‘It is what it is.’
‘Don’t do that,’ she murmured, shaking her head. An early morning breeze came from the ocean, carrying with it the tang of sea salt and ruffling Frankie’s hair. She caught it with her fingertips and held it over one shoulder. ‘Don’t act like it doesn’t matter. You’re talking about your brother’s death. It’s okay to say you’re upset.’
If anything, his features tightened. ‘What good can come from being upset?’ he asked, the words flat, turning away from her, showing he didn’t expect an answer.
‘Plenty.’ She gave one anyway. ‘Being upset, talking about how you feel, helps you move on. Helps you process...’
He shook his head. ‘Why should I get to move on when Spiro has died?’ He gripped the railing and leaned over it a little, staring at the ground beneath. ‘Sometimes I think that if I can just reach for him in my dream, it won’t have happened. That I will wake up and he will be here. Sometimes I think the accident was the nightmare, only I don’t know how to rouse myself from it.’
Frankie made a small sound of sympathy.
‘There is no processing this.’ His eyes were hollow when he turned to her. ‘There is no moving on from it. And I don’t want to move on. Spiro is a part of me—his life, and his death. I live for both of us.’
Her fingertips ached to touch him, to comfort him, only the memory of how incendiary contact with this man could be was still alive in her gut, fresh in her mind, and so with great determination she kept her hands at her sides.
‘Your parents died in the accident as well?’ she murmured gently.
His response was a curt nod but the pain in his eyes was palpable, his emotions strong and fierce.
‘Oh, Matt,’ she murmured, and determination gave way to sympathy and an innate need to comfort him, to ease his suffering. She lifted her fingertips to his shoulder and gently traced his flesh. He was still so warm. A kaleidoscope of butterflies launched in her belly. The sun rose higher; gold slanted across her face. ‘I can’t imagine what that was like for you.’
‘An adjustment,’ he grunted, his nostrils flaring, his eyes pinning her to the spot.
She looked at him with obvious disbelief. ‘Stop acting like you’re too tough to care. No one can go through something like that and not have it change them. You must have been...’
‘It changed me,’ he stated, interrupting her with a voice that was weighted down by his feelings. ‘It changed me a great deal. At fifteen I still believed my parents were infallible, that my sovereignty was guaranteed and that Spiro would spend his life driving me crazy with annoying questions and demands for attention. At fifteen I believed that I was the future King and would one day have the power to do and fix and make just about anything. I truly thought I was omnipotent.’
She nodded slowly, unconsciously bringing her body closer to his. ‘I think most teenagers feel that—royal or not.’
‘Maybe so.’ He didn’t smile but his eyes dropped to her lips, tracing their soft roundness with visible distraction. ‘By the time I turned sixteen I saw the world for what it is.’
Silence throbbed around them, emotional and weary.
‘And what’s that?’ she prompted after a moment.
‘Transient. Untrustworthy.’
She shook her head and the hand that had been tentatively stroking his shoulder curved around it now, so only her thumb swept across his warm flesh. When he still didn’t look at her, she lifted the other hand to his shoulder, needing more contact, as though through her touch alone she could reassure him and somehow fix this.
‘What happened to you is a terrible tragedy,’ she said quietly. ‘But you can’t let it rob you of your own happiness. Your parents wouldn’t want that. Your brother wouldn’t either. You say you’re living for Spiro, but how can you be when you take such a dim view of all there is out there?’
‘I am a realist, remember?’ he said, breathing in deep, so his chest moved forward and brushed against her front. Her nipples tingled at the unintentional contact.
‘A realist? I don’t know, Matt. Sometimes I think you’re nudging into pessimist territory.’
His eyes held hers and the air between them was thick, like the clouds before a storm. ‘Is that so bad?’
‘I...’ Her mind was finding it hard to keep up. She looked at him, shaking her head, but why?
‘Maybe, over time, you’ll change me,’ he said and then his smile was cynical and the air returned to normal. She blinked, like waking up from her own dream.
‘I’m not sure people really change so easily.’
He stepped out of her reach and nodded curtly. ‘Nor am I.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘JUST A LITTLE this way, please, madam,’ the photographer urged, holding a slender tanned arm in the air.