Page 65 of The Honest Affair

Chapter Fifteen

Nina

Secrets.

The word rang inside me like a gong as we drove out of Florence.

“You’re very quiet,” Matthew said. “More than usual. What’s on your mind, doll?”

He switched gears and sped forward as traffic disappeared on the highway, away from the city. He hadn’t said it, but I rather thought he was enjoying the Ferrari more than he let on. Normally I might have enjoyed his obvious pleasure. Right now I barely noticed.

“I was thinking about Giuseppe.” I turned to him, suddenly uncertain. “Do you really want to hear this?”

Relief washed over me when Matthew simply shrugged. “I mean, I’m not surprised, given what we’re doing. And we all have our pasts, baby. You wouldn’t be you without yours.” He flashed a brilliant, slightly sharkish smile at me. “I want to know all of it. Even if it does make me want to punch a dead man.”

I bit back a smile. His humor was perhaps a bit ghoulish, but I preferred joking to jealousy. So much better than the brutal possessiveness I’d endured from my husband.

But Calvin had never really been a husband at all, had he? Maybe that was part of why.

“I was thinking of what his wife said,” I answered as the hills of Tuscany ebbed and flowed around us. “About his secrets. It made me wonder how many she had to keep.”

“I think that probably depends on what they were. You, for one. But it doesn’t sound like you were much of an anomaly in his life.”

“No,” I said shortly. “It doesn’t.”

I felt like a fool. I shouldn’t have been angry, of course. A twenty-year-old girl getting involved with her forty-two-year-old married professor? It was beyond cliché. Tragic, really. Pathetic. Even more, perhaps, if he really had intended to leave his family for me, as his wife said.

“But you know, everyone has secrets,” Matthew interrupted my thoughts. “Just because you have some doesn’t make you a liar.”

“Doesn’t it?” I asked softly.

He cast me a meaningful look before changing lanes to pass a truck. I kept my eyes firmly forward.

“I don’t think so. I mean…” He shrugged. “I can’t pretend it didn’t sting that you didn’t tell me sooner about Olivia. Or about your involvement in Calvin’s business. But today I thought, why would you? What did I do to deserve that kind of honesty?”

“Oh, Matthew, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I’m not,” he said shortly. “I just think that’s an unfair assumption most people make. They think secrets are something that should be freely offered. But secrets are precious. They’re earned. That’s how you know someone really loves you, I think. They confide the things they wouldn’t have told anyone else.” His mouth, so beautiful and full, twisted into a sardonic half-smile. “I like to think that’s when you knew you loved me, Nina. You had to tell your honest-to-God truth. Otherwise, how do you know the person really loves you back?”

I sat there quietly, ruminating on his words. I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap, and for a moment, saw a ring of bruises play around my wrist.

I hadn’t told him everything. I wasn’t sure I ever would. For one, there was a part of me that worried about what he would do if he knew every side of my marriage. Matthew had a protective side. More than protective, really. Matthew looked at me like I was whole. There was no pity in his eyes, the way the people who knew even bits and pieces of what Calvin did—my housekeepers, my assistant, Caitlyn—looked at me, like I was a wounded animal who would be better put down than forced to live. I couldn’t bear it if he thought of me like that. Like I was ruined.

Even so, if what he said was true… If my secrets were a gift, why wouldn’t I want him to have them all? Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I’d never know he truly loved me until he knew them all.

“Will you tell me one of yours?” I said. “Something you’ve never told anyone else. A trade, if you will?”

Matthew glanced at me. “I’ve told you secrets. Like Iraq, remember?”

His gaze darkened. I didn’t press. The memory of him on his knees, sucking blood from my finger after I had pricked myself on the sharp pin on his Navy Cross, would stay with me always. I had listened to him tell a story that was less about the valor for which he had been honored, and more about the deep guilt he carried from the horrors of that day.

Was that when he began to love me too?

“Well, that’s one,” I said. “But you have two of mine, or you did before I gave one to your boss. You owe me another.”

He shot me a quick, green gaze, then turned back to the road. “What if it’s something you don’t like?”

“It’s fair to assume I won’t. That’s why we keep them, isn’t it?”

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