I had to believe that. I had to cling to it until my fingernails peeled and bled, until my teeth cracked from the pressure of holding on. Because if I didn’t, then what was all of it for?
Why did she have to put us through all of this? The yearning and pain and utterly human suffering.
Why do it if not for love?
The answer to that was not pretty. It was mean and cruel and promised to rip me apart.
Did she even still have the watch I’d returned to her in New York City when I’d first seen her engaged to Tate? I had never asked, but the question burned in my throat.
The ache around my heart moved up into my head and throbbed like tandem wounds. I felt under attack by my own psyche as I tried to fight my way through the thicket of the past and the tangled mess of my present, where, it was quite possible I was on the precipice of loving three very different, very unattainable people.
My mama used to shake her head at me and say of all her children, I was the one who always insisted on choosing the most difficult course for myself.
At this moment, I had to agree with her.
“I do have feelings for you that will never die,” Savannah confessed with a wince, pulling her hand back to clasp it tightly in her other one as if she needed to self-soothe. “But believing love is everything is naive. There are other factors.”
“Maybe back then,” I allowed. “When I had no money or fame. But now? What is stopping you from leaving Tate and being with me the way we could have been all along?”
“Sebastian,” she said, a sharp reprimand.
“Savannah,” I pushed back. “I’m being serious. If you love me as I have loved you, what is stopping you?”
“I am a married woman,” she hissed, thrusting her enormous diamond ring out in front of her.
“That didn’t stop you before.”
She was out of her seat and slapping me before I could blink, the blow smarting instantly.
I stared at her in shock, disbelieving that she really would have hit me.
It was a passionate thing to do, so wildly unlike her.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have given me hope, but it did. I was from a country where people shouted and pushed and went over the line in the heat of the moment. My mother had thrown fish heads at Seamus when he returned from three consecutive nights of gambling and debauchery, Elena had nearly screamed the apartment building down when she found out Giselle and Sinclair were expecting their first child, and Alexander and Dante had quite literally killed men for insulting their wives.
Perhaps this was like that.
An excess of emotion that overflowed from the small vessel Savannah had culled her heart into.
I dropped to my knees on the ground before her chair where she still stood, eyes blown black with her own surprise, hand lifted in horror to her chest.
“This is the second and last time I will ask you this,” I told her solemnly, the way one swore fealty to a feudal king. “Leave him and be with me. Choose me this time, as I have to believe you wanted to before. Be brave, Savannah, and pick passion over power. Choose us over anything else. I have held my tongue forthe past six years we have been just friends, and I will not do it any longer. That is not the man I am.”
A small voice in the back of my head reeled at my proposition.
What if sheactuallychose me?
It seemed like such a pipe dream, but she could shock us both and reach down to clasp my face in her hands and make a decision with her heart instead of her head for the first time in her life.
What then?
Of Adam.
Of Linnea.
Ofthem.
They had each other, though. Even when I had set them up in this Hollywood deception, I had hoped they would fall in love. Two people with hearts like theirs deserved a love that could swallow the world down to nothing, make everything outside of their two twined hearts seem inconsequential in comparison. If anyone could convince Adam—beautiful, broken Adam—to love again and do it fiercely, it was Linnea Kai.
