prologue
sara
Paris
Ella’s alive!
It is the news I have hoped and prayed to receive for months on end. It doesn’t feel real until I hear her voice on the phone, and suddenly all the pieces of my heart, which I was certain would end up shattered, are healed. But too soon, she ends the connection. I hold the phone to my ear, not ready to let go of her, haunted by her secrecy and reliving the past thirty minutes that got me to this moment. I was in Chris’s studio, reveling in the fact that this famous, sexy artist has been my husband for almost two weeks—and then it happened, the moment I’d been anticipating for months. I shut my eyes and live it again, because how can I not want to live it again?
A Matchbox Twenty song fills the air, fuel for his creative juices; a canvas is in front of him, a brush in his hand. He’s only a few feet away from me, focused on his work, his longish blond hair sexily mussed up, his feet bare, his jeans slung low. He wears no shirt, of course. He never paints with a shirt on, which is quite all right with me, considering I have
a delicious view of a well-defined chest, and his multicolored dragon tattoo that speaks of a jagged-edged past and a soul that is dark and light in equal parts—much like the paint he marks on his canvas.
There is something special about watching him work here in Paris, in the city where he first picked up a brush that would turn him into a rock star of the art world. Especially since he is painting me. I am naked and exposed in every way with this man, sitting in the alcove of a massive arched window, my legs pulled to my chest. There was a time when I swore I’d never let him paint me. When I knew he’d see things I didn’t want him to see, because I didn’t want to see them myself. But that was then, and this is now. And while I am still damaged, still fighting old wounds, no one understands better about the cuts that never heal than Chris Merit. No one understands the damage that can never be repaired, but simply caressed. We are two lost souls that were found in the fog of pain and heartache, able to see again, to breathe again, as one.
I am lost in that spell when Chris’s cell phone rings and he digs it from his pocket. The instant he gives me his back, I know something is wrong. It’s in the sharp way he turns and the knotting of his shoulders. I’m on my feet in an instant, darting for his T-shirt on the chair next to his easel and canvas. I’ve just pulled it over me when I watch him drag his fingers through his hair, an act of emotion he’d show no one but me. Ella, I think, fearing that this is the news we’ve waited for from Blake Walker, the PI we’d hired to find her, and that it must not be good. I hug myself, preparing for the worst. She’s dead. She must be dead.
“Now?” Chris asks the caller, turning to look at me, his green eyes lighter than I expect, no tragedy in their depths. “Yes. Give me sixty seconds to fill her in.”
“What is it?”
“Ella’s alive.”
“What?! You’re sure?”
“She’s with Blake, and he’s going to let you talk to her.”
“Yes,” I say, rushing forward and reaching for the phone.
“Easy, baby,” he says, his fingers catching my hip as he pulls me to him. “There are things going on that we don’t know about, and she won’t tell us. You can’t push her for anything she doesn’t feel ready to tell you.”
“Oh my God,” I say. “Ella! It’s really Ella?”
“It’s really her.”
“Is she in danger? What happened to her?”
“Just talk to her and be glad she’s alive. We’ll figure out the rest later.”
I put the phone to my ear and her voice radiates through it with joy. And then we are talking, about me and Chris, and she won’t talk about herself. But I talk. I walk to the ledge and sit down and I hold onto to every word she speaks, because she’s alive. But then we say goodbye, she hangs up, and I have no way to reach her again. And that joy I felt while talking to her begins to transform to worry. To fear.
“Talk to me, baby.”