“It’s beautiful here.” I wasn’t sure if lust had dulled my senses earlier or whether the orgasm had heightened them, but the cove seemed more beautiful, the sea greener, the sand finer and peppered with jewel-like shells.
“It is,” Tristan said, sitting down opposite me and placing our lunch and some drinks between us on a cloth. “You need to drink.” He opened the screw cap of the bottle and handed it to me.
“Thanks.” Is that what relationships were meant to be—someone focused on your welfare and happiness as much as their own?
“I can tell by your smile that you’re thinking something interesting. What is it?”
“My smile told you that? I’m always thinking about something interesting.”
He fixed me with a be-careful-or-I’ll-kiss-you look and bit into his sandwich.
“I was just thinking how pleased I am that you bid on me at that auction.” So many coincidences and almost-didn’t-happens had led us to this exact moment. How easy would it have been for us never to have even met?
He nodded. “And to think, I wasn’t supposed to go.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “You know, most of those charity things, I just write a check and send my apologies. If Arthur hadn’t been the one to ask me, I would . . . Never mind.”
“If it hadn’t been for Arthur asking, you would never have come to the gala? I get it. That doesn’t bother me.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
I tilted my head to the side. I wanted to hear him uncensored. “So tell me.”
The waves lapped at the shore of our private cove and a cloud settled in front of the sun, cloaking us in shade for the first time today.
“If I’d bothered to look more carefully at the invitation and seen that it was a gala supporting Sunrise . . .” He glanced at me, held my gaze as if he was deciding whether or not to continue, and then looked away. “If I’d know the evening was raising money for a charity helping children with congenital heart defects, I would never have attended.”
I tried to cover my shiver. I knew Tristan wasn’t a bad man. I knew he wasn’t ungenerous or unfeeling, so why would Sunrise’s mission have stopped him coming to the gala?
“When I was eight years old, my parents had another a child. A girl. Her name was Isadora. Issy.”
He didn’t need to say anymore. The haunted look he wore told me everything I needed to know. I dropped my sandwich and moved to sit next to him, my arm hooking around his waist. He didn’t move.
“She died when I was eleven after years of hospital visits, treatments, pain and suffering.” His sister had been the family member who died that he spoke about in the bathroom at our engagement party. It all made sense why his mother would have been so emotional about guests being asked to contribute to Sunrise.
I pressed my head against his shoulder. I wanted to climb inside him and hug him from the inside out.
“She was beautiful and smiley and never pronounced the R in my name. It was always Tis-tan. You know?”
I nodded, trying not to let the tears slip from my eyes.
“She had these blonde curls that would bounce back no matter if you brushed her hair or if she was just out of the bath.”
I could see her as if she were right in front of me.
He took a breath and continued. “Her illness consumed all of us. I would creep into her bedroom at night to make sure she was still breathing and find my mother or my father in there weeping. And then when the time came and she died, it was like our world stopped. I remember feeling such guilt when I felt anything but grief. My parents were so miserable for so long, I thought that was how I was meant to be feeling. I felt disloyal for any happiness that crept in through the crack of my broken heart. It was almost unbearable. Looking back, they were navigating the breakdown in their marriage. They split up the following summer and . . .”
His confessions were like blades slicing through my stomach. Painful beyond belief but only a fraction of how Tristan must feel. I wanted to stop it, make it better for him, pull out those memories and drown them in the sea-green ocean.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. He’d suffered so much pain and it was buried so deep, I’d had no idea. It made sense now how emotional Tristan’s mother had been at the engagement party, the QR code he’d arranged for donations, and why he’d agreed to marry me.
“I hope the money from your trust fund will make it easier,” he said. “Hopefully take the pressure off and keep other families together.”