Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4)(17)

As if she’d broken a promise.

And for the briefest of moments that afternoon, she’d been tempted to break one to Julien. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t. Straying wasn’t in her nature. But had Michael sent that letter before she met Julien, her life might have taken a different course, back to him. As it was, she’d had to march onward, and she did. But with so much that had once been between them, perhaps it was no surprise, really, that the first man she’d ever loved would be the one to rekindle all that was dormant in her body. Last night had ignited something inside her.

Julien had said over and over that he didn’t want her to mourn him forever, or at all. “Love, I won’t be here always. You’ll need to move on. You’re young and beautiful and smart and vibrant.”

She’d laughed him off, shook her head. “Darling, you aren’t going anywhere. I won’t let you,” she’d said, then mimed digging her claws into her husband’s chest as they’d relaxed on a park bench watching the sunset by the Eiffel Tower one evening. But Julien didn’t toss back his sandy blond head, or smile his sweet, sexy grin at her. Instead, he’d tugged her close. “The odds, Annalise. The odds. Five years is much more likely than fifty.”

“Stop that,” she said. “Let’s not talk about this. The sun is falling. The lights are coming on.”

The odds were not in their favor. They never had been, and she’d known that before he got down on one knee. He had a lethal arrhythmia, a genetic condition that meant he could die of cardiac arrest at any moment. Well aware she’d likely be widowed young, she’d walked down the aisle anyway. She wasn’t blind. She wasn’t foolish. But her love for him was powerful. It couldn’t be quashed by medicine or odds or statistics.

“Fifty years or five years. I want whatever you have,” she’d said to him after he proposed.

She’d gotten eight.

A tear slipped down her cheek as she glanced out the tinted window of the Nissan. The car veered right onto the Strip, and the bright light of the sun pounded down from the sky. Las Vegas in daytime was exposed. Nothing hidden. Every trick, every mirror, every trap was starkly visible in the daylight.

She’d always been so good at spotting sleight of hand, at something out of place, at shining the light in a dark corner. But with Julien, she’d chosen to believe in the illusion—in the glass half-full, in the possibility of fifty years with him. Hope was more powerful than knowledge, love stronger than evidence. She’d loved him fiercely until the day he died in his sleep two years ago.

Knowing the odds had never prepared her for the wreckage of her heart when she found him that morning, unable to be roused. Over the next two years, the only things that got her through each day were routines. Work, walking, shooting photos, taking care of her mother, buying bread. Those simple acts had guided her out of the black hole of grief, as had the change in her career to fashion photography. Her heart had been too heavy for the weight of current affairs.

As the car pulled into the portico at Caesars, she glanced at her watch. A few more hours until Michael arrived.

Her stomach swooped, remembering last night, fast-forwarding to what might happen this afternoon.

Julien had wanted her to move on. Her sister wanted her to move on. She didn’t think she’d ever want to love again. It was too risky, too dangerous. What if she let herself, then lost again? She shuddered at the thought. Once was hard enough to find the man you love gone from this world.

But a moment, a snapshot of not feeling so goddamn empty and lonely? She’d experienced that last night. She’d held it in the palm of her hands, owned it deep in her chest.

That.

She wanted that. She was so f*cking tired of denying herself everything good in the world.





CHAPTER EIGHT


Eighteen years ago

“You want to do this?” Thomas scooped some pepper steak from the buffet onto his plate, eyeing his eldest son.

“I do,” Michael said with a crisp nod, a fierce certainty in his stare. Thomas’s son had his eyes—cool and ice blue. Some people thought that meant he didn’t care. Hardly. Thomas cared too much at times. About everything. About his wife and how distant she’d become during the last several months. About his children and how they were growing up so damn fast. About his present job and the one that he wanted to do, the one that would make it possible for him to do more for his kids.

Right now, though—as his sixteen-year-old son spooned lo mein from the silver vat at their favorite cheap Chinese restaurant, the one that boasted all-you-can-eat for $4.29 a person—he cared about Michael. The kid was a chip off the old block. He’d fallen madly in love at such a young age. Hell, Thomas knew what that was like.

He’d been like his son, crazy for the girl in high school. Course, he’d gone and married her a few years later, and they’d had their first kid when they were both only twenty and scraping by at crummy jobs. No college, no nothing. That was why he was heading to night school after this meal, to shore up on his associates degree in accounting. A practical skill, and one that would surely help him get the job he wanted.

If he scored the new gig, that would spell opportunity for his kids. “All right, let’s find a way to get you to Paris next year.”

“Dad, you think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Michael asked when they sat down at an orange booth with cracked vinyl seats.