for a while. We all know it’s temporary. A form of charity, really.” He smiled at her, and there was a bit more color on those remarkable cheeks of hers than there had been before. Though that could also have been the cheerful fire that crackled away beside them. “No, I mean that Luca and I dated a wide selection of very elegant, fashionable, socially adept women. You idolized them, of course. It must have been a master class for a girl like you, from such different circumstances.”
She returned her attention to the sleeve of her sweater and fiddled with her cuff. “Were our circumstances so different?”
“I’m really talking more about a certain polish that some girls have. They’re born with it, I think.” He eyed the growing flush on her cheeks, certain it was her temper and not the fire this time, and kept going. “I hope my honesty doesn’t upset you. If it helps, I think European women are better at achieving this polish than American women. Perhaps it’s cultural.”
“How lucky that I had all of the many women you dated to help me overcome my Americanness,” she said evenly. He hoped she was remembering the women he’d dated back then, all of them about as polished as mud, and that her even tone was painful for her. But she only flicked a look at him, her blue gaze unreadable. “Is that what happened? These paragons of womanhood made me one of them and you found you had to date me, too?”
He actually grinned at that and saw the reaction in her clear blue eyes before she dropped them again. But the heat he’d seen there licked over him like wildfire, and his voice was huskier than it had been when he continued.
“You wrote me daily poems, confessing your girlish feelings to me. It was adorable.”
“Poems,” she echoed flatly. “I find that...amazing. Truly. Since I haven’t written a word in as long as I can remember.”
“We haven’t established how long that is, have we?”
“And how long did I attempt to woo you with teenage poetry?” she asked, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You must have found the whole thing embarrassing.”
“Very,” he agreed. “You were so bad at it, you see.”
“Were it not for the existence of Arlo, I’d think this story was heading in a very different direction,” she said dryly.
“On your eighteenth birthday,” he said, as if recalling a favorite old story instead of making it up on the spot, “you stood before me in a white dress, like a wedding gown, and asked me if I would grant you one wish.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “Like a fairy tale. Did you say I was eighteen or eight?”
“Eighteen.” His voice was reproving, and it was hard to keep himself from laughing. “You were quite sheltered, Lily.”
“But not by you, because then the fact that we actually did get together would surely be gross.” She smiled faintly at him. “I’m guessing.”
“You were sheltered by the strict convent school you attended,” he lied happily. She’d been nowhere near a convent in all her life, to his recollection. “You entertained some notion of becoming a nun.”
He could almost hear the crackle of her temper, like water against hot metal, though she only swallowed. Hard.
“A nun,” she repeated, her gaze narrow on his. “I wanted to become a nun.”
He smiled with entirely too much satisfaction. “It was cute.”
“And yet somehow we produced a child,” she prompted him, a touch of acid in her voice, though her expression was impressively impassive. “Despite the fact I was, apparently, an eight-year-old wannabe nun with no greater ambition than to live in a fairy tale. A poetic fairy tale.”
“On your eighteenth birthday you asked me for a kiss,” he told her, sitting back farther in his chair and enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time in the past five years he’d enjoyed himself quite so much, in fact. “‘Please, Rafael,’ you begged. ‘I want to know what it is to be a woman.’”
“Oh, come on. No one says things like that. Not in real life.”
He shrugged. “And yet, you did. Or do you remember it differently?”
“I don’t remember it at all,” she murmured, and he saw that mutinous light in her eyes. His stubborn girl. “Though that sounds a little bit dramatic, if I’m being honest.”
“You were a very theatrical teenager, Lily. The despair of your mother and a trial to all your teachers, or so I was told at the time.”
She rubbed her hands over her face. “And yet somehow all this drama led to a secret relationship? That strains belief, doesn’t it?”
“That was your call,” he told her without a single qualm, watching her for a reaction to what might have been the biggest lie of all, but she only stared back at him. “You begged for a kiss, which, of course, I refused.”
“I can’t say I blame you. I’d question the man who looked at a gawky teenager in a makeshift bridal gown who’d seriously considered taking up the veil and thought, I want some of that.”
Rafael had no idea how he kept from laughing. “I told you that I couldn’t possibly kiss such an innocent. That you would have to prove yourself a woman if you wanted me to kiss you like one.”
“You felt this was the right approach to an obviously confused teenager?” Lily sniffed. “I wonder if a kind word or two might have been a little more helpful. Or the number of a good therapist.”
“I thought you would run screaming back into your sheltered little world.” He didn’t know when he’d slipped from his fantastical story into something a lot like the truth, but he knew he didn’t like it. Rafael stretched out his legs before him and eyed her across the accent rug, where she’d once slipped to her knees and taken him in her mouth while his father and her mother had talked loudly in the hallway on the other side of the door. He remembered the heat of her mouth, the sweep of her tongue, as if it had happened yesterday. So did the hardest part of him. “I thought you were all bark and no bite.”
“Let me guess,” she said softly. “I bit.”
“In a manner of speaking.” Rafael remembered that kiss on New Year’s Eve. He remembered the taste of her flooding him, and the weight of her thick, wild hair against his palms. He remembered the press of her breasts against his chest and the silky-smooth expanse of the sweet skin at the tops of her thighs, where he shouldn’t have reached in the first place. “You decided you needed to prove yourself a woman.”
“Was there a series of tests?” Lily asked in that same soft voice, yet with something far edgier beneath it. “A gauntlet of fire, one can only hope?”
“Do you really want the details?”
Her gaze was too hot when it met his. She looked away—but it took a moment. “No.”
“You insisted we keep it a secret. You demanded I date other women in public so no one would know. You were determined.”
“And you, of course, acquiesced.”
“Of course. I am nothing if not a gentleman.”
There was a long silence, then. There was only the sound of the fire. The far-off noises that all old houses made, the shift and creak of settling. The moody December weather on the other side of the old glass windows.
His own heart, beating a little too hard for a simple conversation like this one.
“Can I be honest with you?” she asked.
“Always.”
“I don’t think I believe you.”
Rafael couldn’t keep from smiling then, and stopped trying. “Do you remember another version of events, then?”
“Of course I don’t.