wanted that.
She had the pain part down pat, she thought, tears streaming down her face.
But she knew she’d done the right thing—even if Alex had been right, that she’d been protecting herself. If marrying Cal had been a mistake, marrying Alex would be a disaster—because she could not stop loving him, and he didn’t know what real love was.
He couldn’t draw a straight line.
He broke the lead in all his mechanical pencils. He snapped the nib off his best drawing pen. His hands shook so badly as he sat at his desk and tried to find the calm he always felt designing, that he crumpled up page after page of the paper in his sketchbook.
Finally Alex threw the whole damn thing out and went to stand and stare out the window, dragging in deep breaths. But for once even the sight of the spectacular Manhattan skyline didn’t soothe his furious soul.
He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window, then lifted a hand and rubbed it against his stubbled cheek.
The physical sting of Daisy’s palm was long gone. But the emotional sting was imprinted on his soul. So were the words she’d flung at him: It’s all about you. You don’t love Charlie. You don’t love anyone. You don’t want to.
His throat tightened. His eyes blurred. He sucked in another breath and shook his head, wanting to deny it.
But he couldn’t. Not entirely. At least a part of what she said was true: He hadn’t wanted to.
For years—ever since Vass’s death and his parents’ divorce—Alex had done his best to make sure that anything as messy and painful as love would not be a part of his world. He’d deliberately built himself a life without it. He had his business, his design projects, his friends, and recently he’d figured that he could do marriage as long as it was on his terms, where his wife didn’t want anything deeper or more demanding than he did.
He’d wanted a world he could control.
Which was why he had turned his back on Daisy five years ago.
She had threatened his control. She had bowled him over that weekend, had loved and given and enchanted in equal measures. He’d never met anyone so unguarded, so genuine, so warm and real.
Letting Daisy into his life would have been opening himself up to a tidal wave of emotions he couldn’t control, a future he couldn’t predict, the possibility for pain he didn’t ever want to experience again.
God knew what would happened if he let down his guard.
So he hadn’t. He’d turned away from her warmth, rejected her love, shut her out of his life. And having done so, he’d thought he was safe.
He was wrong.
But she was wrong, too.
Daisy had thought he couldn’t love, and Alex had believed he wouldn’t.
But God help him, he did. He loved Charlie. He’d only had to see the boy, watch the joy of life in his eyes, listen to him, hold his hand, touch his hair—and he loved. But more than that, before he recognized that he loved Charlie, he knew he loved her.
Daisy.
In spite of himself and his determined intentions, the day Daisy had come into his life, she had created a tiny rent in his armor. She had pierced his defenses, had touched his heart and planted a seed deep in his soul. For two days she had given him a glimpse of what life could be like if he had dared to let it grow.
He hadn’t. He’d turned his back. But while he thought he’d walked away heart-whole, it wasn’t true.
The minute he’d seen her again this autumn, everything he had felt when he’d been with her the first time—the need, the emotion, the connection—the sense that the world was a brighter, warmer, fuller, more welcoming place—had broken through.
He hadn’t given in, of course. Though he had felt the attraction all over again, he’d still tried to do it his way—to control it. To control her.
He couldn’t.
She wouldn’t let him.
He knew what she wanted. Demanded. A real future, a no-holds-barred willingness to love and, admitting that love, to face the possibility of pain, of loss of control, of helplessness—all the things he’d said no to.
He didn’t know if he could do it now.
But he loved. He had no choice. It was simply there—in him. For better or worse. But he knew he couldn’t face the future until he was able to face the past.
Rubbing a hand over his face, Alex turned away from the window, from the cool remote perfection of the distant skyline, to the emotional minefield that he carried inside him. He padded into his bedroom.
The room was spare, unadorned. It held a wide bed, a tall oak chest of drawers, a closet. Nothing more. He went to the chest of drawers, then crouched down and pulled open the bottom drawer.
It was empty except for one thing—a single sturdy, flat, dark green cardboard box, perhaps a foot-square, two inches deep.
For a long minute, he just looked at it. Didn’t immediately reach for it. Didn’t really want to touch it even yet.
He hadn’t touched it except when he’d moved it, since he’d left for university at the age of eighteen. He hadn’t opened it since he’d put the lid on it when his parents separated, when they sold the house, when his mother moved to Athens and his father to Corfu.
“Don’t look back,” his father had said as he’d sold off everything and buried himself in his scholarly books.
But Alex had put the things that mattered in that box, the things he couldn’t let go of, even if he couldn’t bring himself to look at them.
He’d carried the box with him ever since. He’d taken it to university in London, to his first job in Brussels, to the dozen or so places he’d lived in his adult life. He had brought it with him here.
Wherever he was, he always put it carefully in its own drawer where he wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it when he was looking for something else. He didn’t want to be blind-sided when he wasn’t prepared.
Someday, he always promised himself, he would open it. When the time was right he would once again let himself remember. But as time had passed, he’d learned to cope, he’d shut off the past, had refused to give it the power to hurt him. It was easier to forget. The time had never been right.
Until now.
Now he hurt anyway. Now Daisy’s words had cut right through his protective shield, had looked inside him and found him wanting.
His hands shook as he drew the box out of the drawer and carried it over to sit on the bed with it. He was surprised how light it was. In his imagination it was the heaviest thing he owned.
He ran his fingers over the top, then carefully eased the lid off and set it aside. There were only a handful of things within—and just as he had feared, the sight of them brought a thousand memories flooding back.
There was the postcard of the Matterhorn that Vass had sent him when he was six and Vass was nine. Vass had been with their father in Switzerland. “It’s s’cool,” he had written. “You and me will climb it someday.”
They hadn’t, of course. But when Vass came home, they’d begun climbing the cliffs by their island home with eager purpose. Just as they’d earnestly practiced tying ship’s knots in the two feet of line that lay in the box, as well.
“Learn to tie the knots and I’ll teach you to sail,” their father had said.
Now Alex drew the piece of line out of the box and his fingers moved automatically to make a Spanish bowline, a clove hitch, a figure eight while in his mind’s eye he saw the summer days they’d spent on the water, the three of them. He remembered