Love Beyond Words (City Lights, #1)(40)

“…And she pulled me close to her and said, ‘Mi hijo, you have to be very careful. You are only a boy and soon I will not be here to take care of you. Your book is going to splash on the world and make a tidal wave. You have to keep yourself safe. You are so very young. Low men will try to take advantage of you, steal your money. Women will want you for your name and not your soul. Promise me you won’t pollute your beautiful mind with drugs or liquor; that you won’t let money turn you into something that you are not. Promise me you will tell no one that you have made this book. Promise me, so that I may leave his world in peace.’”

He looked at Natalie. “Of course I said yes.”

“Of course,” she said, her eyes shining.

“This didn’t sit with Len,” Julian said, clearing his throat. “He thought he had a prodigy on his hands and the publicity to go with it. But he acquiesced on the condition that it would not be published anonymously. We had to give him a name.

“Out of anger with my father I had been going by Rafael since I was four. But my writing was for my mother, so I chose the names she had given me for the world to hear, and used my father’s names in life, where I was alone and no one knew me.”

“They’re all beautiful names,” Natalie said in a small voice. “Your mother must have been touched by the gesture.”

“I’d like to think so. By then there wasn’t much left of her. She…she died. She died before she saw Above in print, before it became a bestseller or an award-winner, before it made me enough money that I could have taken her anywhere in the world, or gotten her better medical care, or bought her anything she wanted, or…”

He wiped his hands over his eyes, and took a deep, fortifying breath. He heard Natalie sniff and couldn’t look at her.

“So there you go. Not a very glamorous story, but I’m glad you know it. I’m glad to have told you about my mother, so that she doesn’t exist solely in my mind and heart.”

“No, now she lives in my heart too,” Natalie said softly.

Julian’s chest tightened and he turned to the cityscape outside the windows. The brilliant spread of lights blurred in his vision.

He felt Natalie slide onto his lap, felt her arms go around his neck and she held him. He buried his face in her hair that smelled like cinnamon and flowery shampoo and even his own bed sheets from when she’d lain with him. She pulled away enough to kiss him. Her mouth was soft on his, and so very sweet.

“Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “I needed that.”

“There’s more where that came from,” she said in just the right playful tone to pull him from the melancholy of his story. She got to her feet and tugged his hand. “Come on. It’s late and we still have unfinished business.”

“We do?”

“We do.”





Chapter Eighteen


Natalie lay back on Julian’s pillows, her thumbs flying over the keypad of her old flip phone.

“What are you doing?” Julian asked, drawing on a pair of jeans. “You’re not selling my story are you? Already? It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Of course I am. It’s been my plan all along.”

“Damn. I feel so used and dirty. And not in the good way.”

“I’m texting my friend Liberty to let her know that you’re not a serial killer after all.”

“A serial killer? That was on the table?”

Natalie giggled. “We had our suspicions.”

His secret isn’t that he has a child, she wrote. It’s better than that. It’s better than anything I could have imagined.

Natalie hit “send” then flipped the phone shut and set it down on the nightstand. It immediately chirped an incoming text, and she giggled again, feeling slightly guilty for not answering it. Slightly.

“I didn’t tell her who you are, even though I’m bursting to do so.”

“I’m not as worried about that as I once might’ve been.”

Natalie sat up, her knees to her chest. “Does that mean you’re going to go public?”

“I haven’t decided. The promise I made to my mother was to keep from being reckless and arrogant with my good fortune. But I’m no longer the eighteen-year-old kid she wanted to protect. I feel as if I should just let it go and move on. Even so, I don’t like all the other stuff that comes with it. The press and the questions…”

“Questions about you or the writing?”

“Both.”

Natalie frowned. “You don’t want to talk about the books?”

He sat beside her on the bed and took her hand. “With you, yes. You can ask your million questions and I’d never get tired of it. But with total strangers?” He made a face. “And in the grand scheme of things, it can’t make that big of a ripple, can it?”

Natalie thought he was understating it—that the literary world, at least, would go mad for him—but she said nothing.

“And David wouldn’t be happy about it,” he said. “Not at first.”

“David? Oh, your assistant? What difference would it make to him?”

“He’s protective. And maybe a little worried he’d be lost in the shuffle should I go public. He’s a bit…neurotic but a good guy. You’ll meet him soon.”