His head sank back against the headrest, eyelids falling closed as the limousine whisked them through the night. The faraway lights of San Francisco whirred by the tinted windows like a carpet of stars. They weren’t going back to the Kanes’ personal villa at Willow Creek Winery, but to the large, densely populated upscale hotel Charlotte had booked them into for the conference.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last few days.” Samuel’s eyes were still closed, his strong jaw drooping slightly.
Arlie’s heart fluttered in her chest. “You have?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “And I came to a realization. Would you like to know what it is?”
“Sure,” she said, not at all positive that she did.
“After careful consideration—” he halted and, for a horrifying moment, Arlie was certain he would either fall asleep or lose his train of thought “—I’m pretty certain that I was in love with you.”
It was a good thing she was already sitting down. Every molecule of air abruptly evaporated from the limo’s darkened cab. Her heartbeat drummed in her ears, an inexplicable primal pulse deeper than her breath.
“What memory in particular brought you to this conclusion?” she asked when words were finally a thing again.
“Do you remember when Marlowe had a sleepover party for her fifteenth birthday?” He made a passingly fair job of the complex combination of consonants and sibilants. Arlie hoped this might be a promising indicator that the heaviest of the medication was beginning to wear off.
She did remember.
She remembered in alarming detail.
The herd of long-limbed debutantes, all out of braces, save her. Designer overnight bags. The boathouse decorated with throw pillows and blankets of Marlowe’s favorite seafoam green.
“I do,” she said.
“Before the party, I snuck down to the boathouse, cracked open a couple windows, and found myself a convenient spot in that giant tree in the backyard.”
“Hoping to witness a pillow fight?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “But then Marlowe had to come back to the main house, and one of the other girls called her a spoiled bitch and started talking about how she’d only accepted the invite so she could try and sneak into Mason’s bedroom.”
Oh, Arlie remembered just which girl that had been.
Brittany Payne.
At the time, she’d been the youngest up-and-coming prima ballerina for the Philadelphia Ballet. These days, she was a bank teller with three kids in Ardmore.
“But you,” Samuel said, pointing at Arlie with his good arm. “You stood up and told her that she’d better come down with a sudden mysterious illness and excuse herself or you’d give her a good reason to vanish.”
“I said that?” Arlie asked, knowing full well it was true. She had known even as she’d done it that she’d just permanently etched her name on the Lennox Finch social blacklist.
“You did,” he said. “And that was it. That was the memory.”
Given that any kind of long-term romance between the two of them was a complete impossibility for many reasons, what good did it do her to know this now?
“I’m sorry,” Samuel said after her extended silence. “I shouldn’t have told you that.” His hand landed heavy on the leather seat between them.
Arlie studied it. His neatly trimmed nails. The callus on his thumb where he held his pens. The physical reality of this man who had cut such a broad swath through her life.
Arlie tightened her hand into a fist to keep from reaching out to him.
“No apologies necessary,” she said, the realer, truer words she wouldn’t allow herself to say stuck somewhere deep inside.
I’m reasonably certain I loved you, too.