Enough to make me stupid.
There are things I need to tell Luke, but right now, when we must stay alert and watch for trouble, is not that time. I’ll talk to him at the hotel. For now, we walk, but a mile isn’t that far, and soon enough, we’re at a table eating our food.
It’s actually quite surreal, sitting across from him and sharing a meal as if we’re still us and not whatever this is that we are now.
“You have dirt all over your cheek,” Luke says, surprising me by reaching across the table and rubbing it off my cheek.
My breath hitches with the connection, and when he says, “All gone,” and starts to pull away, I don’t let him.
I catch his hand. “Luke—”
“You just can’t get my name right, can you?” he challenges, but he doesn’t pull away from my touch.
My heart is racing, and I want to say so many things to him. I need to say so many things. “I just—I need—”
“Be careful what you ask for, Ana,” he warns softly. “You might regret it.”
“I have enough regrets to last a lifetime,” I whisper.
“And yet you never called me.”
He’s wrong. I did. I called him. Not from my phone. And once, he picked up. I heard his voice, and the ground spun under my feet. The next time I tried, his number was disconnected.
“I did, actually.”
He studies me, his lashes lowering, half-veiled, his expression unreadable. “When?” he asks softly.
“Does it matter when?”
“It matters,” he assures me.
His cellphone rings, and I want to scream in frustration because I know he has to get it. “Saved by the bell,” he says softly, and I’m not sure if he’s talking about him or me, or perhaps both of us.
He untangles from my hand, and as he answers the call, I can almost feel the wall between us thickening.
“Yeah, Adam,” he says into the phone. “Yeah. We’ll call you when we get to a safe place.” He glances at his watch. “About forty-five minutes. Right. Yeah. Later.” He disconnects. “Adam wants us to call him when we get to our room.”
My spine straightens. “Us?”
“That’s what he said, and no, I don’t know why, but if it were urgent, he’d have told me.” He starts cleaning up. “We need to get moving.”
He’s right. We do. But I can’t help regretting the moment that we just lost.
I hate him, I do. He killed my brother, but there is also no denying that my heart bleeds without this man in my life. I still love him. And not even blood or water will wash that away. I know. I tried. And I failed. Now, I’m not sure I’m even trying anymore.
The next forty-five minutes includes two Ubers, a stop at a store on foot to grab a few items, including suitcases to look the role of travelers, and finally, we arrive at our destination hotel. The St. Julien is a five-star hotel that is both stunning on the outside and on the inside, with its mountain views and luxurious lobby.
“The nicer the hotel, the higher end the security,” I say, rolling my small suitcase behind me.
“Just like Kurt taught us,” Luke supplies a moment before we step up to the check-in counter, where he offers the clerk a fake identity. “Reservation under the name Wright.”
“One moment,” the clerk says, typing a moment before she says, “Welcome Mr. and Mrs. Wright,” making the façade of husband and wife that Luke must already be aware of now awkwardly crystal clear to me as well.
“You’ll be on the eleventh floor,” the woman continues, “and I’m sorry I cannot accommodate your reservation request for an upgrade to a suite. There’s a convention in town, and you got our last room.”
Room, I repeat in my head, as in singular. It seems Luke and I will be sharing a room, which makes sense, of course. He doesn’t trust me not to run, and we’re pretending to be what we once might have been: a happy, married couple who would sleep in the same bed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
ANA
Luke and I step into the empty hotel elevator and stand side-by-side. Once the doors seal, it’s as if a countdown starts. Three. Two. One.
We turn and face each other, the tiny space punched with ten thousand intimate, sexy moments. The air is thick. The baggage heavier than anything we have in our nearly empty suitcases. For long seconds, a full minute perhaps, we don’t speak. We just stare at each other, but the floors tick by as heavily as the unspoken words and unrealized emotions hanging between us.
“There was only one room,” he says. “Pretty much in the whole city. Blake warned me earlier.”
“And you didn’t warn me.” It’s not a question.
“I didn’t want you to run.”
“The running thing again? Really? I’ve never run from anything. That’s not who I am.”