AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He groaned then, dropping his head forward and kissing her with all the hunger of a man who’d finally found his way to a buffet after years of starvation. She laughed into the kiss, but even her laugh was one of desperation—something they shared. It carried them to the bedroom, and they stayed there for hours. Kissing, touching, exploring, worshipping, remembering, pleasuring and being pleasured, until it was the small hours of the morning and they lay as a tangle of limbs and cotton sheets in the silver light cast by the moon through the expansive windows.
“Are you tired?” He asked, propping up onto one elbow.
She leaned forward and kissed his shoulder, just because she could. She shook her head. “I should be, but I’m not.” If anything, she felt completely and utterly alive—more alive than she’d felt in forever.
“Then let’s go out.”
“Out?”
“I’m hungry. We can get some pizza.”
“Of course you’re hungry,” she said with an eye roll, but then her own tummy gave a little groan, and she clamped a hand to it. “I guess that makes two of us.” She kissed his lips then. “Give me five minutes to get ready.”
Manhattan in the middle of the night was a mystical place. Devoid of the crowds that usually flooded the streets, there was an eerie, almost apocalyptic feeling on the sidewalks. It was cool and she huddled into Leandro’s side as they walked, his arm around her protectively, keeping her cocooned. She breathed him in, that woody, citrussy scent of his, and acknowledged, just for a moment, how right this felt. How much she liked being there with him.
How glad she was that she’d decided to just go along with this.
It scared her to think of losing any hint of her independence and in offering her a ‘fun’, causal relationship, he’d possibly built a bridge between what she wanted and what she knew she couldn’t have. This could work.
She didn’t want to think about when it stopped working, and they were no longer in each other’s lives. The fact they openly acknowledged that time would come should surely take the sting out of it.
They ordered a couple of slices from a place with glowing fluorescent lights and ate as they continued to walk, talking, looking at the cityscape. It was one of those picture-perfect moments that etched itself deep in Skye’s memory almost without her consent, so that without realizing it, their late night walk through the streets of Manhattan would become something she could never forget. Not for any particularly significant reason, or perhaps there was significance in this. The ordinary magic of it all—a contradiction in terms that just seemed to perfectly sum up their relationship.
Skye didn’t overthink it. She was happy, and she was relaxed, and she just wanted to soak up those feelings. She wasn’t stupid enough to think it could last forever.
“This has to stop.” Max strode into the office Leandro was working out of, his dark eyes boring into Leandro’s.
Leandro fixed him with a steady gaze in return and didn’t move from where he sat.
“Our mother is distraught. What’s going on?”
Leandro startled. His family had been tiptoeing around his absence, taking his excuses with the appearance of acceptance. After that first confrontation with Emme in the hotel, no one had called him on this, and that was just what he wanted.
But now, a month on from the wedding, he supposed his disappearance was wearing thin. They were a close-knit family; it was not usual for one of them to simply fade into the background.
“Ask her,” Leandro snapped, then wished he’d said nothing because Max’s eyes narrowed in that assessing way he had.
“I have. And our father. Niente. But clearly you have argued with them, and I presume over something significant. So what is it?”
Leandro’s jaw worked overtime. “Leave it be.”
“Not when you’re acting like such a shit. Our parents deserve better than this.”
Leandro flinched, jerking to his feet, unable to bear this conversation. Not with Max, whom he’d always shared things with. His brother, no longer a brother. The loss was immense. Leandro had lost so much, but so had Max and Emme. They would have to grapple with this too. Their parents had betrayed all of them. He wasn’t ready to throw that grenade into their lives. Was that why he’d stayed away? Because it wasn’t like him to hide out. It wasn’t like him to bury himself in a fantasy, like his life here with Skye, rather than face the music. He was someone who’d always tackled problems head on, yet here he was, ignoring his family, as though time might make it all go away.
“Just leave it,” he snapped.
But Max wouldn’t leave it. Of course he wouldn’t. He stalked towards Leandro, until he was right up in his face. “What the hell has happened?”
Leandro flinched. “I need space.”
“From us?” Max looked appalled, as though the idea had never occurred to him. Which was spectacularly unfair, all things considered. After Max’s best friend had died, Max had taken himself off to lick his wounds, had pushed all of them away, and the family had respected that. For the most part. Okay, Leandro had gone to check on him a few times, and Max had told him to get the hell away, and Leandro hadn’t always listened.
Because his brother had been suffering, and Leandro had been worried.
“I have never known you to act like this,” Max said, his voice deep with emotions. Worry. Surprise. Anger.
“Perhaps you just don’t know me at all.”
