She sat up a little straighter on the leather couch, drawing the soft throw tighter around that body of hers that regularly made me imagine I was a religious man. “I don’t recall asking you to be one way or another.”
“Do you truly think I don’t know that you feel things for me?” I demanded. “Do you suppose I can’t see it?”
She didn’t flush. She didn’t look the least bit flustered. She tilted her head to one side, regal and beautiful and entirely too composed.
God, she was so beautiful it hurt. All these months later, it still hurt.
“I could say the same, Sebastian,” she said quietly. As if she was rendering a judgment. “The only difference between you and me is that I’m not over here lying to myself about it.”
And the storm in me...broke.
“I can’t be that man!” I thundered at her. “I can’t. I told you from the start that I want you. But not this. Happiness. Joy.” And that other thing that filled the rooms we inhabited, no matter how hard I worked to ignore it. I decided to stop pretending I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it. “Love is for other people, Darcy.”
I braced myself for a storm in return, but all she did was sigh.
And then she rose to her feet before me, sinuous and mesmerizing. She wasn’t wearing those wings of hers tonight, but I could almost see them there. Not as part of a costume, just a part of her. Angelic in the fiercest, most gloriously fiery way.
Her gaze on me was intense. It made that storm in me rage all the more. “I have a radical idea, Sebastian. What would happen if you accepted the possibility, just for one second, that you actually deserve to be loved?”
I would have preferred it if she’d hauled off and punched me. Then kicked me a few times for good measure.
“I don’t want to have this discussion.”
“Because let me tell you what this has been like for me,” she continued in that same ferociously calm way. “I went to Paris to live out a fantasy. And now, looking back, I realize that none of it would have worked at all if it hadn’t been you. I looked up from that performance and I saw you, Sebastian. I think I fell in love with you then and there.”
There was so much thunder in my head it should have drowned her out, but instead it seemed to amplify her.
“Stop it,” I managed to grit out.
But she didn’t. Instead, Darcy unwrapped the throw from her perfect body and dropped it to the side with a certain dramatic flourish. Or maybe it was a dare.
Because she didn’t need to hide a thing. I was the one who felt as if I needed to lock myself away somewhere until I could figure out how to handle this. How to handle her. And not just metaphorically.
“I can’t believe I actually imagined that I could just...have sex with some stranger like that,” she was saying, as if she was knocking down all the walls inside me on purpose. “Because of course I couldn’t have. Don’t get me wrong. It might have been fun. Erotic, certainly. I would have been glad I did it, no matter who it was, if only so I’d stop fantasizing about it. But it was you, Sebastian. And it changed everything.”
I wanted to shout at her. Or whatever else would make this stop. Make her stop. But I couldn’t seem to move, much less make noise. I felt frozen solid and rendered mute, there before the window with the cold, careless city at my back.
Maybe I should have known that I could never have her. Not the way I wanted her. And not because she didn’t want me. But because deep down, as everyone who had ever been close to me had discovered at one point or another, I was defective. No one who truly knew me wanted anything to do with me.
That was why I’d wanted to marry her before she could get to that point. That was why I’d hoped that sex could confuse the issue and keep her from realizing what everyone else had.
“Sometimes,” she was saying, as if she was wholly unaware of what she was doing to me, “it’s easy to get lost in a rut even when it doesn’t feel good any longer. And particularly if it hurts, because you’re so desperate to make the pain mean something.”
“I’m fine,” I seethed at her.
“Congratulations,” she shot back at me. “I’m not. I love ballet, but I’m tired of it. I don’t want to dance the same thing over and over and over again, particularly when I’m always at the back of the stage. There are other ways to dance. My contract is up in March, and I’m not going to renew it.”
I saw the way she swayed a little after she said that, as if she hadn’t meant to let that out. Not like that. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
“Darcy.”
Her gaze was wide and faintly shocked, but she lifted her chin.
“And I’m not going to marry you unless you love me,” she said, her voice soft. But that didn’t make it any less fierce. “I’m not going to torture myself with one more thing that doesn’t love me back. I’m not going to batter my body and break my heart against another brick wall.”
My chest hurt. “Darcy...”
“I think you love me already,” she said, and the catch in her voice almost wrecked me where I stood. “You promised me you’d be honest. Can you do that, Sebastian? Now, when it counts?”