs.

The bottom floor of the townhouse was the last space of the building that hadn’t fully been remodeled. What was once one of the great Gilded Age houses of New York had served as an apartment building for years. Eric and Jane had initially bought the top floor until Eric purchased the rest of it late last spring. At first I’d been surprised they even wanted to stay here after everything that happened—after all, when you shoot the man who’s persecuted your family for years and he bleeds out on your living room floor, maybe you don’t want to stay there anymore. But more and more, I understood. You can’t really run away from your ghosts and demons. You have to exorcise them instead. Eric had just done it with drywall instead of a priest.

So maybe it was fitting that in the last empty space of the house, my own personal demon was standing by the window waiting for me.

Alone.

“What the fuck, Nina,” I spluttered as I toppled into the room. “Are we really back to this again? We finally get somewhere, and you just take off? Really?”

But she didn’t answer, just continued to gaze through the back windows that looked out to a small garden behind the townhouse—tiny by most standards, but a massive luxury on the Upper West Side. Nothing says wealth like a backyard in Manhattan.

“Just look at them,” Nina murmured, pulling aside the gauzy curtain.

Through the window, Jane and Eric were standing together, arms wrapped around each other as they gazed at a fountain in the middle of the garden, clearly enjoying a moment of solitude after the evening’s reverie. Every so often, Eric would kiss his wife tenderly on top of her head, and she would nuzzle against his shoulder.

My chest ached at the sight.

“Nina,” I started again, but she kept talking.

“We are such fools, Matthew. We can’t stay away from each other, but together we are miserable, aren’t we?”

“Speak for yourself, duchess,” I said, unable to curb the acidity in my voice. I couldn’t lie. Her words stung. Suddenly I made her miserable? How could that be when touching her made me feel like I was God himself?

“I do,” she said. “Because no matter how much we might want it, we are never going to be that. And it really is torture.”

I frowned. It took me a moment to figure out why her words bothered me so much. After all, it had been months since that night in Boston when we had stared at each other in the dark, equally convinced the other was lying. Fewer still since I’d divulged the particulars of our relationship to my boss and accepted leave before watching Nina’s disappointment in me clang like a hammer to a bell. I’d lived with the separation. Tended bar. Moved through this city like a ghost. I had been mourning my own life like it was already over.

But as I looked at her now, I knew that deep down in my gut, I hadn’t confessed to my boss like he was my priest because I was trying to keep my job. I was doing it because loving her, even when I hated her, was more essential to me than any career. This wasn’t the afterlife—it was limbo until I realized what was really going to happen. Leave or no leave, I’d known the second I stepped into Cardozo’s office that morning that my career at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office was over.

And that one day, after the dust had settled, Nina and I would find our way back to each other. Because we had to. There was no other way.

How could she not know that?

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