Page 45 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

“That’s one of your favorite places?” she asked.

He felt...exposed in a way the art gallery had not made him feel. “Yes. The first time I was in the city I felt compelled to stop in. My mother would take me in every cathedral we passed to light a candle when I was young and... I felt like I ought to. I remember I walked in and there was an old woman, kneeling and praying, her dress shabby, her shoulders stooped. A man in a sharp, custom-made suit knelt down beside her. I was struck by the image, that both were welcome. I thought perhaps then I still was too.”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

His chest felt twisted up. “By then my life had become complicated. I was not the man I’d hoped to be. But there was something...healing. About knowing I could go there, light a candle. Be in the silence. It’s like all the hymns that were ever sung are still in the stone. You can feel it.” Perhaps she’d think him insane. “Or at least I can.”

“I feel it too.”

He worked to lighten things after that. He took her to a Mediterranean restaurant with a glorious dining patio, where you had to queue up out front and pay only with cash. Followed by a walk through The Village.

“I used to wonder what I would have to do to be able to live a life here. There was something so quiet about it. I think it was the first time I really understood that in the middle of a city like this silence costs a premium. A well-preserved home on an old street means you’ve made it.”

He could still remember wandering here when he’d had his free time. Imagining another life. He was living that life now, he supposed, but it didn’t feel quite like he’d imagined.

“Did you ever buy a place here?”

He shook his head. “No. By the time I could afford it I wasn’t so romantic. This isn’t near my office. Therefore it isn’t practical. And anyway, I chose to make my primary home in Greece. Perhaps because it felt like taking something of myself back. I never asked to move to Scotland. I didn’t ask to lose my life, my language. That is the problem with being a child, whether your parents are good or not. They make decisions on your behalf. On that, I think we can connect. They choose what they think you need. Or perhaps what they think they need, and you get no say.”

It was getting late and the streetlights had come on. They were charming and old-fashioned, though to him, they didn’t seem so old. He was from one of the very cradles of modern civilization. With history stretching back so far it was nearly impossible to track.

And still, something about this place would always call to him.

He had never shared these truths about himself with another person. Her favorites were very much New York to the eyes of a child, while his... They were a mix of his missing home, missing his soul, his desperate desire to be part of a class he wasn’t. His hunger to escape the scarcity that had dogged him for so many years.

His need to be forgiven.

He wondered if she could see that. Did he want her to? What was the point of it, except that when faced with the idea of not having her in his life at all, he found himself feeling adrift. She was an anchor he had not realized bore so much weight in his world. Though he had to wonder how much of that was just his dislike of change. Of losing people. There were spare few people in his life. And he had attached a great deal of importance to Hannah.

She was his new church, in that sense. The thing he looked at which made him ache. To be whole. To have a soul.

Dieu, he’d told himself he would keep himself separate today. Forever.

But just as the cathedral had enticed him to his knees, to a position of what some would call weakness, Hannah made him vulnerable.

Being finished with her, setting her free, that would be the fulfillment of all the good he’d ever done. And so in truth, it would be a good thing to let her go. In a year’s time, when the marriage could be dissolved, he would feel glad about it. And not wistful in any way.

Wistfulness was the province of other men.

As was vulnerability.

They had walked a near impossible amount, and when they arrived back at his Upper Eastside penthouse, they were disheveled in a way he rarely allowed himself to be.

“Well,” she said, sinking onto a chair by the expansive windows in the apartment. “I feel like we’ve done enough.”

“Do you think you’ve defeated jet lag?”

“I do,” she said.

When he looked at her sitting in the chair, he could only see that night.

When he had dropped to his knees before her and tasted the sweetness between her thighs.

When he had sunk inside of her beautiful, tight heat.

He had told himself that he wouldn’t think of her this way. He had told himself that he wouldn’t think of that at all.

And yet, he was.

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