had that tingling returning to Lia’s eyes. She shook her head and gestured to the door, eager to escape before that awful leaking came back. “I need to get my suit. It’ll be fine. I’m not going to let him make me dread any part of my adventure. I’m here to revel. R.E.V.E.L. And climbing a frozen, snowy, almost-mountain is the kind of adventure I can’t have in Portugal. Don’t worry.”
She silently repeated the words to herself. Don’t worry. Don’t worry because he couldn’t say anything worse than he already had. And that stare of his hadn’t said he wanted to talk to her about anything, just like him hiding out in the storage room all day said he didn’t want to be in her presence any more than she wanted to be in his.
“I’m going to worry, anyway,” Jordan muttered, still looking uneasy with the concept, but apparently with enough confidence in Lia still to say, “Call me for dinner when you get back. Zeke and I will meet you in the galley.”
“Okay. Don’t worry,” she repeated. “We’re just going to work. Said everything we needed to last night.”
“You did?” If possible, Jordan looked more alarmed.
Suddenly, Lia didn’t want to uphold any masks with her. She could shrug it off, she would’ve before, but she probably couldn’t pull off the unaffected face. Not when she knew that her eyes were still a little red, which might become a chronic condition.
“I don’t think I can talk about it yet,” she said after a hard pause that made a little line appear between Jordan’s brows.
Jordan squeezed her hand once and nodded, accepting. “When you’re ready.”
She had to swallow down another rise of emotion, but glanced toward the door. “If I’m late, he won’t wait for me.”
God knew West found it too easy to leave her behind.
WEST STOOD AT the door of his cabin, a rigged heater in his arms, ready to take it next door to Lia.
She didn’t know he was coming. Probably wouldn’t want to see him at her door for the second night in a row, but he had to do something.
No matter how sound his reasoning, West knew he’d abandoned her. And he knew how bad that felt. How it wormed down into places you didn’t even realize were there, and came out when you least wanted. Over the years he’d seen it from every angle—from the slow-motion abandonment of his mother, to Charlie’s withdrawal into substance abuse, and even from the other side and the many times he’d walked away from friendships or half-formed relationships to outrun Charlie’s problems.
Until Lia.
Until West had met Lia and was no longer willing to start over anywhere she wasn’t. And in his fear of losing her, he’d hidden his biggest weakness from her—his addict brother. She knew he had a little brother, but he’d hidden the bad parts. To keep her from asking to meet Charlie, West had concocted a story about an adventure in the States, working his way across the continent, like some romanticized vagabond.
That was the first in a string of unforgivable sins that led him here.
If he’d told her the truth back then, he might have never felt the need to make Charlie choose. Or maybe he would’ve done it gentler, and actually listened to the words his brother said. West had heard “Have a nice life” as another passive-aggressive jab of guilt. It wasn’t until much later that he’d understood it to have been a more final goodbye.
He needed to pay attention to Lia right now. Make sure she didn’t have a Charlie reaction to his choices. She was still his responsibility, and if anything happened to her…
Not that he thought Lia suicidal, but he’d once thought her made of iron, stronger than anyone else he’d ever known. Strong or not, she’d still cried herself to sleep last night, and he’d heard every sniff and hiccup through the paper-thin cabin walls. He’d seen the evidence of it all day in her still-puffy eyes, and it ate at him.
He stepped out of his cabin, closed the door and took the two steps separating them to lightly knock on hers. Unlike last night, she didn’t take long to respond.
With the door held half-open in front of her like a shield of protection, she met his gaze and some of the burning in his chest eased when she didn’t flinch or look away. Of course, that meant he could see fresh redness in her eyebrows that contradicted the flash of strength. And still wearing the pink pajamas, but she hadn’t been sleeping, at least not yet.
No greeting, no deep longing looks and no hope in her voice, she glanced at what he carried and back up. “Flower pots?”
“Heater,” he said softly, tapping the terra-cotta pots with one finger. If the promise of heat didn’t buy him admittance, he had no words to ask. No words for anything. There was a time when he’d always had something to say to her. Waited, saving up thoughts throughout the day to tell her at night. Stupid things to make her smile, or things to spark debate. Teasing. Challenging. Playful. But now, every word he uttered could give him away. He couldn’t afford to overshare.
“How?”
“I’ll show you. It’ll warm the cabin, those at the end of the pods are exposed to more outside walls than those stacked side by side. They don’t retain the heat as well.”
She considered the pots for another several seconds, door still in place, then simply let go of the door and moved back inside.
He closed the door behind him, then wordlessly stepped to the bedside table to clear it off while she burrowed back into a mountain of blankets on the bed.
Explaining how the pots functioned as a heater while he assembled it was easy at least. He lit four tea-light candles for the bottom layer and stepped back to mention safety; even if she didn’t need to hear not to touch hot things, it was easier.
“But I guess you don’t need to be warned about the danger of fire.”
“Not really,” she muttered. “Things I need to be warned about never come with a warning. Or I’m just really bad at picking up on hints.”
So was he. Charlie had proven that.
And she didn’t need to know that. “Hints?”
“Do you really want to know?” she asked, pushing down the blankets to her lap so she could sit up straighter, but stayed tucked into the bed.
He was suddenly sure he didn’t want to know, but he said, anyway, “Tell me.”
One purposeful nod, and she asked, “When did you know you didn’t love me? Because I’ve had months of wondering what happened while I was gone. The last thing you said to me at the airport that day was ‘I love you.’ Did I miss something? Did you know then?”
Hell.
No more circling the problem. This was more like the Lia he knew than the sad-eyed woman he’d seen every time he’d looked at her since she’d arrived.
And he didn’t have an answer. He never considered that he’d need to have more of an answer.
“I figured it out after,” he said. “Probably good you didn’t want me to come to Portugal with you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You didn’t want me to go.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why would I invite you to Portugal when you had no idea what you were going to be walking into? Because what is going on there? It’s a mess, above what you’ve probably realized.”
“Mess how?” he asked. “What’s going on at Monterrosa now? Are you avoiding going there?”
“That seems to be your MO, not mine. I don’t run away from pain—apparently I run