tonight?”
“Because it’s time. The end of the line. I want to marry you. Either we cross this line and go forward. Tonight. Together. Or we face up to the fact that it’s never going to work.” He paused for several beats. His voice went quiet. “I want to be with you, Meg. I want to make a life, a family with you. I’m tired of being kept on hold. In stasis. Isn’t that what you told Stathakis about lives in limbo, lives without closure? Well, that’s how I feel about us. If that means you going back to Shelter Bay and writing this, then let me help you do it.”
“Sometimes,” she whispered, “I really hate you, you know that? When you drag out all the psychobabble and metaphysical shit—sometimes . . . sometimes I think you’re with me because you see me as some live-in test case. The ‘fiancée in the petri dish. ’ ” She made angry air quotes. “The damaged rescue puppy that you think you can rehabilitate, and ‘save’ because it serves the so-called altruist in you, the Dr. Lawson of the realm of fractured minds and souls.” She leaned forward. “But you know as well as I do—there’s no such thing as pure altruism, is there, Jonah? You do it because it makes you feel good, and self-righteous. The Messiah.”
He leaned back, rubbed his brow. She’d cut him, and she loved him, and she couldn’t stop jabbing in and twisting the knife. And an indefinable kind of terror and panic was rising up her throat. A self-destructive craving for annihilation. She was whirling into a tunnel, and just gaining speed, unable to stop.
“Maybe,” she said darkly, “I’m having a bit of trouble committing since you went and fucked Jan Mascioni.”
He flinched, glanced out the window, blew out a long, controlled breath. Always so damn controlled. He reached for his glass. Holding it by the stem, he took a sip of wine. When he spoke, his voice was soft, defeated.
“We’ve been through that. You know why that happened.”
Hurt flushed through her. So easy for him, just to fill his bed with another woman.
“Jonah—” She reached for his hand.
He moved it away. “No, Meg. Don’t do this. Not this time.”
“Do what?”
“Obfuscate like this. Touch me like this. Try to connect with sex when you’re really using it to shut me out.” A glimmer of anger finally. In his eyes. In that face, that body that attracted her, this man she loved, but couldn’t truly connect with. It was like she had a type of autism or something. As much as she needed him she had an intense need to be alone. And she couldn’t the hell find a way to combine those two drives at war inside herself. Pain balled in her throat. She held her mouth tight against it.
“Give me a date.”
“I . . . I can’t. Just not tonight. I—”
His jaw set in a fierce line. “If not tonight, then, when?”
“I . . . I think I need some air.” She got up. Dizziness swirled. She braced her hand on the table to steady herself.
“Meg.” He grasped her wrist, tight. “Walk away now, leave this restaurant, and it’s over. You know that. This time it’s over for good.”
She stared at his hand on her wrist.
He released her slowly. She turned, hesitated. She walked.
Legs like columns of water, she made it past the reception area, pushed out of the door, and was hit square in the face with a bracing icy wind and biting crystal flakes off the black sea.
She grasped the railing for balance, the wind drawing water from her eyes, because she didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried since the day her father was charged. Since her mother took her own life. With her bare hands she gripped that frozen railing. And she waited. She waited for the door to fling open behind her, for Jonah to come out. To take her home.
Where they would make fierce love until she hurt. Because that’s what usually happened when this—or any other prickly subject—came up. When she was trying to avoid hearing the possible subterranean truths, that she was