Page 58 of His Vow

He nodded. Didn't look up. But he nodded.

I drove. Didn't go home. Didn't go to the gallery. Didn't go to him — though the pull was so strong it sat in my chest like a fist. My body wanted to be wherever he was because for months that was where safety lived. I drove until the city thinned and parked on a quiet street and sat in my car and looked at the photographs on my phone.

I called Margaux.

She picked up on the first ring. 1:00 a.m., and she picked up on the first ring.

"I need you tomorrow." My voice was raw. "I found something."

She didn't ask what. "I'll be there. Whatever it is."

The line went quiet. I leaned my head against the steering wheel. Closed my eyes. Tomorrow I'd be brave. Tonight I was just a woman who loved two men and lost them both in the same evening.

I drove home. Pulled up to my building. Got out of the car.

Nolan was there.

Standing outside my door. The navy suit wrinkled, the tie gone, his collar open. He looked like he hadn't moved since the gala — like he'd come straight here and waited. His face was stripped of every mask he'd ever worn. No control. No system. Just a man standing on a sidewalk who had nowhere else to go.

I walked past him.

"Soleil — "

"You're the last person I want to talk to."

"Just let me — "

"Let you what?" I spun around. The gold dress swung against my ankles. My keys dug into my fist. "Explain? Apologize? Tell me again how it stopped being the plan? I've heard it, Nolan. I stood in a dark room and listened to every word and none of it changes the fact that you lied to me every single day."

"I know." He stepped closer. His voice was rough, raw, stripped of the short controlled sentences I'd grown used to. The words were coming out wrong, tangled, tripping over each other. "I know what I did. I know what I am. But you — Soleil, you are the only real thing — "

"Don't." I jabbed my finger at his chest. "Don't tell me I'm real. You don't get to decide what's real. You lost that right when you photographed my father's files from the office I walked you past."

He flinched. The first time I'd ever seen Nolan flinch.

"I trusted you." My voice cracked. I hated that it cracked. I wanted the steel from the ballroom, the woman who said shut up to three hundred people. But she was gone and what was left was just me, standing in the cold in a gold dress with mascara tracks on my face. "I showed you paintings I've never shown anyone. I brought you to my family. I sat in your kitchen in your shirt and made you coffee and you drank it every time even though it was terrible and I thought — I thought that meant — "

My throat closed. I pressed my fist against my mouth.

He closed the distance. One step. Two. Close enough that I could smell him — the soap, the starch of the navy shirt that was supposed to be for tonight, for dancing, for the promise I made him this morning in his kitchen. Tonight. We were supposed to have tonight.

"I'm sorry." His voice broke on the second word. "I'm sorry. I don't have anything else. I don't have a strategy or a speech or a — I'm just sorry. And I love you. And I know that doesn't fix it but it's the only true thing I have left."

I looked at his face. The jaw I'd traced with my thumb a hundred times. The eyes that held things the rest of his face had learned to hide. The mouth that kissed me at my front door the first night.

He kissed me. Or I kissed him. It didn't matter who moved first because we both moved and the collision was furious, desperate, tasting like tears and champagne and the wreckage of everything we built. His hands were in my hair. My fists were in his jacket — the navy jacket, the color I gave him. His mouth was hot and shaking against mine and I kissed him back with everything, with the grief and the rage and the love I couldn't kill no matter how hard I tried.

The kiss was not forgiveness. It was mourning. Two people grieving something that was still alive and already dead.

I pulled away. Looked at him. My lips swollen, my eyes wet. He was breathing hard. His hands were still in my hair. His forehead pressed against mine.

I didn't say a word. I stepped back. Turned. Walked inside. Closed the door.

I leaned against the other side and pressed my fingers to my mouth and tasted him and hated that it still felt like the truest thing I'd ever known.

EIGHTEEN

NOLAN