One Reckless Decision

“Did you know?” she asked, her voice clipped. She glared at him, forcing herself to be fierce, refusing to show him the agony inside, much less that terrible, doomed love for him that made her act like such a colossal fool. “Did you know that we would have to register our separation and then wait three years? And did you convince me to come here anyway, knowing that I thought we could divorce immediately? Did you manipulate me in that way, Leo?”

His lips pressed together into a hard line. His eyes burned but he did not speak. One moment passed. Then another.

Bethany did not realize how much she had hoped he would have an explanation until he failed to offer one. She let out the breath she had not been aware she was holding.

“Well,” she said unevenly, and it cost her not to show how deeply his silence hurt her. “There we are.”

“Did I drag you here against your will, Bethany?” he asked fiercely, his features harsh with something like pain. “Did I kidnap you like the savage you love to tell yourself I am? Did I lay a single finger upon you before you asked me to do so?”

“No, of course not,” she said bitterly, the pain of all their years so heavy on her heart, that she thought her knees might give way. Part of her wanted to collapse beneath it, to be done with it finally. To be at some kind of peace. But she could not allow that, and she knew it. She felt her lips twist into something rueful. “You are a saint.”

“You are my wife,” he said.

“What does that mean?” she asked, hearing her own voice shake but not knowing what she could do to stop it. “You still do not have the right to treat me this way—like an asset you must manage, a pawn you must maneuver around according to your own Byzantine rules! I am a person, Leo. I have feelings. And I am tired of you treading them into dust beneath your feet!”

“You have feelings?” he demanded in a kind of furious amazement. “You dare to stand there, one foot out of the door, your suitcase packed, and talk to me of your feelings?”

“I do not want a lake from you some day once I finally do my duty,” she threw at him, barely able to see him through the sheen of tears she desperately wanted not to shed, to keep hidden. But then they were streaming down her cheeks, and she could see the look on his face—as if she’d hit him with something much too hard in his gut—yet she could not seem to stop. “I do not want your parents’ marriage. I won’t do it, Leo. You cannot make me do it!”

“I love you!” he bellowed. She did not know what was more astonishing—the words themselves or the tone in which they were delivered.

Leo—shouting? Leo—with that color splashed across his high cheekbones and eyes too wild to be his? Love? He had not mentioned love since those heady early days so lost to them now … She could not take it in. She could not absorb it, make sense of it.

Though that traitorous part of her, that silver thread, pulled taut. Hoped.

“I love you,” he said again more quietly, but somehow it had all the same kick and power of the louder version. It seemed to rip into her, ricocheting inside of her like a bullet and doing as much damage.

He stepped further into the room. She could see that he was not the man she knew—not the perfectly groomed, perfectly pressed prince. The man in front of her looked slightly out of breath, and ever so slightly disheveled—as if he’d run after her, which was impossible. As if he had not stopped to smooth his clothes back into line, which was unlikely.

As if he was finally telling the truth, a small voice whispered, and her heart began to kick painfully against her ribs.

“You …” She could not repeat what he’d said. It hurt too much. It made her yearn for things he had proven, time and again, he could not give. She shook her head. “If you loved me, you would not spend so much time trying to manipulate me. Surely you must know that?”

“Let me tell you what I know about love,” he said, his voice ragged, not his at all. It seemed to strike her directly in the heart, paralyzing her. “Nothing,” he snapped. “Not one damn thing, Bethany. No one was at all concerned with teaching me about something I was never expected to experience.”

She wanted to go to him, to hold him, to mourn with him for the things that had been done to him, but she could not. She ached for him, for both of them, but she could not move. Neither toward him, nor away.

“Your parents treated you abominably,” she said in a low voice. “But that does not give you the right to do these things to me. You cannot truly believe that it is okay. You cannot. If you thought you were in the right, you would not have hidden it from me.”